Posts Tagged ‘charts’
Wednesday News Brief, This Is All the News Today
* The US is now on track to have the worst outbreak anywhere. In the end we will have handled this worse than any nation on earth, because our leaders lied to us, said it was under control, said it wasn’t a big deal, said we were doing great, privately sold their stocks, told us to *buy* stock, ignored science, ignored experts, lied.
* Vox has some details on the coronavirus bailout, including how UI will be extended to freelancers and the self-employed and when you’ll get your check. Here’s another read from Forbes. This thread on Twitter seems to have more information on how the UI expansion will work for the self-employed.
* Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Reclaim our homes. Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression. European countries are writing blank checks to save their economies from coronavirus.
I've been thinking about something Ted Chiang said: A conservative narrative = there's a disaster/problem/war. It's resolved, and everything returns to normal. A progressive narrative = there's a disaster, it's resolved, and nothing is the same. We are in a progressive narrative.
— Halimah Marcus (@HalimahMarcus) March 24, 2020
Just started crying thinking about the end of Vonnegut’s Timequake. World enters a long period of isolating illness, afterwards no one knows how to live anymore. Saved by person-to-person transmission of a creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
* “Herd Immunity” Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism.
one thing that's happening very clearly RN IMO is a vivid, dramatic tightening of longstanding continuums of exploitation and disposability
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 19, 2020
basically, then, in a moment when the *inevitable* *best case scenario* is spacing out deaths manageably, the *bandaid* is a rolling distribution of preventable death and illness throughout the most vulnerable people in the workforce. ok.
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 22, 2020
Coronavirus proves the socialists were right about everything all along, but
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 25, 2020
* On Monday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
* Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2. From the list let me recommend Four Futures by Peter Frase, which I thought was great.
* We are in a time of wild magical thinking: miracle cures, coronavirus parties, Disney reopening next week, return to work by Easter, life without fear. Meanwhile, as a direct result of Trump administration policy: Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies.
Laundered thru masculinism (don’t be afraid), xenophobia (don’t be like China), reactionary liberalism (don’t be like Trump) and not-even-being-wrong (it *is* unsustainable), but in the end he reaches point you knew he would: we simply have to let them die https://t.co/xY5Zsbeoyt pic.twitter.com/w8HTf5degX
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
just such a good example for how the civility debate breaks brains: you can call for the preventable, near-term deaths of millions of Americans and millions more globally as long as you politely say “refuse to countenance trade-offs between public health and economic survival” https://t.co/mUsJFkrKH4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
Wall Street doesn’t seem to think so. As far as they’re concerned, things are getting back to normal. Really shows you the kind of magical thinking that undergirds all of it.
— guantanamo bey (@pennhb) March 25, 2020
faced with two equally destructive paths, health system collapse or economic freefall, America has boldly chosen both https://t.co/YkgiWFUDhr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 22, 2020
We need to be thinking creatively about new forms of collective aid and vast governmental expenditure to protect the vulnerable when it turns out that of course we can’t simply social distance until a vaccine is found.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 23, 2020
So we're doing The Trolley Problem but the most important thing is to save the trolley
— Mark Agee (@MarkAgee) March 24, 2020
* New York has 5% of Covid-19 cases worldwide as city becomes battlefront. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. “We have 11,000. We need 30,000.”
* Trump Shrugged Off Repeated Intelligence Warnings About Coronavirus Pandemic. DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck. U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak. Coronavirus and Fox News.
* How the virus got out. How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It). What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus.
* A Day in the Life of an ER Doc. A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients. Nursing Home Worker: “Everything About This Is Designed for Disaster.”
* Higher Education in the Age of COVID-19. How Is Covid-19 Changing Prospective Students’ Plans? Here’s an Early Look. Central Washington University Board of Trustees declares exigency. “To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.” Embrace the Canavan plan for pass/fail.
* Amidst a global health crisis, porn finds a way.
* The Very Specific Reason We Shouldn’t Bail Out the Cruise Industry.
* We Need a Hard Pause, Followed by a Soft Start.
* That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Really Scares Me.
* It will only get worse: ICE Detainees Are Being Quarantined. DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency. ‘Terrified’ Package Delivery Employees Are Going to Work Sick. Coronavirus hits rural Kansas, Missouri towns. Many don’t have a single hospital bed. U.S. Hospitals Prepare Guidelines For Who Gets Care Amid Coronavirus Surge. White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up.’ Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus. Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals. “This week, it’s going to get bad.”
* Science you can use: the Great Depression and death rates.
* DoE won’t let this crisis go to waste.
* Africa’s mountain gorillas also at risk for coronavirus.
* In some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline.
in some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline https://t.co/4LazYaBrdV
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) March 23, 2020
* The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
* Comrade Britney Spears shares post calling for general strike and redistribution of wealth.
* Chess in the time of coronavirus.
* Joe Biden Pivots to Video. ‘There’s no playbook for this’: Biden trapped in campaign limbo. You know it’s bad when the political cartoons start agreeing with you.
if you have a problem
and no one else can help
and if you can find him
maybe you can hire
the B team https://t.co/scJ3S45ice— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 23, 2020
You know it's bad when political cartoons start agreeing with you pic.twitter.com/dvUOdmesDF
— Sassy Comrade ❤🖤☭♀️ (@SassyOlli) March 21, 2020
* A really exciting new book series: Palgrave SFF: A New Canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 25, 2020 at 12:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1099s, academia, admissions, America, anti-capitalism, Bernie Sanders, books, Britney Spears, Central Washington University, charts, chess, China, class struggle, comics, communism, coronavirus, cruises, Dark Forest, Department of Education, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, FDA, financial exigency, funerals, gorillas, grading, Great Depression, grief, health care, herd immunity, homelessness, How the University Works, ICFA, isolation, Joe Biden, know when to fold 'em, magical thinking, medicine, Mitt Romney, mortality, neoliberalism, New York, Olympics, podcasts, politics, pornography, recession, rural hospitals, science fiction, science fiction studies, socialism, stimulus, Ted Chiang, the Constitution, the economy, The Onion, Timequake, trolley problem, Trumpbucks, UBI, unemployment, Vonnegut, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
There’s way more empirical evidence that men can’t be trusted with power than that women are bad at math. [gestures broadly, to everything]
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 5, 2017
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2017 at 10:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, #TheResistance, academia, academia jobs, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, affirmative action, Africa, Afrofuturism, agricultural civilization, agriculture, aliens, Amazon, America, anti-trust, anxiety, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, arguments, artificial intelligence, asteroids, backfire effect, bar jokes, Battlestar Galactica, Big Data, Bob Mueller, books, carceral studies, CFPs, charts, Chris Ware, Christianity, cities, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, cognitive presses, college basketball, comics, Confederacy, Constitutional Convention, Cory Doctorow, courts, CWRU, dark side of the digital, Darko Suvin, debt ceiling, Democrats, deportation, digitality, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, dystopia, Escape from LA, FCC, film, friendship, Game of Thrones, game theory, games, gender, gerontocracy, Ghana, GIFs, Google, grad student nightmares, grade inflation, grading, grand juries, Greenland, hacking, Hamilton, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, human extinction, humanity, humor, ice, immigration, Internet-connected fish tanks, interviews, iPhones, Jaimee, Jedi, John Carpenter, John Kelley, Karate Kid, kids, Klingons, Kurt Russell, labor, love, machine learning, maps, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, midterm election 2018, milkshakes, misogyny, murder, my teaching empire, names, NASA, NCAA, Netflix, neurolinguistic programming, New Jersey, New York City, nuclear war, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, perpetual motion, Planetary Protection Officer, poetry, Poland, police, police dogs, police violence, politics, prehistory, prison, prison-industrial complex, private prisons, privilege, Putin, race, racism, regenerations, relationships, Rex Tillerson, robots, Rotten Tomatoes, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, sea level rise, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, SFRA Review, simulations, Sinclair Broadcasting, smartphones, social media, Space Race, speeding tickets, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, State department, student athletes, student labor, subalternity, suicide, syllabi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, teen girls, the Constitution, The Dark Tower, the Devil, the Force, the Internet, the law, the subway, the truth is out there, Thor, Tolkien, Tommy's, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Twitter, undergraduates, University of California Irvine, university presses, Utopia, voting, Voyager, Voyager 2, Voyager spacecraft, walking, Westeros, white victimhood, whiteness, wildfires, women, words, work, writing, you are the product, young adult literature
#OEBStudies for All Your #OEBStudies Needs
* I’m at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, presenting as part of the Octavia Butler studies conference here. Here’s a great writeup from the organizers, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey. Hashtag #OEBStudies!
* Lumenscent Threads: Knowing Octavia Butler through a Community That Loved Her.
* I also got in a big Twitter to-do with Noah Berlatsky about the Oankali, if you want some extra bonus OEB content.
* Then next week I’m back in California for the Science Fiction Research Association conference at Riverside, giving a talk called “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene” (and doing a bunch of SFRA executive committee stuff too I guess).
* “Rakka,” a nightmarish SF film from Neill Blomkamp, narrated by Sigourney Weaver. Seems almost like proof of concept for the Alien sequel they won’t let him do…
* And why not? Here’s an Irish one.
* The Han Solo prequel film, like every other Star Wars followup Disney has attempted, has encountered problems that have crashed production. This time they’ve fired the directors and brought in Ron Howard to attempt to salvage the project.
* Jon Ossoff’s Georgia special election loss shows Democrats could use a substantive agenda. Nonsense! They’re doing great. Why Jon Ossoff’s loss is bad news for Democrats’ 2018 hopes. Keep hope alive.
* Memo shows what major donors like Goldman Sachs want from the Democratic Party. Class struggle in America doesn’t look exactly like you think.
* Who Is Getting Rich Off the Secret Health-Care Overhaul?
* Senate Health Bill Gives Huge Tax Cuts to Businesses, High-Income Households. G.O.P. Health Plan Is Really a Rollback of Medicaid. A helpful chart of the differences between the Senate and House bills and the status quo. The Senate health bill is a recipe for a death spiral. Wheelchairs and zip ties. The littlest lobbyist: a 6-year-old, whose life depends on ACA, heads to Capitol Hill. There will be deaths.
Republicans: we're going to decimate the healthcare system unimpeded
Democrats: that's it, we're gonna *pulls out posterboard* pic.twitter.com/aZ8tzwwCnY
— Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@AyeshaASiddiqi) June 23, 2017
2015-2016 was when i finally learned to spell "millennial"
2017 was when i finally learned to spell "guillotine"— Gravitas Free Zone🤖 (@NoraReed) June 22, 2017
#TrumpcareInOneSentence pic.twitter.com/aeSQgEZ3jS
— WorkingFamiliesParty (@WorkingFamilies) June 22, 2017
* Going on Fox News cost me my job, professor claims.
* Don’t Trust a Republican Just Because He Hates Trump.
Frum, McMullin, etc will all sit 2020 out or reluctantly / not-so-reluctantly endorse a supposedly improved Trump over an unacceptable Dem. https://t.co/ZL7o44sxqs
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2017
* Corey Robin on China Miéville’s October.
* The Pittsburgh Fairy Tale: Pittsburgh’s much-touted revival has remade the region for the wealthy while leaving workers and the poor behind.
* Twilight of the CEOs. Uber doesn’t even currently have a CEO, COO, CFO, or CMO, “in addition to other open positions.”
* Ted Chiang was right! Attractive Students Get Higher Grades.
* Probably the only good thing that has ever happened on Twitter.
* Hunting for Antibiotics in the World’s Dirtiest Places.
* The New Free Speech is a right-wing grift, part 29.
* “North Carolina is the only state in U.S. where no doesn’t mean no.”
* “Bill Cosby to Teach Young People How to Avoid Sexual Assault Charges.”
I think it’s unrealistic that Offred didn’t flee America before the final takeover. https://t.co/vbLWS1iW5b
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2017
* But it’s not ALL deranged misogyny! N.H. Republicans Accidentally Approved a Bill Allowing Pregnant Women to Commit Murder.
* Looks like the marketing team have had a word.
* This seems fine: Elections officials outgunned in Russia’s cyberwar against America.
* Sega!
Written by gerrycanavan
June 23, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #TheResistance, A Series of Unfortunate Events, AHCA, Alien, America, antibiotics, Bill Cosby, calliagnosia, CEOs, charts, China Miéville, class struggle, consent, Dawn, DC Comics, democrat, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, elections, Elon Musk, Fox News, free speech, games, general election 2020, gentrification, Georgia, Gilead, Goldman Sachs, Han Solo, Handmaid's Tale, HBO, health care, health insurance, Huntington Library, hyperspace, Ireland, jokes, Jon Ossoff, Laura Kipnis, Liking What You See: A Documentary, maps, Mars, midterm election 2018, murder, my scholarly empire, Neill Blomkamp, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, October, Parable of the Trickster, Paul F. Tompkins, Philando Castile, Pittsburgh, police state, police violence, politics, Rakka, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Ron Howard, Russia, Russian Revolution, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, Sega, Star Wars, Ted Chiang, Title IX, Twitter, Uber, University of Wisconsin, Watchmen, Wisconsin, Xenogenesis
Tuesday Links! Just for You
* My review won’t appear in The New Inquiry for a couple weeks, but Liu Cixin’s Death’s End is finally out today. I read it this summer and it’s great. Go get it!
* A local talk I’ll be giving this Saturday afternoon at the Milwaukee Public Library: 150 Years of H.G. Wells in Milwaukee.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee Public Library beat! Milwaukee Public Library to forgive fines for patrons who visit the library.
* CFP: Flannery O’Connor and Popular Culture. CFP: Modern Fiction Studies: The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies. CFP: Essays on the Evil Dead Anthology. CFP: ICFA 2017.
* Star Trek: Discovery Has Been Delayed Until May 2017. I never saw how they’d make January, even before it was nearly October and they didn’t have a cast yet.
* Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever.
* Professor Cottom’s Graduate School Guidance.docx
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* Too Much and Too Little: A History of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
* With outcomes so uneven, it is no wonder that MFAs are the bastard children of English departments.
* Saint Louis University must pay $367,000 in damages to a former professor who alleged she was denied tenure because of her gender. That’s what a Missouri court decided late last week following a trial by jury. The university says it’s “disappointed” in the verdict and is reviewing its options.
* What does it cost to run a department at UCLA for a year? or, who will pay the salary of the English department?
* This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program’s criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament.
* New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity.
* Haitian-American Roxane Gay Becomes First Black Woman Writer for Marvel Comics.
* From 2014: The Future According to Stanisław Lem.
* Parenting and moral panic, 2016.
* If You Change a Baby’s Diaper in Arizona, You Can Now Be Convicted of Child Molestation.
* “Very pessimistic.” The idea that they could actually somehow manage to blow the lead they’d built up over the summer is horrifying.
this is fine https://t.co/zGp0PVwqX6
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 15, 2016
* It Sure Seems Like Hillary Clinton’s Tech Guy Asked Reddit for Email Advice.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Defendants who can’t afford bail more likely to plead guilty as a way out, studies show.
* Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester. After court threat, state of Michigan removed Flint’s power to sue. WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer). 37 Years in Solitary Confinement and Even the State Can’t Explain Why. Nation’s largest police union endorses Trump. And right here in Milwaukee: An Inmate Died Of Thirst In A Jail Run By A Loudly Pro-Trump Sheriff.
* A Prison Literature Syllabus.
* The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.
* How the failed politics of “humanitarian intervention” were born in 1980s Afghanistan.
* Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.
* Romeo and Juliet in Wisconsin.
* The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult ‘trash.’
This is the most important news of the year. https://t.co/D7o4PddWH0
— Gabriel Baumgaertner (@gbaumgaertner) September 19, 2016
* “I await an apology from Chancellor Dirks, and Dean Hesse,” explained Hadweh. “The university threw me under the bus, and publicly blamed me, without ever even contacting me. It seems that because I’m Palestinian studying Palestine, I’m guilty until proven innocent. To defend the course, we had to mobilize an international outcry of scholars and students to stand up for academic freedom. This never should have happened.”
* I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke.
* The Woman Who Is Allergic to Water.
* Feral Cats and Ecological Disaster.
* The name of the character in the excerpt, GBW Ponce, comes actually from the Ponzi scheme, among other things. There’s a Thomas Frank piece that I once read somewhere (I think it was Harper’s), where he said that civilization is basically a gigantic ponzi scheme. With our obsession with data and with predicting the future, it’s as if we were trying to cancel the future and its uncertainties, in order to make the present feel safer. The IMF has projections for the growth of EVERY economy on the planet which stretch to two-three-four and even more years: why let reality run its course when we can model it and predict it, right? So, the idea behind that character was that by “scientifically” predicting every inch of life, it’s as if we borrowed against our unknown future to live the present with fewer uncertainties and anxieties. But that’s precisely what causes more anxiety, this idea of a life that could fit entirely in an Excel spreadsheet.
* Moderator Announces Topics for First Presidential Debate.
America's Direction
Achieving Prosperity
Securing America
America's Prosperity
Securing Direction
Securing Prosperity
America's America— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 20, 2016
* Definitely, definitely, definitely aliens.
* All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. Shame to get all the way through 312 and then swap #1 and #2…
* Elsewhere in the numerical sublime: Every He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figure, ranked.
* Teach the controversy! “Peter Thiel Would Make A Great Supreme Court Justice.”
* The Bonkers Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe.
* Someone Removed The Music From ‘Dancing In The Street’ And I Can’t Stop Laughing.
* Run it like a sandwich: After Texas high school builds $60-million stadium, rival district plans one for nearly $70 million.
moreover, wealthier school districts are reducing taxes (that have to be shared) and spending more via bond-funded projects (that don't).
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 19, 2016
* Class size matters a lot, research shows.
* Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?
* Page B13: Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates.
* And never forget that the Monkees are DCU canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 20, 2016 at 8:32 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, actuarial science as politics, alcohol, aliens, allergy, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, austerity, ban the box, Berkeley, Big Data, Black Panther, boondoggles, Bowie, C.M. Punk, canon, cats, CFPs, charity, charts, Chyna, Cixin Liu, class size, class struggle, climate change, college budgets, college majors, comics, D.C. Comics, Dancing in the Streets, David Foster Wallace, David Simon, Death's End, debates, digital humanities, digitality, distant reading, diversity, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Snowden, emails, English departments, English majors, Evil Dead, fandom, fans, Flannery O'Connor, Flint, football, futurity, gender, general election 2016, graduate school, H. G. Wells, He-Man, high school football, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, invasive species, Israel, Jesuits, journalism, journamalism, kids today, library fines, literature, lobbying, lockouts, Long Island University, luxury boxes, marijuana, Marvel Comics, MFAs, Michigan, Mick Jagger, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Library, misogyny, moral panic, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, New York, novels, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, Philip K. Dick, Pluto, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, polls, popular culture, pot, prison, prison literature, prison-industrial complex, professional wrestling, race, racism, Reddit, rich people, rising sea levels, Rolling Stones, Romeo and Juliet, Roxanne Gay, scams, science fiction, sexism, sexting, Should I go to grad school?, socialism, solitary confinement, spreadsheets, Springsteen, St. Louis University, stadiums, Stanislaw Lem, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, strikes, superheroes, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the courts, The Dark Forest, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, the Mediterranean, the Monkees, The Pale King, The Three-Body Problem, The Wire, Thunder Road, torture, toys, Tressie McMillan Cottom, unions, USSR, Wakanda, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, Washington Post, water, Who is going to pay the salary of the English department?, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, x-rays
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Public showings of the Tolkien Manuscripts at Marquette, 2016-2017.
* Don’t Panic, But There’s An Asteroid Right Over There.
* Why is the keynote speech such a train wreck at most academic conferences?
* Because it’s that time of year again: my two-part piece from Inside Higher Ed from a few years back on entering the academic job market as an ABD, 1, 2. But of course:
Trivia: this year on the digital #MLAJIL, there are more checkboxes to narrow your search than there are British Literature postings.
— T. S. Miller (@TheFishInPrison) September 12, 2016
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* How could anyone think graduate students shouldn’t have a Plan B?
* Great teaching document: Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question about Theory That Will Provoke Conversation and Further Discussion from Your Colleagues.
* And more: Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion.
* Trump: graft :: Clinton : paranoia.
lot of people *still* complaining that clinton's body doubles are built to run down & collapse after 72 hours. but imagine if one escaped
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) September 12, 2016
* And marrying the last two links: One in Six Eligible Voters Has a Disability.
* “Debate” and the end of the public sphere.
* Let history be our judge: Pepe the Frog, an explainer.
* If Hillary Had to Drop Out, Here’s How a New Democratic Candidate Would be Chosen. Former DNC chairman calls for Clinton contingency plan.
* Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, called Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.
* Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology.
* Getting Restless At The Head Of The Class.
* CFP: this xkcd.
* Demystifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
* Going viral this week: extinction illusions.
* In search of the universal language.
* Reported Concussions in Youth Soccer Soar a Mere 1,600 Percent in 25 Years, According to Study.
* Nice work if you can get it: Wells Fargo won’t claw back $125m retirement bonus from exec who oversaw 2m frauds.
* Sexting in the seventh grade.
* Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Is Working.
* How the sugar industry has distorted health science for more than 50 years.
* Stories that should be more exciting than they are: We Were Wrong About Where the Moon Came From!
* I read Jason Shiga’s Demon as a crowdfunder — it’s great. Check out the first volume when it comes to print next month.
* Special providence: Catfish Falls From The Sky, Hits Woman In The Face.
* The organizing economic metaphor of all of Against Everything is artificial scarcity. The concept usually refers to the way that monopolistic sellers exploit their excessive market power to restrict supply so they can raise prices. Greif’s view is more capacious and idiosyncratic: He describes a culture where the affluent, at sea in a world of abundance, engage in the elaborate restriction of their own demand (to kitsch diners, ethnic food, inappropriately youthful sexual partners). This turns what could be unfussy gratification into resource-intensive performance. On one level, this is about making a technically meaningless life more diverting, but it also gives our atomized selves the comfort of belonging. It serves to differentiate “people like me” from those other, worse people—those without access to the most current information, say, or simply the economic means to act on it. What gives n+1’s economistic turn its authority and novelty is the way Greif and his colleagues show that the market is not, as someone like Gary Becker had it, a bazaar untainted by sinister, irrational notions (discrimination, exploitation, class prejudice), but a site where those things are given free play under cover of neutral utility-maximizing exchange. They have taught us to speak the softer insights of theory (with its sensitivity to symbolic difference and its hermeneutics of suspicion) in the hardheaded but incantatory vernacular of the powerful.
* The New Yorker remembers the Wilmington coup of 1898.
* And I’m catching up late, but man oh man, Bojack Horseman is a good show.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 13, 2016 at 12:53 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, academia, academic jobs, alt-right, animal personhood, animals, asteroids, banking, Bojack Horseman, cartoons, Catfish, charts, class discussion, class struggle, climate change, Colin Kaepernick, college sports, comics, concussions, conferences, contagion, coups, debate, debates, Demons, disability, diversity, dolphins, Donald Trump, ecology, economics, economism, endowments, football, fraud, general election, gifted and talented, gifted kids, graduate student life, graft, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, illness, Islam, Jason Shiga, keynotes, kids today, language, library, lingustics, Mark Greif, Marquette, n+1, NASA, National Anthem, NCAA, Netflix, Noam Chomsky, North Carolina, outer space, paranoia, parenting, pedagogy, Pepe the Frog, Plans B, pneumonia, politics, pollution, public sphere, race, racism, replicants, scarcity, science, science fiction, sexting, soccer, special providence in the fall of a sparrow, sports, sugar, teaching, television, the Moon, theory, Tolkien, true crime, universal language, Utopia, voting, Wells Fargo, white supremacy, Wilmington, Won't somebody think of the children?, xkcd
Monday Morning Links!
* In Milwaukee, I lived two lives. On the East Side was the liberal Catholic school I attended for nine years; on the North Side was everything else. Dateline Milwaukee: Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation. Some Lesser Known Justice Facts about Milwaukee and Wisconsin. And a more positive Milwaukee profile: How Milwaukee Shook Off the Rust: The Midwestern hub reclaimed some of its industrial glory by doing a surprising thing. It cleaned up.
* Google’s response to inquiries was chilling: “Google News Archive no longer has permission to display this content.” Entire Google archive of more than a century of stories is gone. Why?
* A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
* Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse. Special congratulations to N.K. Jemisin, whose The Fifth Season I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and to Nnedi Okorafar, whose “Binti” I have read already and is fantastic. Relatedly, Abigail Nussbaum asks: Do the Hugos actually need saving?
* In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.
* This seems like a pretty big deal: Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail.
* U.S. Army only fudged its accounts by mere trillions of dollars, auditor finds.
* An Indiana City Is Poised To Become The Next Flint.
* Another late-summer syllabus: Problems in Posthumanism. #WelfareReformSyllabus. And a study guide for a world without police.
* “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world. I may have half my squad there for hours.”
* Ranking the Most (and Least) Diverse Colleges in America. Marquette sneaks in at #86, while my alma mater Case Western is a surprisingly high #40 and Duke gets #32.
* The strangeness of deep time.
* “The jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. In other words, only the best-educated humans will compete with machines,” Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist, told Pew. “And education systems in the US and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what is told to them, preparing them for life in a 20th century factory.” Nothing can stop Judgment Day, but with the liberal arts you just might have a chance of surviving it…
* 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you.
* Hot.
* Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’saislados, as isolated people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of his tribe.
* The poet and activist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
* Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore.
* Pittsburgh and the birth of the self-driving car.
While people around the world will no doubt continue to project various fantasies onto the tiny island republic, the fact remains that Iceland has yet to see any surge in left mobilization comparable to that in Portugal and Greece — or even the more modest adjustments being made inside the two trans-Atlantic establishment left-liberal parties in the form of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns.
* This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP.
* 88 College Taglines, Arranged as a Poem.
Lang will reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch, Avatar’s villain who appeared definitively dead at the end of the film after taking several huge Na’vi arrows through his chest. Despite that setback, Quaritch is expected to be resurrected in some way and will appear in all the remaining sequels.
Eywa* save us all.
* Reader, I googled it.
* Lovecraft and suburbia and Stranger Things.
* Anyway, the point I’d like you to take away from this is that while it’s really hard to say “sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible”, the smart money says that it’s extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We’d need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances … and that’s for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.
* I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
* My new favorite Twitter bot: @dungeon_junk.
In the dragon's horde, you find the mythical staff Rod of Gnoll which allows you to summon dragons but only during the day.
— Dungeon Junk (@dungeon_junk) August 19, 2016
While looting the tomb you find a magical muttering flask! It has an unsettling accent and it blurts out your embarrassing secrets.
— Dungeon Junk (@dungeon_junk) August 18, 2016
You locate a gold sword. It shines with serrated edges of finely-crafted sapphire. It's worth €30, minimum.
— Dungeon Junk (@dungeon_junk) August 10, 2016
* Viacom is hemorrhaging money, in part on the basis of the struggling Star Trek (and Ninja Turtles, and Ben Hur) reboot franchises.
* Friend acquires a lot of cheese. What to do with it?
* And of course you had me at Historic Midcentury Modernist Motels of the New Jersey Coast.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, advertising, Alpha Centauri, America, architecture, Ask Metafilter, attention economy, automation, Avatar, Avatar 2, bail, Ben Hur, Binti, Brazil, Case Western, charts, cheese, class struggle, climate change, college, Colson Whitehead, conspiracy theory, corpocracy, cruises, CWRU, debt, deep time, Department of Justice, diversity, Donald Trump, down the shore, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, East Chicago, ecology, extrasolar planets, Facebook, film, finance, Flint, found poetry, fraud, GDP, Google News, graft, hotels, How the University Works, Hugo awards, human extinction, Iceland, Indiana, James Cameron, jobs, Judgment Day, liberal arts, Lovecraft, mail, maps, Marquette, Michigan, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, modernism, motels, Mr. Robot, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, New Jersey, Nnedi Okorafor, outer space, Paramount, Peru, Pittsburgh, poems, poetry, police abolition, politics, post-industrial cities, posthumanism, prison, prison-industrial complex, Proxima Centauri, R2-D2, race, racism, revolution, robots, Rust Belt, science fiction, segregation, self-driving cars, shoplifting, slogans, Solmaz Sharif, special effects, spoiler alert, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stranger Things, suburbia, syllabi, taglines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, television, the Army, the banks, the courts, The Fifth Season, the humanities, the law, The Man of the Hole, the suburbs, The Underground Railroad, true crime, twists, Twitter, Twitter bots, uncontested tribes, USPS, Viacom, Wal-Mart, waste, welfare reform, white flight, Wisconsin, work labor, ZIP codes
Sunday Morning!
* Early career advice you can use: The Hiring Process at Teaching Colleges. How Your Journal Editor Works.
* So what do I mean by claiming that there is no future to the study of culture in the 21st Century? My thesis is that we are (or should be) nearing the end of the study of culture, and that to continue to study it as we have will run the risk of irrelevance, or worse. In this talk I maintain that there is no future for the study of culture if it does not include the study of key concerns of the 21st century, including especially those ecological, geopolitical, and economic issues which threaten the existence of culture as we know it.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on Generation Anthropocene.
* I thought the first episode of Harmonquest was pretty promising. I’ve also been enjoying The Union of “The State” for the full 90s flashback experience. And why not wash it down with Dana Carvey’s Nano-Impressions?
* Bad news: 2016 will get one last extra second to make us all suffer.
* There’s a Secret Message Written Into the Sands of Mars.
* “I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing.” A bit more from Kottke on what happens when you turn police agencies into a revenue stream.
* Pokémon Go and Race in America.
* Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers Look Nearly Unbeatable.
* The Leftist’s Guide to Actually Existing Welfare.
* When a physician is the perpetrator, the AJC found, the nation often looks the other way.
* An interactive self-care guide.
* Millennials and class identity.
* The parental misery index. Whenever I see this studies I really think that “happiness” is the wrong value to be trying to measure; being a parent is unquestionably the best thing I’ve ever done, whether it makes me quantifiably “happier” moment-to-moment or not.
* No more half measures: only the total elimination of the university can protect students and teachers from each other.
* The Trusted Grown-Ups Who Steal Millions From Youth Sports.
* On playing the LAPD in your local pickup league.
* And truly we are all guilty before the law.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 10, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2016?, academia, academic jobs, academic journals, austerity, butter, Center for 21st Century Studies, charts, class struggle, climate change, comedy, cultural students, Dan Harmon, Dana Carvey, doctors, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, embezzlement, futurity, games, general election 2016, happiness, Harmonquest, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, impressions, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, LAPD, leap seconds, Little League, margarine, Mars, millennials, misery, Morse code, neoliberalism, Netflix, no future, parenting, parents, pedagogy, podcasts, Pokémon, police, police state, politics, poll numbers, race, racism, rape, rape culture, revenue, Richard Grusin, schtick, science fiction, self-care, sports, teaching, the 1990s, the Anthropocene, the Left, The State, theft, true crime, welfare
So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!
* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”
* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”
Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?
The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.
* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.
* Marquette will pilot a J-term.
* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?
* The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.
* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.
* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.
Trump status:
–38%, down 7 pts
–outspent 100%-0 on TV
–$1.3m COH, v. $42m for Clinton
–30 staff membershttps://t.co/UaHpJLICJt— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) June 21, 2016
But this one is still my favorite:
So as it turns out, I was booted from the Trump rally because a woman saw me do the Hunger Games salute to a group getting thrown out.
— Jackson Pearce (@JacksonPearce) June 16, 2016
* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.
In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.
* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.
* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.
@gerrycanavan @Lollardfish lotta people cursing both Senate rejection of watchlist for gun control and Strieff majority's 4A logic today
— Nick Fleisher (@nickfleisher) June 21, 2016
* Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.
* Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.
* The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’
* The hack that could take down New York City.
* Rethinking teaching evaluations.
* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.
* What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?
* How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.
* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.
* On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.
* It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?
* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.
* We’re All Forum Writers Now.
* Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.
* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.
* At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.
* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.
* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.
* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.
* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.
* Homeless in Seattle: five essays.
* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.
* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.
"Our fathers were all evil men." Happy Father's Day from Game of Thrones!
— Sarah Galo (@SarahEvonne) June 20, 2016
* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.
* The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!
* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”
* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.
* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.
* Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.
* The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.
* That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.
* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.
* There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.
* Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.
* Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.
* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.
* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Abraham Lincoln, academia, airplanes, airport security, alligators, Anton Yeltsin, AR-15s, Aurora, Barnes and Noble, Batman v. Superman, Bill Gates, Black Panther, boards of trustees, Bolivia, books, Brexit, Britain, brokered conventions, Cal State, CEOs, charts, chickens, children, China Miéville, class struggle, Colbert, color, comics, computers, Connor, content warnings, DC Comics, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, Earth, EU, extrasolar planets, Flashpoint, food, forums, Fourth Amendment, free speech, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, generation starships, George R. R. Martin, George Saunders, guns, hacking, happiness, He-Man, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hunger Games, interstellar travel, iPhones, J-terms, Jacobin, James Garfield, James Joyce, Jameson, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Jay Edidin, Jesus, Jesus's Wife, Jupiter, Justice League, kids, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kodak, Krypton, labor, language, laptops, LEGO, liberalism, life is short, Liverpool, Lord of the Rings, Mad Men, maps, Marilyn Monroe, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, masculinity, medicine, money in politics, morality, museums, my life backing the wrong horse, my scholarly empire, Nabokov, NASA, Netflix, New York, North America, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oakland, obituary, Olaf Stapledon, Omar Mateen, Orlando, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, Philadelphia, phones, Pixar, poetry, police, police corruption, police state, politics, polls, postmodernism, postmodernity, progress, publishing, Quantum Leap, race, racial profiling, racism, rape, rape culture, Ray Bradbury, Republicans, research, Sansa, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, search firms, Seattle, Sega Genesis, She-Ra, Sherryl Vint, sin tax, social text, soda tax, solar system, Sonia Sotomayor, Star Maker, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Wars, startups, Supergirl, Supreme Court, syllabi, sympathy, taxes, teaching, teaching evaluations, television, terraforming, terrorism, The Bachelor, the bible, The Census-Taker, the courts, the CW, the Emperor, the Flash, the Internet, the law, the nineteenth century, The Young Ones, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, toddlers, Tolkien, totality, trigger warnings, Trump TV, TSA, Tuskegee, two-year-olds, Ulysses, United Kingdom, UnREAL, Venezuela, Wakanda, war on terror, Waukegan, Wisconsin, words, writing
Big Tuesday Links!
* Sadly always relevant: How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. I bought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in Philly in 7 minutes.
* Since, in fact, we lack the ability to realise even a single one of these demands in the foreseeable future, and since all other apparent solutions are unavailing, the unwelcome thought begins to insinuate itself — we are going to live in a world with Daesh and its massacres no matter what we do.
* Presenting The Bee. Exciting new “Beyond Criticism” project from Lili Loofbourow.
* Along the way to a world of driverless cars there are many potential roadblocks: infrastructure issues, different technical standards, restrictive state licensing policies, and more. But something more problematic might be the one most likely to derail this important technology: excessive lawsuits. To avoid the chilling effect that excessive litigation might have on this life-saving innovation, Congress may need to provide a certain amount of legal immunity for creators of driverless car technologies, or at least create an alternative legal compensation system for when things go wrong.
* There are no ifs, maybes or caveats allowed in American sports and now in American culture—you’re either a champion or you’re a loser: a nothing.
* We Finally Know Why Birds Are So Freakishly Smart. The tragedy of the pit bull. Fugitive capybara captured in Toronto park 19 days after zoo escape.
* The Ecstatic Experience: “Hamilton,” “Hair,” and “Oklahoma!” “Hamilton” and History’s Darkened Rooms.
* Moving as a child can change who you are as an adult.
* Aldermen call for hearings on lead in water at Chicago schools.
* The Blacklist: Here are the media outlets banned by Donald Trump.
* Sad! These three campaign gurus for Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have had some time to reflect on their loss to The Donald. And do they ever have stories to tell.
* The case for, and the case against, Elizabeth Warren as Clinton’s VP pick. Democrats vs Democrats. Clinton running even in Utah.
* Curb returns. So does Clementine.
* Harrison Ford is moving to one of the five or six cities I call home: Burlington, Vermont.
* Not all heroes wear capes: Traveler sues TSA for missed flight.
* Abolishing Daylight Savings Time in California.
* If you want to understand the contemporary moment. Why Trump Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid.
* Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.
For example, the White House, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, becomes sulk.held.raves; the Tokyo Tower is located at fans.helpless.collects; and the Stade de France is at reporter.smoked.received.
Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
* First, let’s vote out all the lawyers.
* Video is terrible, is almost certainly the future of everything.
* And the future just isn’t very stable: Carbon nanotubes have been pegged as the wonder material that could finally allow us to build a space elevator. A discouraging new study suggests these microscopic strands aren’t as resilient as we thought—and all it could take is a single misplaced atom to bring the whole thing crashing down.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 14, 2016 at 3:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing journalism, actually existing media bias, air travel, airport security, Alexander Hamilton, America, animal consciousness, animals, Bernie Sanders, birds, Burlington, California, Captain America 3, capybaras, carbon nanotubes, cars, championships, charts, Chicago, childhood trauma, Civil War, Congress, criticism, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Daylight Savings Time, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, dogs, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, empire, Facebook, film, futurity, games, general election 2016, globalization, guns, hair, Hamilton, Harrison Ford, Hillary Clinton, history, income inequality, ISIS, Jeb Bush, kids, lawyers, lead, lead poisoning, liability, Lili Loofbourow, literature, losers, Marco Rubio, mass shootings, Mongolia, moving, musical theater, musicals, NASA, neoliberalism, Oklahoma, Orlando, outer space, parents, pit bulls, plot, polls, pornography, regulatory capture, Republican primary 2016, Salvage, science fiction, self-driving cars, space elevator, sports, Star Wars, Ted Cruz, Telltale Games, text is best, The Bee, the courts, the Internet, the law, The Walking Dead, theory, TSA, Utah, Vermont, video, villains, virtual reality, water, weirdness, X-Wing, zoos
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 6, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 11/22/63, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, allergy, America, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Are we living in a simulation?, art, artificial intelligence, austerity, autoimmune disorders, Back to the Future, basketball, BDS, Bernie Sanders, Bill Kristol, billionaires, blacklists, boxing, brands, Brazil, Brigham Young, California, cars, Catholic Church, Catholicism, CFPs, charts, Chicago, child molestation, China, class struggle, climate change, construction, coups, Daenerys Targaryen, David French, dead bodies, decolonization, Democratic primary 2012, diabetes, dogs, domestication, Donald Trump, Duke TIP, education, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emails, Emmett Rensin, English departments, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, film, First Amendment, Fred Moten, free speech, Game of Thrones, gangs, gender, general election 2016, genes, genetic determinism, George R. R. Martin, Google, guns, happiness, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Horace and Pete, How the University Works, ideology, Israel, J.J. Abrams, J.K. Rowling, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Journal of Science Fiction, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kean University, lead, lead poisoning, legal bribery, Louis C.K., lynching, magic, maps, Mark Maron, Mars, masculinity, Massachusetts, medicine, merchandising, Miami, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, money in politics, Muhammad Ali, murder-suicide, NBA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, novels, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Olympics, Palestine, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, poetry, politics, polls, poverty, power, precrime, protest, public relations, rape, rape culture, real estate, reboots, refugees, religion, rich people, riots, Rocky II, run it like a sandwich, San Francisco, science, science fiction, science is magic, sea level rise, Seinfeld, sequels, Shakespeare, Silicon Valley, simulation argument, Skynet, skyscrapers, sleep, sleep is for the weak, sports, standardized testing, Stanford, Star Trek, stem cells, Steph Curry, Stephen King, Story of Your Life, subprime loans, summer, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the canon, the courts, the CW, the humanities, the law, the Pentagon, The Voyage Home, third parties, time travel, tornadoes, trans* issues, trolls, Trump University, typos, Uber, UCLA, undercommons, University of California, Veep, villains, Washington D.C., water, whales, wolves, writing, WTF, Yale, year-round schooling
Weekend Links!
* We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively — they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”
* Yet in spite of these lofty commitments and goals, not everyone is impressed with the proposed solutions that are surfacing ahead of the Paris talks. This includes the leading climate scientist James Hansen, who published an editorial on Friday in which he derided an Obama-led climate initiative as “unadulterated 100% pure bullshit.”
* The Wampanoag Side of the First Thanksgiving Story. What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale. The Secret History of the Pilgrims and Beer.
* My Favorite African Science Fiction and Fantasy (AfroSFF) Short Fiction of 2015. I liked both “Discovering Time Travel” and “Last Wave” a lot.
* The story of the first Black Friday.
* 40 maps and charts that explain sports in America.
* Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, applauds President Obama who signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.
* How The House Of Representatives Voted To Make Refugee Resettlement Impossible.
* Assassinating Terrorists Does Not Work.
* Dinosaurs in Science Fiction.
* “Bad News For The Planet,” Says The World Meteorological Organization.
* The circle of life at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
* For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. Cows and calves, rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, deer, and fauns, goats, gazelles, and horses, seals and walruses, perhaps cats and dogs on occasion were rendered into scrolls and codices, bindings and booklets, charters and mezuzot. A large part of our written inheritance survives as a great mass of animal remains.
* Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out.
* Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control.
* “false testimony occurred in hundreds of trials, incl. 32 death penalty.”
* Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.
* How Did Doctor Who Manage To Waste a Companion Like Clara Oswald Actress Like Jenna Coleman? However they did it, they certainly did…
* I’ve seen this movie. Though this one is intriguing: We Still Don’t Know Why the Heck There Are So Many Blue Tarantulas.
* It’s Time to Change Your Amazon Password.
* The case for letting children vote.
* Star Wars as its own genre. The Heartwarming Story Behind R2-KT, And How She Joined Star Wars Canon.
* A Unified Theory of the Rocky Movies.
* And now they tell me: Childless adults are generally just as happy as parents.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcohol, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, beer, Black Friday, black holes, bullshit, cancer, charts, circle of life, climate change, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, early childhood education, ecology, FBI, film, Hawaii, James Hansen, Jessica Jones, kids today, labor, maps, Marvel, Medical College of Wisconsin, murder, Native American issues, outer space, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Pilgrims, police, property rights, R2-KT, rape, rape culture, refugees, robots, Rocky, Rojava, science, science fiction, short stories, spiders, sports, Star Wars, Supreme Court, tarantulas, teaching, terrorism, Thanksgiving, the courts, the law, time travel, true crime, unions, Utopia, Wampanoag, war on terror, Won't somebody think of the children?
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 19, 2015 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, administrative bloat, air travel, all things must pass, animals, assisted suicide, austerity, beavers, Beowulf, Bernie Sanders, brands, Buck Rogers, California, CFPs, charts, cheese, cheese bandits, Chris Ware, class struggle, Colin McGinn, comics, copyright, crip theory, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Democrats, Denmark, Department of State, dictatorship, disability studies, Dracula, dystopia, eugenics, FBI, Fukushima, general election 2016, ghosts, Grendel, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Instagram, Japan, Larry David, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, mass incarceration, McDonald's, megadrought, money, national security, neoliberalism, nuclearity, philosophy, politics, prison-industrial complex, queer theory, robotic bears, robots, Satan, science fiction conference, sexual harassment, Sir Thomas More, SNL, socialism, suicide, the rich are different from you and me, trolls, true crime, University of California, University of Miami, Utopia, Vox, wealth, zombies
Monday Morning Links!
* The first cut of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ was over 3 hours long. I’m sure that would have solved all the problems.
* Science Fiction and the Urban Crisis.
* In short, riots aren’t counterproductive because they do not achieve their goals. They are counterproductive because they are an expression of those who are already-counterproductive, those “individuals committing the violence,” those ever-ready to riot.
* Starfleet as the Federation’s “Dumping Ground for Orphans.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18.5: “Peaceful Protest.”
* Wow: Rebuilt slave sites being unveiled at Jefferson’s Monticello.
* The U.S. Civil War ended 150 years ago, but once a year, deep in the sugar cane fields of southern Brazil, the Confederate battle flag rises again.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably. They’re banning Sherman Alexie? Come on.
* Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity.
* Executive Who Presided Over Nonprofit’s Fall Seeks $1.2 Million Payday.
* The names of the chemical elements in Chinese. More links below the chart.
* The Washington Post‘s Police Problem.
* Judith Butler’s talents are wasted on a “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” piece that really should be obvious to everyone.
* The most amazing thing about this exchange is that Sam Harris thinks he won this argument so completely he needed everyone in the world to see.
* The headline reads, “Nepal’s Kung Fu Nuns Have Refused To Be Evacuated – They’re Staying Back To Help Victims.”
* “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Disability in Game of Thrones.”
* Porn data: visualising fetish space.
* Ideology at its cutest (hat tip: Justin I.): Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear.
* Big Bird Actor: I Almost Died on the Challenger and I Cry in the Suit.
* Report: Cop Dismissed Freddie Gray’s Pleas for Help as “Jailitis.”
* Christie signs law greenlighting fast track sale of N.J. public water systems.
* The Great Victoria’s Secret Bra Heist of Pennsylvania.
* Behind the scenes of the Game of Thrones map.
* It’s always worse than you think: The CIA has been organizing clandestine TED Talks.
* “Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.
* “Social media trend sees men ditching sit-ups for snack cakes.” My moment has arrived!
* Tesla unveils a battery to power your home, completely off grid.
* I hate to link to an SNL bit, but their parody of a Black Widow movie was really pretty good.
* Area X novella coming… eventually. I liked the first book in the trilogy much, much more than the latter two, but I’m still in.
* Can 3D printing save the rhino? Seattle-based bioengineering start-up Pembient believes it can. The company plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D printed rhino horn in an effort to stem the number of rhinos killed for their horns. But conservationists fear that the plan may backfire, undermining their own efforts to cut the demand for such products in China and Vietnam, the main black markets for rhino horns.
* The coming DC Cinematic Universe trainwreck, Suicide Squad edition.
* A University Is Not Walmart.
* Trustees are basically heroes, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 4, 2015 at 8:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, 3D printing, academia, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, Age of Ultron, Area X, austerity, Baltimore, banned books, batteries, Bernie Sanders, Big Bird, Big Data, Black Widow, bras, capitalism, CEOs, Challenger, charts, Chinese, Chris Christie, CIA, cities, Civil War, class struggle, cool, cultural preservation, dadbod, DC Comics, debate, disability, disability studies, endangered species, film, Florida, Freddie Gray, Game of Thrones, Grace Lee Whitney, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, it's always worse than you think, Jeff Vandermeer, Joss Whedon, Judith Butler, kung fu, LLAP, Marvel, Monticello, neoliberalism, Nepal, Noam Chomsky, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nuns, obituary, orphans, Pennsylvania, periodic tale, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, poliitcs, pornography, primitive accumulation, privatize everything, protests, race, racism, rhinos, riots, Sam Harris, science fiction, Sesame Street, sex offenders, Sherman Alexie, slavery, SNL, social media, Star Trek, Suicide Squad, TED talks, teddy bears, Tesla, The Avengers 2, the Confederacy, The Culture, the Federation, Thomas Jefferson, trustees, Vermont, Walmart, water, words
Thursday Morning Links!
* Report: Only 20 Minutes Until Introverted Man Gets To Leave Party.
* Silicon Valley’s “Thunder Lizards” Want to “Hack” America’s Broken Universities. But are they vultures instead?
* Momentum is building to establish a new geological epoch that recognizes humanity’s impact on the planet. But there is fierce debate behind the scenes.
* Wheeeee! Some top Democrats are alarmed about Clinton’s readiness for a campaign.
* A police shooting in Madison, WI, highlighted the city’s alarming racial disparities.
* Twitter Just Banned Revenge Porn and Doxxing. Good, but, uh — they weren’t already banned?
* The situation at UC Irvine just seems totally surreal to me. ROTC standing guard over the flag? Really?
* From the archives: U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.
* Moral panic watch: The bill does, however, make the school liable to any cisgender (nontrans) student who “encounters a person not of the student’s biological sex” in a bathroom, locker room, or shower. Every student who successfully proves the school violated this would-be law “shall be awarded … exemplary damages in the amount of $2,000.” That sum does not include the “actual damages,” which the bill notes includes “damages for mental anguish even if an injury other than mental anguish is not shown.”
* Gasp! Welfare drug tests fail to save expected cash.
* The “Blurred Lines” Verdict Is Bad News, Even If You Hate Robin Thicke.
* Video games and breast physics. Potentially NSFW link at Kotaku.
* The headline reads, “Mount Everest’s Poop Situation Is About To Go From Bad To Worse.”
* Vince Gilligan says to quit throwing pizzas on the roof of the Breaking Bad house. You’ve changed, man.
* Unemployment up in all Wisconsin counties, major cities. Chachi shrugged.
* Meanwhile, this exists: Charles in Charge: The Novelization.
* NCAA nearly topped $1 billion in revenue in 2014. Nice work if you can get someone to do it for you without wages.
* Seeking a friend for the end of the world.
* What every state is best at. Take that Vermont, though “longest cat lifespans” remains tantalizingly out of reach…
* And in a world without heroes, there was… Mystery Man Suspected Of Pooping On At Least 19 Cars In Ohio.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 12, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, American flag, bathrooms, Björk, Blurred Lines, Breaking Bad, breast physics, California, cats, Charles in Charge, charts, cheese, class struggle, climate change, college sports, copyright, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, doxxing, ecology, flags, flexible online education, games, Happy Days, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ideology, imperialism, introversion, longevity, Madison, maps, MOOCs, moral panic, Mt. Everest, music, nationalism, NCAA, Ohio, parties, pizza, police brutality, police violence, politics, poop, race, racism, revenge porn, Robin Thicke, ROTC, safety net, scams, science, Scott Baio, Scott Walker, Silicon Valley, story of my life, the Anthropocene, The Onion, Timothy Morton, trans* issues, Twitter, unemployment, University of California Irvine, Vince Gilligan, vulture capitalism, war on drugs, welfare state, Wisconsin
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird