Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’
Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!
- ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”
- 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
- Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
- Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
- “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
- This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.
- It’s still Christmas somewhere.
- Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
- The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
- A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
- China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
- Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
- Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
- Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
- The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
- Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
- Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.
- Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
- Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
- A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
- El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
- The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
- Effective altruism takes an L.
- It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
- An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
- to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
- Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
- Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
- Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
- The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
- America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
- They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
- Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
- If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
- Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.
- Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
- Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
- Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
- Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
- The Dark History of Hysteria.
- Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
- We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
- The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
- Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
- Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
- With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
- If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?
- The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
- So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
- I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
- LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
- Testing LEGO Investments.
- Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
- Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
- Film History According to Tarantino.
- The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
- Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
- It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
- I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
- A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
- Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
- A Century of Serious Difficulty.
- Is It Art?
- So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
- MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
- I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
- Fitting.
- And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!
Ye Old Link Roundup!
- I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.
- Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.
- Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
- Remember? Remember? We had fun, didn’t we?
- Panel: People over 75, essential workers next for vaccines. Some more details from the New York Times.
- New ‘worrying’ Covid strain found in South Africa is ‘more severe among young adults.’ Holiday Travel Breaks Pandemic Record Despite Dire Covid Warnings.
- At long, long last: gimme that stimmie.
- Congressional Deal Would Give Higher Ed $23B. Stimulus deal delivers billions in pandemic aid to colleges, but much more is needed, advocates say.
- Congress finally moves to stop surprise medical billing as part of spending deal.
- The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony.
- Unsanitized: Congress Again Taxes the Time of Benefit Recipients. 35% of Americans Could Lose Their Home in Next Two Months, Census Report Says.
- When do you think would be a good time?
- Dragonlance Writers End Lawsuit Against Dungeons & Dragons Maker. I was hoping for Dragons of Fifth Season Postnormality but someone on Twitter pitched prestige Dragonlance TV and now I’m all in on that.
- Kylo Ren Is the Real Hero of Star Wars, The Stand edition.
- The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.
- After 25 years, I’m retiring from ‘takes.’
- And they say love is dead: The Journalist and the Pharma Bro.
- Early humans had the right idea I think.
- Chinese Jesus goes hard.
- Discovery roundup. Architecture roundup. Genre theory roundup. Email etiquette roundup.
- I never promised you an LCD factory.
- Divorce as a tool of class struggle.
- 19 years.
- Star Wars, explained.
- And the flood is gonna get here any day.
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Friday Train Ride Links!
* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.
* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.
* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.
* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?
* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”
* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.
* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.
* Got to have some mixed feelings.
* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.
* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).
* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!
* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.
* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.
* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.
* Fossils of the 21st century.
* Union solutions / management solutions.
* And it was 20 years ago (yesterday).
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
Emergency Blogpost: Board Game of This Arbitrary Amount of Time! Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
A new linkpost will be coming soon, but I wanted to do a special emergency blogpost just to hype a fun board game that may be old hat to many of you, but news to others: the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle cooperative card game. I got it for my birthday and Zoey and I (and, occasionally, Jaimee) have been playing it nonstop ever since; it’s really just a perfect game, especially for a Harry Potter obsessed kid. You start off in the first book and play through all seven years, with the game evolving through the introduction of new cards, rules, and mechanics as you go.
There’s an expansion pack I haven’t tried yet but I’m certain is also terrific.
How to play video here if you want to get a sense of it before you buy, but I really recommend it (and Christmas is coming!). If it seems in any way like the sort of thing you think you’d be remotely into, you’ll love it.
Christmas Hangover Links!
* An excerpt from the conversation between Tim Morton and Jeff VanderMeer from my and Andy Hageman’s issue of Paradoxa is up at LARB. You can read our introduction too! The issue has been printed and will be on its way to subscribers (and available for purchase) soon.
* acting as if nothing terrible has happened
is a failed strategy you yell and this docility
has ruined and crushed us and afraid as I am
I cannot hold your vehemence against you
at this political moment as I watch you dig
your fingers into the rubble you’re sitting on
and you say maybe it’s impossible to believe
in politeness or civilization anymore…
* Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” is the first story to hit the Hugo / Nebula / World Fantasy Award trifecta. Read it!
* The Christmas archives: Home Alone! Die Hard!
* Being a parent really is a second childhood: I’m even terrified of nuclear war again. “A tense new battle over nuclear arms erupts between Donald Trump and his staff.” Tweeting our way to Armageddon.
* How to Be a Guy: What I Learned My First Year Living as a Guy (at Age 34).
* Carrie Fischer is apparently in stable condition, but George Michael is gone.
* Ted Chiang talks adapting Arrival.
* Blade Runner 2 (“Blade Runnest“) and the Koreanization of the future.
* #TheResistance: American Mustache Institute takes a stand against Donald Trump’s anti-facial hair bias. John Bolton Vows Not to Shave Moustache.
* Today’s purge: Donald Trump is demanding the names of federal employees working to curb violent extremism.
* Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary. Trump to dissolve Trump Foundation, having moved on to bigger grifts. And why not dissolve the UN while he’s at it?
* Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel.
* Neo-Nazi March Planned for Whitefish, Montana.
* The GOP Theocracy: Xmas vs Hanukkah Statements. And don’t worry: RNC: The ‘new King’ is not Trump.
* Looking back: The collapse of the Obama coalition. What could explain it? More data that couldn’t possibly explain it. Having presided over the catastrophic collapse of his party and the possible end of American democracy, Obama gives himself high marks. Why Did Planned Parenthood Supporters Vote Trump?
* 2016 wasn’t actually bad, he explained. I’ll give it one point, for this.
* We can end the war on milk in our time.
* Prime Minister Dreamboat can’t wait to Keystone XL again.
*A consummate bullshit artist, Bucky Fuller’s career was built on failure, if not outright fraud. With few of his ideas achieving commercial success, he amounted to nothing more than a hand-waving proponent of outlandish notions. Worse still, he was an aggressive manager of his own profile and patents, an authoritarian technocrat who sought not students but compliant disciples to disseminate his muddled messages. The lynchpin of this view: even the geodesic dome, Fuller’s greatest “success,” rested on a concept borrowed (to be charitable) from an aspiring student sculptor. Buckminster Fuller in the 21st Century.
* John Williams Hasn’t Seen a Single Star Wars Movie.
* Don’t make the joke, don’t make the joke: Sex robots will ‘come a lot sooner than you think’, scientist claims.
* Elsewhere in the rise of the machines.
* A&E Cancels KKK Docuseries Following Criticism. That whole network needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
* BREAKING: All pro sports are bad.
* Actually, my speciality is evil ethics.
* Gasp! Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* They did it: They found the worst Star Wars take.
* The arc of history is long, but it can kick over its own head.
* Meanwhile, in Japan: Can the Emperor abdicate?
* And wherever we are on the political spectrum: let’s give the giant meteor a chance.
Really Almost Christmas Now Links
* 46 shots that were cut from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There Was Almost a Jedi in Rogue One. What Rogue One Teaches Us About the Rebel Alliance’s Military Chops.
* How a Pen and Paper RPG Brought ‘Star Wars’ Back From the Dead.
The Xenofeminist Manifesto, published by the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks lays out a new framework for technology’s role in social progress. “Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends?” the authors ask. “The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized… the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labor.” This reframing of technology requires a politics that does not shy away from scale and complexity.
* The Strange History of Talossa, a Bedroom That Was Also a Country. Milwaukee’s own!
* Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.
* “Even if we darken the sky with hundreds or thousands of satellites and interceptors, there’s no way to ensure against a dedicated attack,” Montague said in an interview. “So it’s an opportunity to waste a prodigious amount of money.” This is fine. The Slim Pickins Trump Doctrine. In 1987, he set out to solve the world’s biggest problem. How World War III became possible.
* Today’s purge: feminists in the State Department. Yesterday’s, of course, was professors teaching courses on whiteness at UW.
* [fingers crossed] please don’t be an academic, please don’t be an academic — aw damnit
* Must-read article from 1983: Tuition Hikes in Store at Some State Universities.
* Supercharging the school-to-prison pipeline in Missouri.
* Huge, if true: The CIA Is Not Your Friend.
* In a time without heroes, they were: The Rockettes (2021).
* The law, in its majestic equality… Appeals court vacates ‘unconscionable’ life sentence for New Orleans man over theft of $15 from ‘bait vehicle.’
* The financial system as hostile AI. What can I say? Great minds think alike!
* And friends, I’m here to tell you, it only gets worse from here.
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
* The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book
* Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
* The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.
* Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
* We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
* The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
* My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Monday Morning Links!
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Christmas Hangover Links
* This was fun: My Tolkien/The Force Awakens mini-essay got picked up by Salon.
* Is Star Wars setting up Poe Dameron as its first queer protagonist? Rey is not a role model for little girls. The prior texts against which this film needs to be judged are not those long-ago movies, but rather the trailers for this new movie. And bah humbug! Double humbug! Double triple bah humbug!
* And for the devotee: How Did This Get Made? covered The Star Wars Holiday Special this week — with bonus oral history.
* A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection.
* New York University is known for bestowing lavish perks on its leaders. Its new president, Andrew Hamilton, will be no exception. NYU sort of hitting it out of the park this week generally. The latest extravagances in the college sports arms race? Laser tag and mini golf.
* Economists Say ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to Christmas Presents.
* Phylogeny of elves finds that santa’s workers are actually dwarves.
* The death of the Wisconsin idea: Under the proposed policies, faculty members could be laid off for financial reasons or if academic programs are discontinued for education reasons, including long-term strategic planning that includes “market demand and societal needs.”
* Let this be our Christmas story. Why? Well, that requires some explaining and perhaps even a stronger rationale than I’m yet able to muster. Because it has no cheer, redemption or family bonding. It’s about power, money, greed, recklessness and what can only be termed the sort of roughshod ridiculousness and surreal unintentional comedy that comes from being powerful enough or serving people with sufficient power that the ordinary sort of fear of getting caught and having to explain yourself simply doesn’t apply.
* Call for ideas: the Museum of Capitalism.
* From Bleeding Heart Libertarians: “Universities may indeed be exploiting adjuncts, but they cannot rectify this mistake without significant moral costs.”
* What really happened in the Christmas truce of 1914? The Real Story Behind the 1914 Christmas Truce in World War I.
* The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom.
* The strange case of Case Western Reserve University law school.
* El Niño, explained: A guide to the biggest weather story of 2015. Records smashed on East Coast’s warmest ever Christmas Eve.
* African-Inspired Space Opera Yohancé Is Going To Be Our Next Obsession.
* ‘Unprecedented’ gas leak in California is the climate disaster version of BP’s oil spill.
Gerry Canavan 