Posts Tagged ‘children's literature’
Monday Night Links!
* CFP: ASAP11, “Ecologies of the Present.”
* A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report: Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people.
* Great Twitter thread on screenwriting from my old friend Tony Tost.
* And a great thread pitching a black Batman story.
batman becomes a number one target for the cops, a target for organized crime, something of a folk hero for black gotham, and highly controversial—even hated and disdained—among white gothamites.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 1, 2019
* Thieves stole architectural gems from USC in a heist that remained hidden for years.
* Bennett, who a week earlier had been placed on indefinite administrative leave, was now barred from the university, the message said. Sandwiched between those assertions was a sordid allegation: Bennett’s “recent admittance to police of meth use and access to firearms.”
* Vox talks to Malcolm Harris about the kids today.
* When a utility files for bankruptcy.
* Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated.
* When Democrats actually propose popular progressive policies.
* Crimes against humanity without apology: Finding all migrant children separated from their families may be impossible, feds say. The utter shamelessness of these people.
* Executive time: How Trump’s schedule compares to past presidents.
* Trump wants another fake physical.
* African-American women were written out of the history of the woman suffrage movement. As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, it’s time for a new look at the past.
* In one Milwaukee school, on one day, what a difference a small class size made.
* Financial literacy is a kind of formation of its own. Such programs form us to believe that we can make up for one $40,000 decision with forty thousand other decisions that save a single dollar each. In retrospect, it seems fitting that Duke Divinity School required each of us to sit through a brief seminar on financial literacy prior to graduation. The school needed one last moment to shape us as individuals in control of our destiny through wise choices, hard work, and willpower. … Student debt thus exposes a farther-reaching cruelty in a system that treats people, in the end, as autonomous consumers. Until we recognize the deeper problem, we will be hindered from taking collective action to build better lives together. We spend so much time blaming one another and ourselves that we don’t have time to look at bigger, collective solutions like tuition-free higher education or the cancellation of student loan debt. We don’t ask what kind of society we want to see and what kind of collective political action it might take to win it. Our eyes haven’t been trained to see society and its institutions as something we can change. Our imaginations haven’t been formed to desire something better fitted for human flourishing.
In 600 years people will refer to this time period as the post-POST-medieval age and they will make whatever the 27th century equivalent of movies is about us featuring women in Victorian dresses driving ‘57 chevys texting on their iPhones and everyone will be all “HAHA THE PAST”
— Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) February 3, 2019
* Y: The Last Man TV Adaptation Will Premiere in 2020. As we were chatting about on Twitter, it’s amazing how long this took, so long that they’re probably quite a bit out-of-step with the times now.
* When you’re looking on the bright side.
* Lots of white people having nervous breakdowns lately.
(quietly) the basic formula of most American action narratives is a white man vindicating the social order and finding personal regeneration by inflicting violence on abjected Others who threaten his prerogatives over white women, Taken was The Searchers meets Death Wish meets 24
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 4, 2019
* Billionaires! They’re just like us our parents!
* How long could my murderer pretend to be me online?
* Can you trip so hard you never stop tripping?
* Another truly bananas story from the world of young adult publishing.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 4, 2019 at 5:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Anthropocene, apocalypse, ASAP, bad trips, Batman, billionaires, burnout, California, capitalism, CFPs, charter schools, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, cochlear implants, comics, conferences, Damnation, Dan Mallory, deafness, death, Democrats, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, fascism, glaciers, guns, history, history departments, How the University Works, Liam Neeson, LSD, Malcolm Harris, medievalism, meth, millennials, Milwaukee, mortality, murderers, pedagogy, politics, public utilities, race, racism, screenwriting, student debt, Taken, taxes, teaching, the Himalayas, the kids today, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tom Gauld, Tony Tost, true crime, USC, vaccines, Virginia, war on education, weather, whiteness, wildfires, women's suffrage, writing, Y: The Last Man, YA literature
Sunday Reading, A Great Idea Whose Time Has Come
* SFFTV Special Issue CFP: Global Utopian Film and TV in the Age of Dystopia.
* CFP: The Sixth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 27-29, 2019.
* CFP: 20th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe.
* Pasadena on Her Mind: Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Her Hometown.
* The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talks to the great Lisa Yaszek.
* When your stalker signs up for your class.
* When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals. To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates—has not improved over 6 years.
* US academics feel the invisible hand of politicians and big agriculture.
* Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor for using the N-word during a class discussion about a James Baldwin book in which the word appeared — and for sharing essays on the history of the word with students who complained to him about it. “Teaching & the N-word: Questions to Consider.” I have always personally abided by the use/mention distinction out of deference to black artists and what I see as an injunction not to rewrite their work for them (which has always seemed, to me, like centering whiteness too, just in a different way). But the social consensus around that is *rapidly* changing; I’m not at all sure what’s best, and it seems like a pedagogical minefield that the contemporary moment is completely unprepared to think through in a careful way.
* Fairfax was preparing to be Va. governor. Then Northam said he was staying put.
"All of you will be reassured to know that I am not the one in that photo," says the guy who just admitted he put shoe polish in his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume in the fall of 1984.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 2, 2019
A reporter just asked Northam to moonwalk AND HIS WIFE HAD TO TELL HIM THAT WAS A BAD IDEA, if you're wondering just how much of a trainwreck this press conference is.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 2, 2019
* Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet. Students Are Preparing for the First Major U.S. Climate Strike Next Month. There’s a big hole in the world’s most important glacier. Hell yeah, Upper Midwest. Climate signs.
* The Anthropocene started in 1492. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.
* How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth.
* ‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings.
Wow this plan of Trump’s really backfired pic.twitter.com/9aaWPI5UMG
— who pixelates the boatmen? (@pixelatedboat) January 25, 2019
* Lord of the Rings as D&D Campaign.
* Trump Allies Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Hiding or Dead. It Started on QAnon.
* The U.S. Needs to Stay Out of Venezuela.
* Snopes officially declares Facebook unfactcheckable.
* Automated background checks are deciding who’s fit for a home.
* New York Insurers Can Evaluate Your Social Media Use—If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed.
* We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole.
* As Drug Prices Rise, Is Boston’s Prosperity Based On A Moral Crime?
* Invincible has a solid voice cast, but for some reason I thought this show was going to be live action, and now I’m broken-hearted.
* Cop watch: FBI Warned Law Enforcement Agencies of Threat Posed by Non-Existent ‘Pro-Choice Extremists.’ Revealed: FBI investigated civil rights group as ‘terrorism’ threat and viewed KKK as victims. No Heat for Days at a Jail in Brooklyn Where Hundreds of Inmates Are Sick and ‘Frantic.’ Mentally Ill Prisoners Are Held Past Release Dates, Lawsuit Claims. Prison gerrymandering is distorting democracy in states across the Midwest and nationwide, leaving incarcerated people with inequitable representation—or none at all. ICE Agents Are Using Pennsylvania’s Courthouses as a Stalking Ground. The State Supreme Court Can Stop Them. One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases. The criminal justice system also has an ‘alternative facts’ problem. The FBI Has Your DNA Now.
Demoted. Not fired. After he pulled her over, took her car, and then posted a photo of her having to walk home in the Detroit polar vortex weather of 2 degrees and then posted video on Snapchat writing, among other things, “celebrating Black History Month”. https://t.co/O7BM3b96CG
— Renee Bracey Sherman (@RBraceySherman) February 1, 2019
* This was cool: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.
* Wisconsin basketball star has no plans to stop protesting racism during the national anthem.
* Breaking: everyone from uncontacted and isolated tribes is in the Bad Place.
* A new study finds Americans take the pain of girls less seriously than that of boys.
* Will Anyone Save Black Colleges?
* A spectre is haunting the 2020 Democratic primary.
* Let children be bored again. I ran this parenting suggestion by my seven year old and got a big thumbs down.
* I wish there were a different author than Jesse Singal, but the story is genuinely fascinating: How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author’s Budding Career.
* New to podcasts? Choose your genre!
Written by gerrycanavan
February 3, 2019 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #woke, 1492, academia, algorithms, apocalypse, blackface, books, Boston, Brexit, CBP, CFPs, childhood, children's literature, climate change, comics, communism, David Foster Wallace, decolonize everything, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DNA, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, Exxon, Facebook, fact-checking, FBI, Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, genre, harassment, historically black colleges, How the University Works, ice, imperialism, Infinite Jest, insurance, intelligence, Invincible, journalism, kids today, labor, Lisa Yaszek, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles Review of Books, measles, Michael Jackson, MOOCs, NLRB, Octavia Butler, opioids, parenting, Pasadena, pedagogy, podcasts, police, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, prescription drugs, prison-industrial complex, public defends, QAnon, race, racial slurs, racism, Ralph Northam, Republicans, Robert Kirkman, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Seattle, slurs, Snopes, social media, socialism, stalking, stamps, student movements, Supreme Court, teaching, the Anthropocene, the courts, The Good Place, the law, United Kingdom, Utopia, vaccines, Venezuela, Virginia, wage theft, white supremacy, Wisconsin, words, young adult literature, YouTube
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2018 at 9:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic jobs, actresses, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, advising, Affordable Care Act, Afghanistan, air travel, airplanes, Alice Walker, America, animals, Anthropocene, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, Aquaman, artificial intelligence, asbestos, baby powder, BDS, bombs, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, CBP, Chickenocene, children's literature, Chris Hayes, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, comedy, concussions, corruption, cruelty, Death Star, department rotation, Donald Trump, double entendres, ecology, emergency rooms, Facebook, fake news, fakery, freedom, games, grade inflation, grading, Graz, Greta Thunberg, gun violence, guns, hate crimes, health insurance, Hollywood, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Jack Dorsey, just world hypothesis, kids today, labor, lizard people, machine learning, malls, Metroid, Mexico, misogyny, neoliberalism, Netflix, NFL, Nintendo, outer space, Palestine, pedagogy, PewDiePie, police, politics, price dogs, race, racism, Ross Douthat, Rudy Giuliani, scam, science fiction, Sears, sexism, Silent Sam, social media, Soviet Union, Springsteen, Star Wars, student debt, supernatural, Supreme Court, surveillance state, Swamp Thing, Sweden, teaching, technology, the university in ruins, the wall, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UNC, United Kingdom, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Woody Allen, work, YouTube
Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!
* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Children’s Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.
* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.
* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!
* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.
* A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.
* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.
* Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.
* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
Every mass media outlet talking about the climate report: “If we don’t get serious soon, bad stuff will start to happen.” This is denialism along multiple vectors: very bad stuff is already happening, it will continue to happen regardless of what we do, and we won’t do anything.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
I’ve lost hope that there’s anything to do about climate change except some sort of likely catastrophic geoengineering intervention — but even if we do it and it works we will need massive intervention in the operation of global society to ameliorate the harms already baked in.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
so anyway good morning
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
ps your favs aren’t getting serious about climate change, they’re building private bunkers and training local cops and private mercenaries to liquidate striking workers and refugees
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.
* The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Can’t Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.
* Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.
* The suffocation of democracy.
* The president sure did some crimes.
* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?
* And how will they solve securities fraud?
* KSR: The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.
* The Bosses’ Constitution: How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
* NC’s Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!
* The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.
* A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.
* Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economy—and Voter Turnout.
* Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isn’t when they’ll rebuild — but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.
* Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.
* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.
* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US. ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court.
* Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”
* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.
* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.
* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.
* How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.
* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.
* I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.
* Geological time versus capitalist time.
* The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.
* The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.
* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.
* “The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”
* On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.
* On raising a non-neurotypical child.
* The film’s real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggers—the gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.
* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.
* I’m here only to present the facts.
* The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.
* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.
* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.
* You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96—less than 1 percent—had their debt erased. And it gets worse.
* How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.
* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.
* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.
* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 9, 2018 at 5:39 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolish the Senate, academic hoaxes, academic jobs, alcohol, alcoholism, aliens, animals, Antarctica, anxiety, apocalypse, Aquaman, art, autism, Banksy, Bernie Sanders, Brett Kavanaugh, cancer, canons, carbs, CFPs, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, comedy, comics, contemporary literature, David Foster Wallace, death, dementia, democracy, denialism, deportation, diabetes, dissent, Donald Trump, Dril, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elon Musk, epic level, ethnic cleansing, fascism, First Amendment, football, fraud, free speech, freelance writing, games, genius grants, geoengineering, George Mason, gig economy, grievance studies, health insurance, Helen Keller, Hurricane Florence, hurricanes, ice, identity politics, immigration, improv, Infinite Jest, IPCC, Kelly Link, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mad Men, Mars, Marxism, mass extinction, Matthew Weiner, Mike Davis, Moral Mondays, my scholarly empire, neurotypicality, New York 2140, NFL, North Carolina, obesity, Oregon Trail, Orphan Black, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, photography, police violence, politics, prison, prison abolition, Puerto Rico, R. Crumb, Rick and Morty, San Francisco, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, scuba diving, SEC, sex, Sokal hoax, Sorry to Bother You, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords, student debt, Supreme Court, surveillance society, taxes, teaching, television, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the courts, The Good Place, the law, the truth is out there, true crime, Twilight Zone, Twitter, UFOs, unions, United Nations, whales, Wilmington, writing
Just 300 or So of the Most Important Links for This Friday Morning
* SFFTV 11.2 is out, a special issue on Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and women and sf, guest-edited by up-and-comers Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint! Check it out.
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* Spencer Ackerman explains Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men.
* Inside the (ultimately successful) campaign to recall the judge of the Brock Turner trial.
* Another report from the looting of Toys R Us.
* Norman, the world’s first psychopath AI.
* Water missing opportunity not to be wet.
* Mapping the Movement to Dismantle Public Education.
* My research suggests that those concerns are real, and millennials really are building wealth more slowly than the other working generations. But they are not insurmountable—as long as millennials are willing and able to work longer than their parents and grandparents did. Great can’t wait.
* Solo: A Star Wars Story & The Problem With Prequels. We need to talk about the woke droid. I Have No Mouth and I Must Solo. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves. What Solo could have learned from My Friend Dahmer. Disney manages to learn $50M on a Star Wars movie. Kelly Marie Tran has deleted all the posts off her Instagram due to months of harassment she has received for her character Rose in The Last Jedi. Racism, Misogyny & Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side. What if Star Wars never happened?
[whispering to date while watching Solo when Solo first appears on the screen] "movies exist to generate wealth for corporate shareholders."
— your friend john (@johnsemley3000) June 3, 2018
* Colonial Hottie: Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman and Brand Israel.
* Trump keeps making it harder for people to seek asylum legally. The Awful Spectacle of 200 Immigration Officers Raiding a Couple of Garden Stores. Former DACA recipient murdered in Mexico after deportation. The Heartache of a Migrant Boy Taken From His Father. Mom and 4 children forced to separate after seeking asylum in US. Cops are called when a senator tries to see kids taken from their immigrant parents. Yet another nightmare child separation story from the Chris Hayes podcast. ICE Agent Decides He Wants Kids After Seeing Incredible Love And Devotion Of Parents Begging Him Not To Take Their Child. Feds Deport Uncle of Six Orphans Whose Parents Died Fleeing ICE. UN office calls on US to stop separating families at border. U.S. sending 1,600 immigration detainees to federal prisons. Pizza Delivery Man Arrested By ICE Is Scheduled to Be Deported This Monday. A GoFundMe for Pablo and His Family.
In this case DOJ successfully argues a woman from El Salvador, who would otherwise be granted asylum, can be forcibly deported from the US for providing material support to terrorists.
Even though said material support came AFTER GUERILLAS KIDNAPPED AND FUNCTIONALLY ENSLAVED HER https://t.co/cmV00wqZuA
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 6, 2018
Seeking asylum is not illegal; it is a right guaranteed under international law. It’s the Trump administration that is acting illegally — by their own admission — by enacting punishments against asylum seekers. Everyone who is a party to this action is a criminal.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018
No American will ever have the right to pretend they didn’t know what ICE was doing.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018
The US government chaotically shuffling thousands of children it has kidnapped from their parents through a series of inadequate temporary shelters has a small number of very predictable outcomes, all of them extremely terrible.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018
@SenJeffMerkley was finally provided a tour of the kid jail.
Those are children in those cages. Ripped from their parents.
Many qualify to stay in the US. There is *no* reason to separate them from their parents.
Unless cruelty has become policy.#ThisIsUs #ThisIsAmerica pic.twitter.com/uQIsHojIoF
— Hassan Ahmad (@HMAesq) June 8, 2018
* Jordan Peterson isn’t a good psychologist, either.
* University tutor died after ‘silently struggling’ with workload. Content warning: suicide.
* Taxi-Driver Suicides Are a Warning.
* How the media covers celebrity suicides can have life-or-death consequences.
Time for that sad reminder. After Robin Williams' suicide, sensational media coverage that violated the CDC guidelines resulted in a 10 PERCENT increase in suicides. Same effect applies to mass shootings. Newsrooms, please be considerate in your coverage. https://t.co/O5Gy81rSP0
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 14, 2018
* What gets muddled in this telling of the gig economy is the idea of control. An Uber driver can pick her hours, yes. But is she really her own boss, or is the boss the company’s algorithm? The algorithm, after all, determines where the driver will head next, who she’ll pick up, and how much she’ll be paid for that trip. In other words, many important features of the job are outside the driver’s control.
* Trump administration tells court it won’t defend key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration believes Obamacare’s preexisting conditions protections are now unconstitutional.
* Literally just letting coal barons write the laws.
* Huge, if true: America Is a Spiraling Corporate Contract Dystopia.
* Gaming it out: Would a Former President Get Secret Service Protection in Prison? Just kidding, Democrats are on the case. Meanwhile.
Republicans who claim the president can commit literally any crime without consequence either during (no indictments) or after (self-pardon) office are saying they do not consider this country a democracy + do not accept any limit other than their own will to power. Believe them!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018
* Questions on Michigan’s Investment Tactics.
Recent scrutiny of investment practices by the University of Michigan is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and ethical lapses at colleges and universities seeking to increase their endowments.
Questions about Michigan’s investment practices were prompted by an investigation by the Detroit Free Press, which found that a large portion of the university’s nearly $11 billion endowment is invested in private equity, hedge and venture capital funds, and real estate investment firms run by top university donors and alumni investment advisers.
* Dystopian Bodies: Barbara Ehrenreich Attacks the Epidemic of Wellness.
* Poor road conditions cost Wisconsin drivers $637 each year.
* ‘Clear-sky’ flooding worsens across U.S. as sea levels rise, report says.
* Below are the two main written versions of Sojourner’s speech, the original, on the left, was delivered at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851. The full text of each speech follows the synopsis below so you can see the differences line by line. I have highlighted overt similarities between the two versions. While Frances Gage changed most of the wording and added the southern slave dialect to her 1863 version, it is clear the origin of Gage’s speech comes from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech.
* Hard pass: Howard Schultz steps down at Starbucks, may consider run for president.
* Without Interpreters, California’s Deaf Prisoners Are Getting Stuck Behind Bars.
* A major physics experiment just detected a particle that shouldn’t exist.
The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.
* The Enlightenment’s Dark Side.
* Rebuilding the Antinuclear Movement. How a little “working group” stopped Oakland from becoming a mini-fusion center for the Department of Homeland Security. Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.
* The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.
* Your schedule could be killing you.
* Nazis brauchen keinen Badespaß.
* Schopenhauer, come on. You promised to keep it together.
* Volkswagen Vows to End Experiments on Animals.
* Drones taught to spot violent behavior in crowds using AI. “The work has questionable accuracy rates, but it shows how AI is being used to automate surveillance.”
* Ways brands can celebrate Pride Month.
* Hacked: 92 Million Account Details for DNA Testing Service MyHeritage.
* It’s Ulysses! No, it’s Finnegans Wake! Who Can Tell?!
* Lovely Twitter thread on Dr. Apgar, who probably saved my daughter’s life, and maybe yours too.
* Body Positivity Is a Scam. “How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.”
* It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right; I hope you had the time of your life.
* And these recently declassified NSA posters make our authoritarian dystopia seem fun.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 8, 2018 at 10:58 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", #MeToo, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, Affordable Care Act, algorithms, America, amnesty, animal experimentation, artificial intelligence, asylum, authoritarianism, Barack Obama, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Clinton, body positivity, books, brands, Brock Turner, California, capitalism, CFPs, children, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, coal, corpocracy, David Hogg, deafness, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, Department of Justice, deportation, Disney, DNA, Donald Trump, Dr. Apgar, drones, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, endowments, EPA, ESP, fandom, fascism, Finnegans Wake, flooding, Frankenstein, Gal Gadot, gay rights, general election 2020, Germany, gig economy, Google, graft, gratuitous cruelty, guns, hacking, health, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, ice, immigration, impeachment, Israel, James Joyce, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Jeff Vandermeer, Jordan Peterson, kids today, labor, looters, lower the voting age, Mark Bould, Marvel, Mary Shelley, mass shootings, MCU, military-industrial complex, millennials, misogyny, Monica Lewinsky, Nazis, NSA, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Palestine, parenting, particles, pets, philosophy, physics, police, politics, potholes, prequels, protest, psychology, psychopathy, racism, rape culture, Reddit, Schopenhauer, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Scott Pruitt, sexism, Sherryl Vint, Sojourner Truth, Solo, Star Wars, Starbucks, Stephen Miller, suicide, surveillance society, SWAT teams, taxis, the Anthropocene, the Enlightenment, The Last Jedi, totalitarianism, toxic fandoms, toxic masculinity, Toys R Us, true crime, Uber, Ulysses, UNC, University of Michigan, Volkswagen, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education charter schools, Washington DC, wellness, white supremacy, Wisconsin, women, Wonder Woman, work, X-Men
Monday Afternoon Links!
* Call for Applications at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts: Division Heads of Children’s and Young Adult Literature (CYA) and International Fantastic Literatures (IF).
* In very broad strokes, colleges and universities have four main revenue streams: state appropriations, research funding, gifts and endowments, and student tuition. The first three come with serious restrictions regarding their use. Generally speaking, state appropriations can only be used for educational expenses, research funding is largely spent on specific research projects, and endowments go toward the pet projects of wealthy donors. Only student tuition can be used for anything university administrators want—construction projects, real estate, interest payments, administrative salaries, football coaches. In recent decades, university administrators have sought, like all entrepreneurial institutions, to maximize their revenues, but they have sought above all to maximize their unrestricted revenues—and have even been willing to sacrifice state funding in order to bring in more tuition. The Tuition Limit and the Coming Crisis of Higher Education.
* The University and the Pursuit of Happiness.
* Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture, something that, linguists say, has never happened in another country.
* Hobbes, the Science Fiction Writer: Part I, Part II. Part II wades into Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther…
* A Political History of the Future: Iain M. Banks.
* How White American Terrorists Are Radicalized.
* “The Workplace Is Killing People and Nobody Cares.”
* Neoliberalism and the family.
* If Tim Kaine can keep John Bolton off the National Security Council, all is forgiven.
* Surely one of the most depraved things any politician has ever said.
* The United States is doomed.
Don’t know who made this but yes. pic.twitter.com/GloVXEpoIS
— howitzer of mercy 🌹🏴☠️ (@girlziplocked) March 25, 2018
* The Stormy Daniels scandal is not gossip. Why the Stormy Daniels story matters, in one paragraph. And everyone needs to face it: Stormy Daniels’ Legal Strategy Strongly Suggests She Has Photos of Donald Trump.
That no one seems to know for sure if the payment to Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws would seem to be a pretty damning indictment of campaign finance laws.
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 26, 2018
* ‘Rick and Morty’ and The Rise of The ‘I’m a Piece of Shit’ Defense.
* From the archives! Superpowers and the ADA.
* Facebook: definitely bad.
Is there an argument that Facebook is almost entirely ‘negative externality’? It’s like an industry that just pumps crap into rivers and doesn’t make anything.
— Will Davies (@davies_will) March 25, 2018
* Borneo Lost More Than 100,000 Orangutans From 1999 to 2015.
* And here’s the robot future I’m worried about.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 26, 2018 at 1:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, America, apes, artificial intelligence, Black Panther, CFPs, children's literature, class struggle, Dan Harmon, depravity, disability, Donald Trump, extinction, Facebook, fantasy, gender, gender-neutral pronouns, government, guns, happiness, Hobbes, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ICFA, John Bolton, John Brown, kids today, labor, loneliness, mass shootings, neoliberalism, orangutans, play, politics, presentations, public health, Rick and Morty, Rick Santorum, robots, Scandal, science fiction, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, superheroes, superpowers, Sweden, terrorism, the Constitution, The Culture, the family, Tim Kaine, tuition, two-party system, white people, whiteness, work, xkcd
Trapped Inside of LAX with the MKE Blues Again
* A great Storify from the great @moyabz of the great Octavia Butler conference at the Huntington this weekend. By universal acclamation, one of the best-loved moments. Check out the exhibit of her papers if you’re able to get near there! It’s gorgeous.
* You are living in a death cult.
* Every lie Trump has told as president, a very long list by the New York Times.
* Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.
Republicans, 2026: “Democrats knew Trump was dangerous, Obama never should have allowed him to take over.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 23, 2016
* Union-busting for God: Catholic colleges and adjunct organizing.
* Student Evaluations at Center of American University Tenure Fight. Given the research on the implicit bias of student evaluations and the obvious perverse incentives involved it is incredible to me that any college administration in the country feels empowered to use them for anything.
* When the Dean Quashes Your Class: An Interview with Jay Smith.
* Major medical groups call for rejection of Senate health bill. This is the biggest pure giveaway to the rich in the Republican health bill. Can’t wait to hear from the centrist Dems why it’s wrong for Bernie to do this. No single payer in Communist-run California, of course.
Names for yachts billionaires will buy with tax cuts from Medicaid being gutted:
– Lucy's Kidney
– Mom's Insulin
– 10 thousand wheel chairs— Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) June 24, 2017
Trumpcare would reduce the price of insurance the same way removing the doors and the engine would reduce the price of a car
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 24, 2017
also it’s not clear that they’ll actually charge less, just that the service you must buy or die will have more ways to kill you anyway https://t.co/jOC509VdaC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2017
* Trump’s election integrity commission needs to redress voter suppression, not fraud. Counterpoint: it’s a voter suppression commission, that is literally the entire point of it.
* Trump says pretending to have Comey tapes “wasn’t very stupid.” The video is stunning even by Trump standards. Still, after this, I’ll probably vote for him.
* Once more with feeling: Never Trump is not a thing.
* Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing. Indentured servitude in the transportation industry in California.
* Mountain lions have better politics than just about every human being.
* Science isn’t an exact science with these clowns.
* Surely the best ending of any New York Times column ever.
[setting fire to orphanage] the quality of the feedback, frankly, has been disappointing
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) June 24, 2017
* From the archives! No one goes dark like children’s literature goes dark.
“Personally I am very pessimistic,” Miyazaki says. “But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making.”
* Every generation gets the folk-hero bandits it deserves: Canada police investigate theft of mummified human toe served in drinks.
* And a great Tumblr mashup: The Weird Adventures of Tin-Tin, by H.P. Lovecraft.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 24, 2017 at 8:48 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NeverTrump, academia, actually existing academic bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, Anthony Kennedy, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Bret Stephens, California, Canada, Catholic education, children's literature, class struggle, cold drinks, college sports, Comeygate, comics, conferences, cults, debt, democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, espionage, folk heroes, H.P. Lovecraft, Hayao Miyazaki, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, Huntington Library, indentured servitude, James Comey, Jesuits, Johnny Depp, Koch brothers, lies and lying liars, Marquette, mountain lions, mummies, my scholarly empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York Times, Octavia Butler, pedagogy, pessimism, politics, Putin, Republicans, rich people, Russia, science, science fiction, single payer, social media, student evaluations, Supreme Court, talk radio, taxes, teaching, tenure, the Senate, Tin-Tin, trucking, true crime, Twitter, unions, voter suppression, voting