Posts Tagged ‘coups’
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them
— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 9, 2021 at 12:55 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1984, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, Afrofuturism, aliens, Amazon, America, amputation, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, Black Panther, Breath of the Wild, California, capitalism, cars, CFPs, Charles R. Saunders, CIA, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cyberpunk, Democrats, diabetes, disaster, diversity, Dragonlance, ecology, esports, film, food, Frozen, futurity, galactic empires, gambling, games, gig economy, glitches, Grad School Vonnegut, Green Planets, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, interviews, Jack Kirby, Jameson, Jeff Bezos, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Le Guin, lithium, mad science, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Michael Hardt, Middle-Earth, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Nathan Grawe, neoliberalism, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, pandemic, pedagogy, politics, postdocs, protest, queerness, race, racism, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, Santa, science fiction, science fiction studies, Slaughterhouse Five, socialism, Stan Lee, technology, The Life Aquatic, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Ministry for the Future, the stock market, the wisdom of markets, theory, this is not a place of honor, Title IX, Tolkien, Utopia, UVM, Wakanda, Walter Benjamin, Wes Anderson, white supremacy, work, Zelda, zombies
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.
ok but can I just mention that being all the way down to the “is the military on board” gate on the flowchart is also alarming https://t.co/eQ2KG8dJPg
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
American learned helplessness is evident not only in its inability to recognize what is happening as an attempted coup, but also in its failure to see this behavior as both illegal and illegitimate. https://t.co/MmKjpPBQfW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
- 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.
neoliberalism: celebrities, politicians, and other rich people should get the vaccine first
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 20, 2020
progressivism: because they are advertising the safety of the vaccine, celebrities, politicians, and other rich people should get the vaccine first
- 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.
Taking step back, some big picture things:
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) December 20, 2020
IN:
– $300/week UI
– $600/person checks
– $284B PPP for 2.0
– $82B for schools
– $27B for transit
– $25B for rental $, eviction moratorium
– $13B for hunger
– Vaccine distribution $
– Surprise billing legislation
– $10B for childcare
Pelosi explaining that $600 is actually good, rather than blaming McConnell or Trump, or saying you get more if the Democrats win in Georgia https://t.co/bjMw2vBxbJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 22, 2020
Democrats see their role as selling right-wing policy to liberals, while making sure no one ever gets too angry that the richest nation in human history is a human rights nightmare https://t.co/5koWcRVmTE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 22, 2020
- 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.
every so often you see a tweet that completely changes your worldview https://t.co/mwfESJjbPy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 21, 2020
- 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.

Written by gerrycanavan
December 22, 2020 at 9:59 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Amazon, Animal Crossing, architecture, Christmas, CIA, class struggle, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, death squads, democracy, divorce, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, early humans, emails, fantasy, Foxconn, games, games studies, general election 2020, genre, hibernation, horror, How the University Works, Jeff Bezos, Jesuits, journamalism, Kansas City, language study, Marquette, Martin Shkreli, my media empire, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, pandemic, politics, propressivism, racism, science fiction, science fiction studies, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Stephen King, stimulus package, streaming, tax cuts, The Stand, trickle-down economics, unemployment, vaccines, Wisconsin
Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2020
- Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
- Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
- What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
- The College Degree Is Dividing America.
- Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
- 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
- Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
- Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
- Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
- If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
- The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
- It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
- Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
- How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
- ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
- Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
- From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
- The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
- Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
- Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
- Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
- Great, more work.
- And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right
— Daigle (@Daigle) October 31, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
November 6, 2020 at 7:01 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, America, animal intelligence, animals, apartheid, class struggle, conservativism, conspiracy theories, coups, democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Douglas Adams, elections, ethics, film, Florida, Fox News, general election 2020, Georgia, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, How the University Works, Joe Biden, Kentucky, maps, Marquette, minimum wage, Montana, outer space, police, politics, QAnon, Republicans, run it like a sandwich, Stacey Abrams, telephones, the economy, the Senate, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, unemployment, voting, whales, women
Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?
This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:
- ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
- American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
- A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
- I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
- You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
- Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
- I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
- The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
- Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
- CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
- Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.
nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020
- A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
- Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
- Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
- Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
- 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.
Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du
— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020
have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t
— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020
Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020
- Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
- Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
- Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
- Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
- “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
- How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
- How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
- Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
- Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
- We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
- Glücky!
- RIP, Duke TIP.
The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020
- Miracles and wonders.
- The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
- Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
- Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
- Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
- He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
- DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
- Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
- idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
- AOC, streamer.
- Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
- Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
- Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
- Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
- Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
- Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
- What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
- “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
- The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
- The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
- The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
- Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
- How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
- Revisiting Nabokov.
- Always look on the bright side of life.
- How will 2020 end?
- And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
- Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!
the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists
— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020
— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
October 30, 2020 at 4:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, AAUP, abolish the Senate, academia, academic jobs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Am I the Asshole?, America, Among Us, animation, art, autism, Baltimore, Berkeley, birds, California, capitalism, car seats, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, conspiracy theory, contraception, Cornell, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, creative writing, deaccessioning, Diplomacy, disaster nationalism, diversity, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, Duke TIP, dystopia, ecology, Ecuador, English departments, exoplanets, fan fiction, fascism, franchies, franchise fiction, futurity, games, grading, Harvard, HBO, hybridity, indigenous futurism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR, labor, libertarians, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Louise Glück, Marquette, medicine, Mormonism, museums, N.K. Jemisin, Nabokov, NCAA, neoliberalism, neurodiversity, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, nostalgia, organizing, Pale FIre, pandemic, paranoia, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, prosperity theology, public universities, QAnon, race, racism, rewind the globe, rich people, schools, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Sierra, socialism, student movements, television, the Amazon, The Fifth Season, the flu, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, trolls, truth and reconciliation, UFOs, unions, Utopia, white supremacy, wildfires, Wilmington, Wisconsin, young adult literature, Zoom
Weekend Links!
* After Isle of Dogs, I’m filled with nothing but dread for The French Dispatch. Here’s what we know so far.
* Astronaut Accessed Estranged Spouse’s Bank Account from International Space Station. How can they say true crime is over when we have the first-ever crime in space!
* Once again, for the people in the back: The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. In Bolsonaro’s burning Brazilian Amazon, all our futures are being consumed. We’re Living Through A Climate Emergency Right Now — We Just Aren’t Paying Attention. The Limits of “Experiencing” the Climate Crisis. In a Devastated Town, Sanders Explains His Plan for a Climate Revolution.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* Kirkwood professor who stated he supported Antifa resigns.
* On December 22, 1973, an embattled President Richard Nixon met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces. It was a ceremonial meeting, not the sort where important decisions are supposed to get made. But one of the generals realized something was deeply off. Nixon was agitated. “He kept on referring to the fact that he [Nixon] may be the last hope, the eastern elite was out to get him,” the four-star general later said. It seemed the president was “trying to sound us out”—to see if, “in a crunch,” the generals would overthrow Congress and the judiciary, and keep the criminal president in power. Through a White House, darkly.
* The US is already occupying Greenland.
The US is already occupying Greenland. In 1951, they demolished the village of Pituffik & built the Thule Air Base in its place. Then a 1968 nuclear accident contaminated the Inughuit's hunting grounds with radioactive plutonium, leaving hairless fur seals and deformed muskoxen. pic.twitter.com/ELz8SOzM0v
— The Decolonial Atlas (@decolonialatlas) August 23, 2019
* A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?
* In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria.
* Kids left without either parent at home for 8 days after Mississippi ICE raid. And updating a story from yesterday: Federal Agencies Have Been Sending Employees Articles From White Nationalist And Conspiracy Websites For Months.
* Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States.
* How segregation makes your commute worse.
* State of the unions: what happened to America’s labor movement?
* Tarantino corner! ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Is a Science Fiction Film. Tarantino’s gruesome revenge fantasies are growing more puerile and misogynistic. Stop, you’re both right!
* There’s a Latinx void at the heart of video games.
* How David Koch Changed the World.
* Slouching towards autokill drones hovering over every street corner.
“In addition to the bucket and kitty litter, the teachers were also given a pop-up tent to put around the bucket, a first aid kit, and a Sharpie to mark the time if a teacher has to tie a tourniquet to stop gunshot bleeding.”
What the actual hell are we doing? https://t.co/6GyJrgiQKK
— Meaghan (@meaghang) August 22, 2019
* The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media.
* When Kids Are Straight Until Proven Otherwise.
* Occasionally, though, one can sense the fears emerging out of the anonymous voices. A therapist talks about patients who are “one bad night away from suicide” now facing new burdens of paperwork. A parent writes, “Medicaid enrollment limits tell my son his life is worthless and he might as well die because he is diabetic.” Another respondent worries that enrollment caps will “limit my ability to get my asthma treated and medications covered.”
* Marvel’s making some interesting moves on Disney+. I might actually watch WandaVision.
With She-Hulk, Moon Knight, and Ms Marvel, Disney is doing a lot on Disney+ that people really wanted AND that seems like it will avoid the dourness that consumed the Netflix shows.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2019
* And that’s how you quit a job.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 24, 2019 at 11:38 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, America, anti-imperialism, antifa, apocalypse, astronauts, Bernie Sanders, Bolsonaro, Brazil, chess, class struggle, climate change, commuting, compulsory heterosexuality, Counting Crows, coups, cultural anthropology, decolonization, democracy, Department of Justice, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, drones, games, gay rights, Green New Deal, Green Revolution, Greenland, guns, health insurance, honey, How the University Works, ice, imperialism, International Space Station, Isle of Dogs, Koch brothers, Marvel, mass shooting, Medicaid, military-industrial complex, Mississippi, Nixon, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, parenting, Parkinson's Disease, politics, protest, quitting, racism, segregation, space crime, Standing Rock, Tarantino, tenure, the Amazon, The French Dispatch, true crime, unions, Utah, WandaVision, Wes Anderson
I Had To Do Some Laundry, So You Know What That Means: Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Feral Feminisms is pleased to announce that we are now accepting submissions for our first general issue. Submission deadline is 15 January 2019.
* What our science fiction says about us.
* From the Earth to the Moon. And hell why not it’s Wednesday just a few more.
* Following a Board of Trustees meeting this afternoon, Temple University President Richard Englert released a statement on behalf of the board, announcing that professor Marc Lamont Hill will not be punished or investigated for his Nov. 28 speech during an event organized with the United Nations. Now investigate the feckless administrators who made these baseless threats.
* Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges 2018.
* Following scientists in three fields, the paper’s authors found that it took about five years for a half of a science cohort to leave academic work in 2010 — compared to 35 years in the 1960s.
* Tired: China is building a social points system that will rank people from birth to death. Wired: Trump Is Trying to Use Credit Scores to Keep Immigrants Out of the U.S.
* Wow, here and I thought Scott Walker was a man of principle and integrity.
* Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off. I tweeted a tweet about the president and the modest virality of that tweet smells bad.
* Grant Morrison Opens Up About Feuding With Alan Moore and Why He Still Doesn’t Like Watchmen.
* Upright Citizen’s Brigade on the brink.
* The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what’s to come. Unparalleled warmth is changing the Arctic and affecting weather in US, Europe. In what is being called the first of its kind, Mayor Francis Suarez quietly signed a resolution last month to address climate gentrification in Miami. Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed. EPA announces plan to poison all the water.
CNN put out a video urging people not to believe climate change deniers.
One problem: two of the four clips they cite are people *on* CNN. pic.twitter.com/tbCT6O43p0
— jordan (@JordanUhl) December 11, 2018
Twenty years from now, kids listening to "Baby it's cold outside" are gonna find it really, really weird.
We're gonna have to explain that it has to be understood in the context of its time.
You see, it used to get cold outside.
— Zi Teng Wang (@Zi_W) December 10, 2018
* Children of Ted: Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.
* ICE arrested 170 potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children.
* They say bipartisanship is dead, but U.S. House unanimously approves sweeping self-driving car measure.
* The law, in its infinite equality watch: Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has dropped charges against 23-year-old Jazmine Headley related to her arrest at a social services office on Friday, he announced Tuesday. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, and trespassing after security guards called police over a dispute that apparently began because she was sitting on the floor while she waited with her 1-year-old son to renew a child-care benefit. Charge the cops who did this next.
* “Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See?” What terrible luck that the camera mysterious turned off during the relevant portion of the search! What are the chances!
* What Everyone Having Diarrhea On The Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity.
* A ProPublica investigation has found that the IRS has been so gutted that audits of the top 1% are rapidly converging on audits of the bottom 36%. This is of course totally irrational, but completely in line with the contempt the ruling class has for the poor.
* What It Means to Be a Marxist.
* The CRISPR babies and scientific ethics.
* The final stage of any sufficiently mammoth crime is abusing bankruptcy law to avoid responsibility.
* I remember having my mind blown by reading this observation in Daniel Dennett book twenty years ago: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have.
* Throw these Chromebooks in the snow. Leave childhood alone, let kids have a little bit of joy.
* We lost that war. But the fight goes on.
Here is John F. Kennedy in 1961 writing to reassure a child that fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapon testing won’t kill Santa. #NuclearWarOnChristmas pic.twitter.com/4w4KapArwr
— Nuclear War on Christmas (Martin Pfeiffer) 🏳️🌈 (@NuclearAnthro) December 1, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
December 12, 2018 at 6:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with absurdism, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Alan Moore, America, ants, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, baby it's cold outside, bankruptcy, CFPs, childhood, China, class struggle, climate change, climate gentrification, CNN, comedy, comics, consciousness, cosmology, coups, credit scores, CRISPR, Daniel Dennett, deportation, diarrhea, Donald Trump, eco-terrorism, EPA, feminism, general election 2020, Grant Morrison, gymnastics, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human nature, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, IRS, Joe Biden, John F. Kennedy, jokes, kids today, Mark Lamont Hill, Marxism, Miami, Milwaukee, Mitt Romney, nuclear war, nuclearity, Palestine, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, politics, rape, rape culture, rump cleavage, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, scientific ethics, Scott Walker, self-driving cars, snow days, social media, Temple University, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the Left, The Magnificent Seven, the Moon, the poor, the Unabomber, time travel, toxic masculinity, transporters, Twitter, UCB, Watchmen, Westerns, Wisconsin, you do not exist, zunguzungu
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 11, 2018 at 7:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with acting, actually existing media bias, Africa, African literature, Ainehi Edoro, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, America, animals, Anthropocene, anxiety, apartheid, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, billionaires, blackmail, books, Brexit, Brooklyn, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Christmas, Chuck Wendig, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college basketball, color, comics, communism, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, coral reefs, corruption, coups, CRISPR, debt, delicious French fries, democracy, deportation, depression, diabetes, dogs, domestic violence, Donald Trump, drones, East Germany, ecological humanities, ecology, English departments, English majors, financialization, fire tornados, Fortnite, Friday the 13th, games, Generation X, gentrification, geoengineering, George H. W. Bush, gig economy, glaciers, graduate school, graduate student movements, graduate student strikes, graft, Harry Potter, He-Man, health care, health insurance, Here, Hillary Clinton, history, housing associations, How the University Works, Hubble Telescope, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, insects, Instagram, insulin, intergenerational struggle, intergenerational warfare, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Jennifer's Body, jigsaw puzzles, Kim Stanley Robinson, lame duck session, Latin America, LEGO, life expectancy, lunch student, manic pixie dream girl, Margaret Atwood, Mark Lamont Hill, mass extinction, medicine, Megan Fox, memes, Michigan, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, military-industrial complex, millennials, minimum wage, Minneapolis, minority rule, money, Moscow, my particular demographic, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Carolina, nostalgia, NPR, obituary, Octavia Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, palm oil, Parable of the Sower, Paradoxa, parents, pedagogy, photography, plagiarism, podcasts, poetry, poets, points, police brutality, police dogs, police violence, pornography, poverty, Powerball, Prime Directive, prison, race, racism, radicalism, rape, rape by deception, rape culture, refugees, Republicans, rich people, Richard McGuire, Russians, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science fiction, science fiction studies, Silent Sam, social media, socialism, Square One, stunts, stuntwomen, suicide, superbabies, Supreme Court, surveillance, surveillance society, teaching, temp workers, the 1990s, the Arctic, the bezzle, the Confederacy, the Constitution, the courts, the economy, The Handmaid's Tale, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Lottery, the Pentagon, the Sentinelese, The Testaments, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, voter fraud, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, West Virginia, wildfires, Wisconsin, Worlding SF, writing
Thursday Morning Links!
There is not a single part of me that doubts that ALF could be a viable contender in the next Presidential election. I’m not saying he’d win…but I do think it’d be close.
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 1, 2018
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Pedagogy, and Social Change. CFP: Teaching 9/11 and Its Aftermaths. CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow: New Conversations & Productive Catalysts Across Science and Humanities Boundaries as the Global Emergency Worsens. CFP: Episodes VII, VIII, IX.
* The ‘feel-good’ horror of late-stage capitalism.
What if the problem isn't stimulants but the mandate for productivity
What if the problem isn't benzos but the mandate to stay calm in actual chaos
What if the problem isn't opioids but the mandate to work like a machine that can't suffer to keep you and your loved ones alive— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) August 1, 2018
* Unreal.
* Twilight of the omniversity.
* All about QAnon, if you’re just catching up to the latest nonsense.
If you call Qanon people crazy it just hardens their stance. Let's open our intellectual debate to the iconoclasts who believe Democrats, Tom Hanks, and US intel agencies are engaged in a worldwide pedophilic conspiracy to take down Trump. (cc: op-ed page editors.)
— George Zornick (@gzornick) August 1, 2018
* Alex Jones, Pursued Over Infowars Falsehoods, Faces a Legal Crossroads. Man, I hope he loses everything.
* Plymouth State University said Wednesday that a retired professor who defended a convicted child rapist in a letter to the court will not be rehired as an adjunct instructor or “in any other capacity.” Two other faculty members who defended the Plymouth State graduate and high school guidance counselor convicted of sexually assaulting a student will complete sexual harassment training prior to their return to campus and will work closely with other professors upon their return, the university also said.
* “The UNC Board of Governors respects each of the varying opinions within the university community concerning this matter. However, after consulting with legal counsel, neither UNC Chapel Hill nor the UNC System have the legal authority to unilaterally relocate the Silent Sam statue,” the board wrote in a statement. “Thus, the board has no plans to take any action regarding the monument at this time, and we will await any guidance that the North Carolina Historical Commission may offer.”
* But in order to turn a story about the U.S. politics of climate change into a story about the entirety of the human species, Rich has to make a strange argument. He has to dispatch with the two most powerful and prominent enemies of a climate policy in the United States: the fossil-fuel industry and the Republican Party.
* A reminder: Just 90 companies are accountable for more than 60 percent of greenhouse gases.
The idea that ‘people,’ as in the entire human species, are failing to act on climate change is based on the assumption that decisions affecting it are democratically made, which is verifiably false.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 1, 2018
It’s not so much the heat or humidity as it is the existential dread that comes from realizing that catastrophic climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilization.
— Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) August 1, 2018
* How the Carr Fire became one of the most destructive fires in California history.
* Europe facing its hottest day ever.
* Here’s a different question one could ask: Could it be that reporters like Chait, who are obsessed with finding the next Watergate and tend to err on the side of military intervention, aren’t exercising enough skepticism?
* Months later I not only considered my own future, but the far-reaching political implications of these cases: Why did the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia find it appropriate to hang virtual life sentences over the heads of 214 people after an indiscriminate mass arrest? How could they have so shamelessly gleaned evidence from far-right groups like Project Veritas, a discredited organization known for making deceptive gotcha videos, as well as the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, and still felt they had a legitimate case? Where was the motivation—the conspiracy—to pursue these cases coming from?
* Immigration crackdown: U.S. soldier honored for service could be heading for ICE custody.
* ‘Like a kidnapping’: ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video.
* Another migrant child molested at a DHS facility. And a WaPo story about the migrant child who died shortly after their release from an unsafe, unhygienic detention center.
* Source close to Ivanka Trump confirms no one so beautiful could be evil.
A “Purge”-like holiday where one day a year American women are allowed to break their NDAs without getting sued.
— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) August 1, 2018
* From the archives: What Is Socialist Feminism?
* Can’t anyone in Congress have a normal hobby?
* Inside the first database that tracks America’s criminal cops.
* Breaking: leftist politics are very popular. Still / again / always.
* The art of the murder mystery.
* Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine.
* Maybe it’s possible to have too much money.
* Nobody powerful ever makes a mistake, MCU edition.
Worth considering: basically nobody responsible for the financial crisis, Iraq War or 9/11 intel/security failures was held accountable or faced serious career consequences. In fact, many of them got richer, became more powerful & accrued more social status. This seems important.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 2, 2018
* Something is happening in America.
Yowza. https://t.co/XRBunwsQZ7 pic.twitter.com/6EiiZkqbqa
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) August 1, 2018
* At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream.
* Parents Are Paying Fortnite Coaches So Their Gamer Kids Can Level Up.
* Pope declares death penalty inadmissible, changing Church’s stance.
* …in the U.S., water park rides are not tightly regulated. Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.
* Can Mars even be terraformed?
* Yikes.
* The Songs We Banned From Our Weddings. The answer to a wedding soundtrack is always just all Motown, I think.
* Film Crit Hulk considers Nanette.
* Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia. No detailwas spared, from a food dish for their cat, Snowball II, to Duff beer cans in the fridge.
But controversy soon erupted in this faux-Springfield mock-up. The homeowner’s association wasn’t keen on having a cartoon house that broke conformity requirements by being painted solar yellow. The sweepstakes winner rejected it outright. And the current owner had to learn to live with the property being a source of perpetual curiosity for fans of the show who brazenly turn her doorknobs and peer through her windows at all hours of the day and night. As it turns out, the reality of living in a fantasy can get a little complicated.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 2, 2018 at 9:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, 9/11, academia, Al Franken, Alex Jones, ALF, America, anarchism, apocalypse, Barbara Ehrenreich, Boots Riley, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, catfishing, Catholicism, CBP, censorship, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, communism, Congress, conspiracy theories, coups, death penalty, democracy, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, Europe, evil, feminism, Fortnite, fossil fuels, free speech, games, general election 2020, Guardians of the Galaxy, homeland security, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Infowars, Ivanka Trump, Japan, kids today, leftism, lies and lying liars, Mars, MCU, medicine, mental health, misogyny, monuments, Motown, murder, music, mysteries, Nanette, NDAs, neoliberalism, Pizzagate, Plymouth State, police, police corruption, politics, polls, QAnon, rape, rape culture, Republicans, revolution, rich people, Russia, science fiction, sexism, sharks, socialist feminism, Sorry to Bother You, South Korea, Supreme Court, terraforming, the Confederacy, the Pope, the Purge, The Simpsons, true crime, UNC, water parks, weddings, wildfires, women
Sunday Morning Links!
* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!
* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.
The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.
* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?
* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.
* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”
* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.
* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.
* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.
* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.
* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.
* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.
* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.
* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?
And it’d be fun to see Gandalf arriving as a young wizard and getting into scrapes, maybe a story or two set in other campaigns during the War of the Ring. But we saw the main story already, there isn’t a ton of narrative space for another epic.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 17, 2018
* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.
I guess I've lived long enough to see sexist stereotypes of women go from "desperate to trap commitment-phobic men into marriage" to "shallow sluts who need enforced monogamy."
— Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar) May 19, 2018
* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.
* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.
* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.
* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”
Cmon put him in the game pic.twitter.com/ggrPZgRQKM
— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) May 20, 2018
* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.
why don't young people trust the institutions and processes that have exclusively brutalized them every waking moment of their lived reality? opinions differ
— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) May 19, 2018
TFW the country with more guns and people in prison than any other nation in the planet, and that's been at war on "terror" for two decades, builds schools that look like prisons and still is terrorized by kids on rampages with infantry rifles
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 18, 2018
* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.
* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.
* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 20, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, Amazon, America, Aragorn, Arrested Development, austerity, Avengers, Bitcoin, books, bullying, Chewbacca, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, corruption, coups, Deadpool, Deadpool 2, Death's End, depression, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Donkey Kong, ecology, failed states, foley work, Frank R. Paul, Full House, games, Gamora, Google, Greensboro, Greensboro Massacre, Guardians of the Galaxy, guns, hate, health care, Infinity War, Janelle Monae, Jordan Peterson, kids today, KKK, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, mass shootings, MCU, Michigan State, misogyny, Nebula Awards, Nintendo, Ozymandias, Play-Doh, politics, pornography, privacy, race, racism, rape, rape culture, schools, science fiction, sex, sexism, smells, Star Trek, surveillance society, the 1990s, The Handmaid's Tale, TNG, Tolkien, trademarks, Voyager, words
All Your Sunday Reading™
* Call for applications: Postdoctoral Scholar for Futures of Literary and Cultural Knowledge, UCSB.
* Call for Papers: “Binge-Watching and the Future of Television Research: A Workshop” Sept 13-14, 2018, at Anglia Ruskin University.
* Studying Tolkien fanzines at Marquette University.
* I make a by-the-way appearance on this massive roundup of Infinity War links.
* What is an English professor?
* The Enduring Anger of Joanna Russ.
* Bonkers Wisconsin tax policy error in my favor.
* Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services. UC Workers on Strike. After 3-Day Strike, University Of California’s Service Workers Vow To Keep Fighting.
* A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired. The icing on the cake. Well, actually, this is.
* If you’re worried about free speech on campus, don’t fear students — fear the Koch brothers.
* Why universities became big-time real estate developers.
* Stephen Kuusisto on ableism in the university.
* White student calls police on black student napping in Yale dorm. When Calling the Police Is a Privilege.
how sad for the student who called the cops on her neighbor for sleeping on the dorm couch that she did it just a few days too late to be a founding member of the intellectual dark web
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2018
* Academia’s #MeToo moment: Women accuse professors of sexual misconduct. 45 Stories of Consent on Campus. The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time.
* (Another) progressive case against the progressive case for the SAT.
* Never-ending nightmare: why feminist dystopias must stop torturing women.
* In 2011, Minnesota got a liberal governor and Wisconsin got a conservative one. Who was better off?
* What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
* Your workplace is killing you.
* Intrigue and Drama on the Han Solo Set. Catch the fever!
* One of the most purely destructive things Trump has yet done. Early days though, early days. Evergreen.
* Taking parents from their children is a form of state terror. Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance. An upcoming Supreme Court ruling could force all workers into forced arbitration, deprived of the right to class lawsuits. Trump Administration Wants to Train Teens in ‘Hazardous’ Jobs. Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab. A taxonomy of Michael Cohen and potential Trump corruption. How Michael Cohen Cashed In. It’s harder to pay off foreign governments than the US one. Breaking Down Gina Haspel’s Tense Confirmation Hearing. Trumpism Is Having Its Best Week Ever. We know a lot about Trump’s misdeeds. But most of all we know there’s more to come.
* How bananas is this Schneiderman story going to get? Man.
* And isn’t it pretty to think so?
In a half-normal presidency, the main scandal right now would be about how a guy died in a fire at a cheaply built, run down, improperly sprinklered building that the president’s blind trust hadn’t been able to find a buyer for.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 8, 2018
good morning, torture is both immoral and illegal and Obama should have prosecuted everyone in the Bush administration who was complicit
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 9, 2018
* ’We Can Make Him Disappear’: The Power of County Sheriffs.
* In One Year, 57,375 Years of Life Were Lost to Police Violence. Plainclothes NYPD Cops Are Involved in a Staggering Number of Killings.
* How to Survive the First Hour of a Nuclear Attack. Wow, a whole hour!
* The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse.
* Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings.’
* Democrats against the gig economy. The Politics of Full Employment.
* It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.
* The Brooklyn Comedian Whose Joke About ICE Got Him a Visit From Homeland Security. ICE Breaking into Home: “We’ll Show You the Warrant When We’re Done.”
* The “Maddening Labyrinth” Aging NFL Players Face for Dementia Compensation.
* England revving up for a Corbyn prime ministership.
* There’s No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal. Almost as if… there’s no excuse at all…
* From blood diamonds to blood healing crystals.
* It sounds like my dream of a Bill & Ted parody of the trend towards grimdark 80s revivals is gonna come true.
* What CBS found when it bought four random used photocopiers.
* How political and media elites legitimized torture.
* #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable.
* You Won’t Like The Consequences Of Making Pluto A Planet Again.
* New York Court Says Chimps Aren’t People—But a Judge Is Not Happy About It.
* The dream of communism is the elimination of wage labor. If AI is bound to serve society instead of private capitalists, it promises to do so by freeing an overwhelming majority from such drudgery while creating wealth to sustain all.
* Imagine that it’s 2044, and everyone is still listening to Duran Duran.
* Sometimes you just need two men.
* And in the advanced Turing test, the machine convinces you that it is conscious and you aren’t.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 13, 2018 at 9:25 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, ableism, academia, accelerationism, addiction, Afrofuturism, America, anger, animal personhood, apes, artificial intelligence, Avengers, Bill and Ted, binge watching, Black Lives Matter, blood diamonds, bribes, CFPs, child care, child labor, chimps, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CIA, class struggle, climate change, comedy, comics, communism, concussions football, conferences, conventions, corruption, coups, deportation, depression, diamonds, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, eating meat, English professors, Eric Schneiderman, fandom, fans, feminism, food deserts, free speech, full employment, futurity, gambling, Get Paid, gig economy, Gina Haspel, grimdark, Groot, healing crystals, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Infinity War, Iran, Jeremy Corbyn, Joanna Russ, Junot Díaz, Koch brothers, labor, literacy, Marquette, masculinity, MCU, meat, Medicaid, men, Michael Cohen, Michigan, Mike Pence, Minnesota, monkeys, New York, NFL, Nnedi Okorafor, nuclear war, nuclearity, NYPD, photocopiers, planets, Pluto, police, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, pork, postdocs, public health, race, racism, Ready Player One, Robert Mueller, SAT, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Scandal, science fiction, Scott Walker, sheriffs, small-town corruption, social media, Solo, Speed Racer, standardized testing, Star Wars, Stephen Kuusisto, strikes, Syracuse University, taxes, television, terrorism, the 1980s, The Americans, the courts, the Democrats, The Handmaid's Tale, the law, Tolkien, torture, Trumpism, Turing Test, UCSB, unions, United Kingdom, University of California, Wachowski, welfare, Wisconsin, work, Yale, Young Dolph
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”
* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages. pic.twitter.com/TlLYGezmv6
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) October 27, 2017
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
Anybody who thinks they can fathom the precise way that Trump will fuck up the turkey pardon has learned nothing.
— Brett Martin (@brettmartin) November 20, 2017
Written by gerrycanavan
November 21, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic jobs, Al Franken, alumni, America, Antarctica, Batman, Black Mirror, books, Bush, Charles Manson, civilization, class struggle, college, college admissions, Congress, coups, crossword puzzles, Donald Trump, dungeon masters, Dungeons and Dragons, English departments, games, George H. W. Bush, grad student nightmares, graduate school, ice sheet collapse, James Baldwin, Justice League, Kim Stanley Robinson, McSweeney's, net neutrality, New York, nuclear weapons, outer space, pardons, politics, Quentin Tarantino, race, rape culture, schools, science fiction, Scott Walker, sea level rise, segregation, sexual harassment, social media, Space Race, student debt, Superman, Tarantino, taxes, the Anthropocene, The Problem with Apu, the Senate, The Simpsons, the subway, the university in ruins, turkeys, unions, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, white people, Wisconsin
Monday Afternoon Links!
* At a time when the United States is in the grip of an opioid epidemic, many insurers are limiting access to pain medications that carry a lower risk of addiction or dependence, even as they provide comparatively easy access to generic opioid medications.
* An inside look at the hunt for fentanyl, the deadly opioid driving the overdose crisis.
* America’s slow-motion military coup.
* Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer.
* And the trend appears to be continuing. “Every new cohort made less in median lifetime income than the previous one,” Mr. Guvenen said.
* Paging China Miéville: Instead of Trump’s Wall, Why Not a Binational Border City?
* Everything old is still old.
mulder: how can animal, my least favorite muppet baby, also be the adult muppet i most respect?
scully: I don't know, mulder— mark leidner (@markleidner) September 17, 2017
* RIP, Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.
* I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like what’s happening in Iceland.
* Beyond the grave. Outsourcing. Specifically bad. Animal intelligence. Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. Imagine a world with people like him in charge. Quorf. Thanks, Literature! This sucks.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 18, 2017 at 11:46 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, America, animal intelligence, antifa, antifascism, China Miéville, class struggle, coups, Donald Trump, Dorothy Kim, drugs, fascism, futurity, health care, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, humanity, Iceland, intergenerational warfare, John McCain, literature, medieval studies, military-industrial complex, Milo Yiannopoulous, Mirror Universe, normalization, nuclear war, nuclearity, opoids, politics, quorf, Rachel Fulton Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, speculative fiction, Stanislav Petrov, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, The City and the City, tourism, trolls, USSR, Wisconsin
#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!
* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.
* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.
* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.
* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).
* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.
* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.
* Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.
* GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.
* Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.
* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.
* The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.
any remaining pieties of respectability inhering in the institution/office/process really shouldn't survive this term. but it will, OC
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 29, 2017
C
R
A
Z
Y
M
Is anybody going to do anything about this situation
K
A— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 29, 2017
my problem with Trump is just my outdated belief that the President of the United States shouldn't be dumber than the dumbest person I know
— maura quint (@behindyourback) June 29, 2017
* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.
* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.
* On desistance and detransition.
* Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.
* US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.
* SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.
* Just what is happening at Disney?
* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.
* And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 30, 2017 at 1:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a republic if you can keep it, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Afghanistan, AHCA, America, Anthropocene, apocalypse, austerity, Barbara Lee, California, Canavan's Razor, CFPs, Chernobyl, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coups, CUNY, democracy, desistance, detransition, dinosaurs, Disney, Don't mention the war, ecology, Emma Watson, film, Frankenstein, general election 2016, guns, H. G. Wells, hacking, Han Solo, Handmaid's Tale, heath care, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, hyperspace, IKEA, Illinois, Infowars, Inhumans, Iran, Iraq, Islamophobia, Joe Scarborough, Jurassic Park, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mars, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, maternity, Medicaid, mediocrity, Mika Brzezinski, Mike Flynn, MSNBC, my scholarly empire, NASA, National Enquirer, neoliberalism, NRA, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, police violence, politics, public health, Putin, race, racism, radiation, Rick and Morty, Ron Howard, Russia, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, SFRA, short fiction science fiction, Star Wars, Stephen King, Steve Shaviro, the presidency, the Senate, this is why we can't have nice things, trans* issues, transition, travel ban, voter suppression, women
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part One!
* I had a great time as the guest on this week’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talking about my Octavia Butler book, which has gotten some nice attention lately, including an interview in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last weekend as well. I was also on Radio Free Marquette this week, talking Rogue One…
* Another great Butler piece making the rounds right now: My Neighbor Octavia.
* A New Inquiry syllabus on Speculating Futures. Wired‘s first-ever science fiction issue.
* Monday’s Electoral College results prove the institution is an utter joke. Original Sin: The Electoral College as a Pro-Slavery Tool. The Left and Long Shots. Trump Is Unambiguously Illegible to be President. Meanwhile, on the lawlessness beat: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump. Amid outcry, N.C. GOP passes law to curb Democratic governor’s power.
* Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell’s Angels, and Trump. Look, all I’m saying is let’s at least give Nyarlathotep a chance. The Government Is Out of the Equality Business. When tyranny takes hold. Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt. It’s Trump’s America now. Time to get over our attachment to facts. And on that note: Too good not to believe.
* Not that we’re doing much better over here: Vox and the rise of explaintainment.
* How to Defeat an Autocrat: Flocking Behavior. Grassroots organizing in the Age of Trump.
* The worst possible Democrat at the worst possible time, forever and ever amen. What the Hell Is Wrong with America’s Establishment Liberals? Of course they are. The Year in Faux Protests. And no, I’m not over it yet: The Last 10 Weeks Of 2016 Campaign Stops In One Handy Gif. How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election.
* My President Was Black. The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America.
* I am terrified about where all this seems to be heading, on every level.
* Colby-Sawyer Eliminates Five Majors to Stay Afloat. English was on the list.
* More on Hungerford and not-reading. Elsewhere at LARB: Graham J. Murphy on the Ancillary Justice trilogy.
* How Bad Was Imperial Cybersecurity in Rogue One? Why Jack Kirby is (Probably) the Forgotten Father of Star Wars and Rogue One. The Obscenely Complex Way the Rebels Stole the Death Star Plans in the Original Star Wars Expanded Universe. And behold the power of this fully operational alt-right boycott.
so, Rogue One is the dirty work that allows the smooth and shiny surface of myth and ideology to be smooth and shiny.
— Ben Robertson (@BenRobertson) December 20, 2016
* More and more I find the unpublished and unwritten versions of stories as interesting or more interesting than the published versions — which is as true of Harry Potter as anything else.
* Dear tech community: your threat model just changed.
* You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news.
* You won’t believe how many Girl Scouts joined the Polish underground in WWII.
* In 2010, renowned string theory expert Erik Verlinde from the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics proposed that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but rather an “emergent phenomenon.” And now, one hundred years after Einstein published the final version of his general theory of relativity, Verlinde published his paper expounding on his stance on gravity—with a big claim that challenges the very foundation of physics as we know it. Big question is whether gravity is a bug they haven’t patched yet, or if gravity is the patch.
* TNT decides that a modern-day Civil War show doesn’t sound like fun anymore. But a show humanizing the KKK, sure….
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over, sitcom edition.
* History in the Anthropocene.
* EPA: Oh, yeah, we were lying before.
* Arms Control in the Age of Trump: Lessons from the Nuclear Freeze Movement. And some timely clickbait: How would you know if a nuclear war started?
* Spoilers: What Really Happens After You Die?
* More news from the future: Feds unveil rule requiring cars to ‘talk’ to each other.
* It can get worse, DC Cinematic Universe edition.
* Academic papers you can use: Where does trash float in the Great Lakes?
* And the war has even come to the Shire: Whitefish Bay to trap and remove coyotes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 20, 2016 at 11:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, actually existing media bias, alt right, America, Amy Hungerford, Ancillary Justice, arms trade, authoritarianism, autocracy, boycotts, cars, Chicago, Chile, Chuck Schumer, Civil War, class struggle, Colbert Report, Colby-Sawyer, collapse, corruption, coups, coyotes, Daily Show, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, DC Comics, death, democracy, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, English departments, EPA, equality, ethics laws, Expanded Universe, explaintainment, fake news, fascism, flocking behavior, futurity, game theory, Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, general election 2016, Girl Scouts, gravity, Great Lakes, Harley Quinn, Harry Potter, health care, Hell's Angels, history, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, hydrofracking, Infinite Jest, interviews, Ivanka, Jack Kirby, John Oliver, KKK, liberalism, Marquette, Michigan, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, mortality, my scholarly empire, Newt Gingrich, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organizing, oxy, physics, podcasts, Poland, politics, pollution, post-truth, professional wrestling, protest, reality TV, resistance, Roe v. Wade, Rogue One, Rust Belt, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, sitcoms, slavery, Slytherin, smugness, snow, Star Wars, structure, superheroes, swing states, Ta-Nehisi Coates, technology, television, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Constitution, the courts, the law, The New Inquiry, the news, the Shire, there's only one story and we tell it over and over, trash, Tressie McMillan Cottom, tyranny, UWM, Vox, water, Whitefish Bay, Wired, women, World War II
Thursday Night Links!
* My brilliant colleague Ainehi Edoro was chosen as one of the most 100 influential Africans.
* The Octavia Project. And elsewhere in the VanderMeers’ vast empire…
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler at ALA 2017.
* More fighting over tenure and post-tenure review at Wisconsin.
* Teaching the controversy: Listening While Feminist: In Defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
* We’re gonna need a better gerrymander: If Democrats want to solve the problem of legislative maps that are biased against them they need to pursue a strategy that is more likely to produce maps that compensate for geography.
* “It is striking to see how committed they are to allowing this train wreck to occur,” he said. “And more surprisingly, how little careful attention has been given (at the top at least) to just how vulnerable—given Bush v. Gore—the current (system for counting votes in the) electoral college is.” But wait! There’s more! Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump.
* Trump vs. conflicts of interest: Maybe the Answer Is That He Can’t Divest.
* How Many Generals Is Too Many? I think the number is worrying, but agree with Kevin that the central issue is that he has chosen an extremely popular, recently retired general for DoD. Civilian control of the military is an important value, or it used to be.
Liberal condescension misreads Trump actions as merely psychopathology. Maybe, but what he’s doing is how you’d start a junta here.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2016
“Historians now believe the ancient Americans were literally incapable of recognizing obvious malice.” https://t.co/bwA3efnOpa
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2016
They’re going to stand back, let him do it, and then say no one could have seen it coming.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2016
if I’d been alive when Trump was elected, I would have fought back
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2016
* This is bad: Trump Launches Tweet Attack on Carrier Steel Union Boss for Fact-Checking Him. (UPDATE: This is what happens when Donald Trump attacks a private citizen on Twitter.) This is bad: Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr. CEO Tapped as Labor Secretary. This is bad: Trump Considers FDA Chief Who Says People Should Use Medicines “At Their Own Risk.” This is bad: Trump to be part-time president, keep lucrative job with Celebrity Apprentice. This is bad: Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?
a helpful translation of every single cabinet appointment post, from my friend tyler to you pic.twitter.com/4QIgbBfas3
— jes skolnik (@modernistwitch) December 8, 2016
* This one though I do approve of: Chris Christie has the lowest approval rating one pollster has ever found for a state governor.
I struggle to find silver linings, but the thorough humiliation of Chris Christie is a small and delicious compensation of our moment.
— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) December 4, 2016
* There are no second acts in American life, they said.
* Point/Counterpoint: How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Can Save the World. What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump? Nothing.
* That’ll solve it! Or, if you prefer, only the super-rich can save us now.
* Worst Game of Thrones spinoff ever.
* …and the portions are too small!
* The Swing-O-Matic: Change the settings to see how shifts in party preference and turnout by different demographic groups would affect the 2016 presidential election.
* We need to admit that right-wing harrassment and conspiracy theories are baked into the business model of social media at this point. And with right-wing political hegemony for the foreseeable future, it will only get worse, because the range of “acceptable opinion” will shift even further to the right. Asking nicely and filling out all the proper paperwork will not change this underlying material reality.
* The tricky part is that many expect the expert agency’s views to change shortly after January 20th, when Trump’s O.C.R. is installed. (Dear Colleagues: Never mind, we take it back.) Come January, advocates of transgender rights, who have enthusiastically supported judicial deference to O.C.R., will have reason for an extreme pivot, given that the new O.C.R. is unlikely to view “sex” as an “internal sense of gender.” It is awkward now for Grimm’s lawyers to argue zealously for the notion that the agency knows best, when only weeks from now, and in coming years, that doctrine is more likely to harm than to help transgender students.
* Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, our photojournalist documented 57 homicide victims over 35 days. And in case you’ve forgotten.
* Located in the city’s Girangaon (Village of the Mills) neighborhood, Trump Tower Mumbai illustrates every pathology of the neoliberal turn away from comprehensive city planning.
* What happens if someone dies on Mars?
* The arc of history is long, but New Jersey Will No Longer Seek to Collect Loans from Families of Dead Students.
* Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you.
* Harvard will not be a sanctuary campus. It’s for your own good, kids!
* Disney ought to pay this former employee for the movie rights to this AMA.
* Today in news from the mysteriiiiiiiious Orient: Japan’s sex problem is so bad that people are quitting dating and marrying their friends.
* Trump propaganda game getting real.
* Chimpanzees See Butts Like We See Faces.
* The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes. From The New Yorker‘s “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”
* If Black Mirror Had a Showroom.
* This might be the worst science journalism piece I’ve seen in years.
* Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They’re Trying to Prove It.
sounds like they patched the game in an early release to prevent civilizations from encountering each other https://t.co/ZeSy4hdzto
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2016
* Paradox Girl Is One of the Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year. I bought these tonight on this recommendation and I can confirm it’s super fun.
* And this makes me feel worse about both extinction-level events and car crashes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 8, 2016 at 8:01 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 2016?, academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adorno, Africa, Ainehi Edoro, America, architecture, Are we living in a simulation?, art, astronauts, automation, baby it's cold outside, Barack Obama, bees, Black Mirror, Brittle Paper, Caesarian sections, car crashes, chimpanzees, Chris Christie, Cixin Liu, class struggle, comics, conflicts of interests, cosmology, coups, death, democracy, Democrats, Disney, don't tell me the odds, Donald Trump, DuckTales, Electoral College, embryos, emoluments, evolution, extinction, fantasy, fast food, FDA, feminism, Fermi paradox, Frankfurt School, futurity, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, general election 2020, Germany, gerrymandering, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, I'm against it, Japan, Jeff Vandermeer, Joe Biden, John Glenn, junta parties, labor, Marquette, Mars, military-industrial complex, music, NASA, NBC, neoliberalism, New Jersey, nuclear war, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, online harassment, only the super-rich can save us now, Paradox Girl, person of the year, Pixar, politics, polls, Ponzi schemes, pregnancy, robots, sanctuary campuses, scams, science, science fiction, second acts, sex, social media, speed of light, student loans, tenure, that'll solve it, The Apprentice, the law, the Philippines, time, time travel, Title IX, trans* issues, Trump Tower, Uber, unions, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, work