Posts Tagged ‘comics’
Friday Links!
- I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence at The Rosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…
- Transfer Orbit dives into the latest on The Last Dangerous Visions.
- In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction.
- Alien again, again.
- Music to my ears: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the MyPillow Guy Are in Huge Trouble. Not as great: A rogue DOJ lawyer almost kept Trump in office.
- When they fantasize about killing you, believe them.
- Breakthrough cases may be a bigger problem than you thought. Children’s hospitals are swamped with Covid patients — and it may only get worse. How the Pandemic Ends Now.
- Census minute: Census Bureau releases population data, starting scramble to redraw congressional lines. We’re Going The Wrong Way. Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show. Milwaukee city workers moved out in droves after the residency rule ended. It was a boon for the suburbs. Wisconsin as democracy desert.
- And in local news: Milwaukee’s comedy market is surging with new Improv club, more shows as people seek escape from COVID-19.
- Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.” Your favorite senator and mine, Ron Johnson, features prominently.
- A people’s history of the Karen.
- The fall of Snopes.com.
- A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Now it’s official!
- Put a man on the moon by whenever you get around to it.
- UFOs and the Boundaries of Science.
- Why Are Young People So Obsessed With Cults?
- A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse.
- What’s the matter with book reviews?
- Climate Denial, Covid Denial and the Right’s Descent.
- A New Idea That Could Help Us Understand Autism.
- And what happens when the bugs all die?
Monday Morning Links!
* The era of high fertility is ending. Every child on their own trampoline. Police-Free Childhoods. The Seismic Generational Shift in Worldview: Millennials Seek a Nation Without God, Bible and Churches.
* Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic.
* The empty brain. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
* My theory, Philip K. Dick style, is that we didn’t survive the Cold War. All the evidence points that way.
* We still know basically knowing about COVID policy.
* Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.
* An interview with Emily Wilder, recent Stanford grad fired from AP job over criticisms of Israel.
* Science Fiction and Fantasy by Palestinian Authors.
* They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy. 27 possible voter fraud cases in 3 million Wisconsin ballots. What if the Renegade Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won? Republicans Want You To Forget January 6 Ever Happened.
* Some Republicans may talk the talk, but this one walks the walk.
* How UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington. How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers.
* California climate refugees. Indigenous Land Management Is The Solution to the Wildfire Crisis. World’s largest iceberg, nearly four times size of New York City, forms in Antarctica. If these trends continue…
* Indigenous Cinema and the Limits of Auteurism.
* How could anyone doubt it? “Generous” Billionaires Are Part of the Problem.
* Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge. For Colleges, Vaccine Mandates Often Depend on Which Party Is in Power. Why Did a University Suspend Its Mandatory Diversity Course? Conservatives Control Public Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill Edition. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure. The Real Reason UNC–Chapel Hill Is Withholding Tenure From Nikole Hannah-Jones. A Statement from the UNC AAUP. Guess Who’s Coming to the Lecture?
* ‘I am seeking justice’: Tulsa massacre survivor, 107, testifies to US Congress.
* Decolonizing Education: A Conversation with Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
* #ReleaseTheSteinbeckWerewolfThing.
* Has science fiction become too serious? Apocalypse movies need to imagine climate solutions, too.
* Bring on the Forgotten Realms!
* Bring on the Summer Slowdown!
* And I think I linked this one before, but we’re in the endgame now.
Friday Links!
- Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
- CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
- If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
- I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
- Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
- “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
- Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
- $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
- Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
- History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.
- Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
- The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
- Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
- How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
- I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
- A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
- We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
- Curation is not cancellation.
- This is why we can’t have nice things.
- The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
- Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
- Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
- “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
- Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
- Unions Are Cool Now.
- The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
- ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
- Life after vaccination.
- “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
- The Invention of murder.
- Inside the incel.
- ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
- The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
- We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
- Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
- The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
- Against WandaVision.
- Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
- What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.
March Links!
- SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
- My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
- I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
- My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
- Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
- And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.
- CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
- A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
- How to Build a World.
- How to Land on Mars.
- Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
- “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
- The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
- Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
- I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
- An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
- From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
- The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
- The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’
- President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
- The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
- Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
- Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
- New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
- The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.
- ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
- When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
- English departments rethink what to call themselves.
- A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
- Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
- Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
- What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
- Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
- More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
- The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
- ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
- Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
- Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
- Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.
- The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
- Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
- The Tyranny of Parents.
- Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
- A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
- Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
- Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
- The realest tweet.
- Chess is bad now. This is good.
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
- The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
- Finally, someone is making sense.
- Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
- Bring back the nervous breakdown!
- Is This the End of Tipping?
- The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
- I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
- All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
- And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.
It’s Been a Minute: Links!
- There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
- I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
- Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
- Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.
- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.
- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too
- ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
- How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.
- Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
- Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.
- America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
- A Possible Majority.
- Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.
- Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
- Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
- U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
- KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
- Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
- White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.
- Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
- Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
- Respectfully disagree.
- Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
- Dibs.
- How Long Can Gyms Survive?
- And I’m listening…
Saturday Night Links!
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.
- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…
* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.
* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.
* USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.
* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.
* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.
* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.
* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.
* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.
* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.
* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.
* Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.
* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.
* 9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.
* Are You Overpraising Your Child?
* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.
* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.
* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?
* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”
* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.
* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.
* Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.
* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.
* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.
* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.
* The Evolution of Ransomware.
* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.
* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.
* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.
* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.
* How UFO culture took over America.
* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.
* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!
* (Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.
* What about the bad job offers?
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.
* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’
* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.
* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.
* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.
* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.
Submitted for Your Approval: Syllabus for ENGLISH 4717/5717: WATCHMEN!
Since a lot of people have been interested in it, and I’m still trying to figure it all out, here’s the preliminary schedule for my Watchmen class this fall. This one will be an all-online class, as that’s the modality I’m in this semester; I’m using an S/S/A schedule where we do MW class sessions synchronously and F class sessions asynchronously. Most of the Friday classes are in the “sandbox” mode described here, some with suggested prompts and some completely open. The class has 30 people in it, so those synchronous sessions may need to break up to 15 and 15; I want to give it a try with the whole group for a week or two before I switch. Final assignment is a long paper or creative/curational project with at least some connection to Watchmen, comics, or American cultural studies, very, very broadly conceived…
Any and all suggestions welcome! I missed the first COVID semester due to my sabbatical so this is all still a bit new to me. I’m excited though: this class started in my mind as a lark and now I think it’s going to be one of the best syllabi I’ve ever planned.
101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Watchmen
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature
Course Description: This course surveys the history, reception, and artistic form of comics and graphic narrative in the United States, with primary exploration of a single comic miniseries that has had a massive influence on the comics industry and on the way we think about superheroes: Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-1987). This semester ENGLISH 4717 will function almost like a single-novel “Text in Context” course; after grounding ourselves in the pre-1980s history of American superhero comics over the first few weeks of the course, we will focusing almost exclusively on Watchmen and its long afterlife in prequel comics, sequel comics, parody comics, homages, critiques, film adaptations, and, most recently, the critically acclaimed HBO sequel series (2019-2020). What has made Watchmen so beloved, so controversial, and so very influential on the larger superhero-industrial-entertainment complex? Why has DC Comics returned to Watchmen again and again, even as one of its original creators has distanced himself further and further from the work? What have different creators done, or tried to do, with the complex but self-contained narrative framework originally constructed by Moore and Gibbons? With superheroes and superhero media more globally hegemonic than ever before, what might Watchmen still have to say to us today?
Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; weekly reading journal; discussion posts; several out-of-class film screenings; one long seminar paper or creative/curational project
| W | Aug 26 | S | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
Introduction to the Course A Brief Prehistory of Comics |
| F | Aug 28 | A | Sandbox: Jim Henley, “Gaudy Nights” [Web] |
| M | Aug 31 | S | The Golden Age of Comics
Action Comics #1 Selections from Wonder Woman |
| W | Sep 2 | S | The Silver Age
Superboy #1 [D2L] Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman” [D2L] excerpts from David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic- Book Scare and How It Changed America and Qiana Q. Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest [D2L] |
| F | Sep 4 | A | Sandbox: The Marvel Explosion
Fantastic Four #1, Tales of Suspense #39, X-Men #1, and Hulk #1 |
| M | Sep 7 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS | |
| W | Sep 9 | S | The Bronze Age
Saul Braun, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant” [D2L] Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, Amazing Spider-Man #121 and Iron Man #128 [D2L] Spencer Ackerman, “Iron Man vs. the Imperialists” [D2L] Gail Simone, “Women in Refrigerators” [web] |
| F | Sep 11 | A | Sandbox: Marc Singer, “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race” [D2L] |
| M | Sep 14 | S | The Dark Age
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #1-3 |
| W | Sep 16 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #4-6 |
| F | Sep 18 | A | Sandbox |
| M | Sep 21 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #7-9
Anna C. Marshall, “Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment of Gender in Alan Moore’s Watchmen” [D2L] |
| W | Sep 23 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #10-12
Matthew Wolf-Meyer, “Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” [D2L] |
| F | Sep 25 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen sequel pitch session |
| M | Sep 28 | S | Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009)
Graham J. Murphy, “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen” [D2L] Jacob Brogan, “Stop/Watch: Repressing History, Adapting Watchmen” [D2L] |
| W | Sep 30 | S | Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (excerpts) [D2L]
Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijingaard, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt Alan Moore interviews (excerpts) [D2L] |
| F | Oct 2 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen criticism survey |
| M | Oct 5 | S | The Nostalgia Age?
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (first half) |
| W | Oct 7 | S | Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (second half) |
| F | Oct 9 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen vs. the MCU |
| M | Oct 12 | S | Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (first half) |
| W | Oct 14 | S | Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (second half) |
| F | Oct 16 | FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
PROJECT PROPOSAL DUE FRIDAY NIGHT 5 PM |
|
| M | Oct 19 | S | Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Minutemen and Silk Spectre |
| W | Oct 21 | S | Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Dr. Manhattan |
| F | Oct 23 | A | Sandbox |
| M | Oct 26 | S | Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book One |
| W | Oct 28 | S | Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book Two |
| F | Oct 30 | A | Sandbox |
| M | Nov 2 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 1 |
| W | Nov 4 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 2-3
interview with Damon Lindelof [Web] |
| F | Nov 6 | A | Sandbox |
| M | Nov 9 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 4-5
interview with Lila Byock [Web] |
| W | Nov 11 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 6
interview with Cord Jefferson [Web] thinkpieces by Emily Nussbaum, Jamelle Bouie, Jorge Cotte, Jaime Omar Yassin, and others [Web] |
| F | Nov 13 | A | Sandbox |
| M | Nov 16 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 7-8 |
| W | Nov 18 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 9
Aaron Bady, “Dr. Manhattan Is a Cop: Watchmen and Frantz Fanon” [Web] Leslie Lee, “Whitewashing Watchmen” [Web] Alyssa Rosenberg, “If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen…” [Web] |
| F | Nov 20 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen season two pitch session |
| M | Nov 23 | S | Rorschach #1 (2020)
LAST DAY OF CLASS |
| Th | Dec 3
12:30 PM |
FINAL PAPER/PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX
FINAL REFLECTION DUE IN THE D2L FORUMS |
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.
