Posts Tagged ‘cultural studies’
Friday Night Links!
* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!
* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.
* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.
* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.
* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.
* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.
* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.
* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.
* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.
* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.
* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.
* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.
* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.
* Meanwhile: some grim accounting.
* Weaponizing student evaluations, part I, II, III.
* Ecological Politics for the Working Class. Jane Fonda is arrested leading environmental protest at the Capitol. Capitalism and addiction. The new age of megafires. Crisis in the Amazon. The inequality of climate change. Global finance is funding 4C temperature rise. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. In 2025, the economic craze for millennials is going to be cheap housing in flood zones. Climate change and the end of the Olympics. Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. The New Green Scare. ‘They should be allowed to cry’: Ecological disaster taking toll on scientists’ mental health.
* I think a lot of academics have been plagiarized by mainstream outlets at one time or another — I certainly have — but this story is truly next-level.
* Aaron Bady interviews Jedediah Purdy at The Nation. David M. Perry interviews llhan Omar, also at The Nation.
* Chicago teachers are on strike today. A high school teacher explains to us why the strike is the union’s best tool to fight for better conditions in the city’s schools and an end to austerity.
* The class war is also an intergenerational war.
* In the future, “Frequent Flyer Miles” may refer to a tax penalty, or even a criminal misdemeanor.
* Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?
* Biden just isn’t very good at this. Neither is Beto. And Bloomberg won’t be either! Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Take Aim At Corporate Interests Gutting Journalism. I’m with Nobody.
* Trump’s Worst Betrayal Yet. Ethnic cleanser very excited about ethnic cleansing.
* This G7 thing is just wild. Truly not even pretending anymore. Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies. The 30-minute phone call that could end Trump’s presidency. Only once has Gallup seen more support for removing a president. Nixon was gone four days later. The Senate is likelier to remove Trump after impeachment than you think. Donald Trump Isn’t Julius Caesar. He’s Republic-Killer Tiberius Gracchus.
* Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter Feed Is a Boomer Conspiracy-Theory Sh*tshow.
* Once Trump is gone, the U.S. must completely reform the presidency. The Sick Video Played at a Pro-Trump Conference Is a Glimpse of the Dark Energy in American Politics. A lot of policy debates these days turn on Republicans threatening to kill a lot of people. Life Under the First Thousand Days of Donald Trump.
So we must build geography right into the analysis. Once we start looking at electoral college-weighted, county-level correlates of the Trump swing—Trump’s vote share less Romney’s vote share—a very different pattern emerges. The three strongest predictors of the Trump swing are college graduation rate, population growth rate, and growth in deaths due to drug overdoses in 2003-2017.
* A professor spoke about whiteness at Georgia Southern University. Students burned her book.
* California becomes first US state to ban animal fur products.
* Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants.
* Seven Supreme Court cases that will destroy America in 2020.
* California accidentally destroys freelancing.
* Try to escape the gig economy with this artist collective’s new video game.
* The X-Men’s New Age Is Here, and It’s Horny as Hell. Adding in a free love element when it seems like they’re all definitely being drugged or mind controlled might not be the best story decision, but let’s see where it goes…
* Science confirms Storm is main character of X-Men.
* Tesla is Enron, exhibit XXIV.
* But wait! A new competitor has entered the fray! WeWork shuts 2,300 office phone booths over health scare.
* Pickens County Schools pulls controversial transgender policy. This moral panic, ginned up out of absolutely nothing, just infuriates me. I’m not sure you can find even a single example of an inclusive bathroom policy harming anyone, while the ordinary operation of every high school in the country leads to rampant sexual abuse.
* A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago.
* The big business — and questionable effectiveness — of mass shooter trainings. “Questionable” seems… generous.
* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were left with nothing.
* The Midwest Is One of the Worst Places for African Americans to Live.
* Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon. Amazon Workers May Be Are Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* Truly horrible story out of Fort Worth. Fort Worth Officer Charged With Murder In Killing Of Atatiana Jefferson In Her Home. Policing just needs to be rethought completely in this country, on every level.
* UK to deport academic to Democratic Republic of Congo – which she has never visited. And here at home: The New War on Naturalized Citizens.
* Tough week for fans of the use/mention distinction.
* New federal data: suicide rate of children age 10 to 14 “nearly tripled” between 2007 and 2017.
* The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.
* The Joy of Being a Horrible Goose in a Time of Moral Crisis. Honks vs. Quacks: A Long Chat With the Developers of ‘Untitled Goose Game.’
* No, I simply refuse to admire Shep Smith, not even a little bit.
* Now NBC killed its Weinstein story.
* I think you could write a very interesting cultural history of contemporary America about the way it loses its mind every time the First Lady role seems like it might get disrupted. Today’s chapter: Rosario Dawson.
* A whole new twist on institutions abusing Title IX.
* A month away from 40, BA, MFA, PhD, professor for seven years, and I still regularly have dreams where it turns out I missed some requirement and have to go back to high school.
* God, you know, I just can’t stop thinking about this.
* A two-year-old’s reaction to seeing the Hulk go bananas for the first time.
* Miracles and wonders: A Drug Was Made For Just One Child, Raising Hopes About Future Of Tailored Medicine.
* Joker today, Joker tomorrow, Joker forever.
* I refuse to consider the possibility that Watchmen will be remotely good. I don’t care how many critics say otherwise! The Never-Ending Challenge of Adapting ‘Watchmen.’
* It’s back! How many European cities can you name?
* Ancient ‘lost city’ of the Khmer Empire uncovered in Cambodia.
* Paris zoo unveils the “blob”, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes. Take off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
* Spotted on Facebook, and it checks out.
* Gaming out season two of Picard.
* “One thing I like to do at Target is pretend their novelty coffee mugs are gravestone epitaphs.”
* And this Studio Ghibli news is (for a particular sliver of the population) a genuinely shocking development and a huge coup for HBO Max. I know for me it flipped from “lol no” to “well, I guess I’ll be subscribing to that” in an instant…
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
‘What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?’
What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies? Michael Bérubé reports.
Gerry Canavan 
NYEE Links! A Whole Lot of Them!
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* What happened when slaves and free men were shipwrecked together. Amazing read.
* Schedule for the MLA Subconference.
* The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. The full report.
* “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.”
* Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote.
* “Obscure law lets Prince of Wales set off nuclear bombs.”
* “The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: at least 33,480 Americans dead.”
* Your weekly must-read: N.K. Jemisin has a new SF/F column in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
* Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation.
* Adjuncts at Loyola University Chicago Want a Union. Will the Jesuit University Respect Their Demands?
* The Absolute Disruption blog has some thoughts on spoilerphobia and The Force Awakens, with a digression through my Tolkien/TFA piece. That piece has had some interesting patterns of circulation, incidentally; the Salon piece did well on Facebook and Twitter while the WordPress version has had a second life in the conservative blogosphere by way of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen….
* George Lucas, genius. Another oral history of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Star Wars and the death of culture. What was cut from The Force Awakens. 13 Story Ideas That Were Dropped from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What is a Mary Sue, and does Star Wars: The Force Awakens have one? I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. Anakin Skywalker and the Methods of Rationality.
* Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use.
* “This iconic picture will live in history. When a women escaped ISIS territory and was able to wear color again.” More links after the photo.
* A suggestion for search committees, and some questions.
* The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales.
* From the archives: The Really Big One.
* ESPN is such a money pit it’s even dragging Star Wars down.
* My life as a job creator.
* Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game.
* Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death. How Can No One Be to Blame for Tamir Rice’s Death? How Philadelphia prosecutors protect police misconduct: Cops get caught lying — and then get off the hook. Police Rarely Criminally Charged for On-Duty Shootings. When is it legal for a cop to kill you?
* Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories.
* ASU’s Global Freshman Academy Is a Complete Bust.
* Being Véra Nabokov.
* Today in loopholes: consumptive demand.
* Loophole watch, part two: Pope Francis: atheists who follow their consciences will be welcome in Heaven.
* Why not cubic centimeters, or raw tonnage? Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”
* Great moments in political campaigning.
* This story has everything.
* Like Goodfellas but for embezzling from a fruitcake company.
* For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions.
* Africa and the Looting Machine.
* The House That Marx Built. Marxism for Tomorrow.
* How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.
* NSFW, obviously, but: These Real Women Want to Show You How to Give Them an Orgasm.
* Everything is totally normal, don’t even sweat it.
* We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles’ Enormous Methane Leak.
* The Opium Wars, Neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.
* The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books.
* The DMCA poisoned the Internet of Things in its cradle.
* More than one-third of wells in dairy farm-intensive Kewaunee County were found to be unsafe because they failed to meet health standards for drinking water, according to a new study.
* William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer.
* This Man Just Guessed How Much the Movies Have Spent “Rescuing” Matt Damon.
* For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.
* Your 2016 TV Preview.
* Why Do Employers Still Routinely Drug-Test Workers?
* When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.
* Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.
* After difficult summer, UW-Madison fighting off efforts to poach top professors. The view from the provinces.
* The Coolest Images From National Geographic’s 2015 Photo Contest. This Is Your Brain on Nature.
* Star Wars Lego Sets Exploding at 3,000 Frames per Second Is the Best Guilty Pleasure.
* When Bobby Shrugged.
* The science myths that will not die.
* Because you demanded it! The DeBoerist Manifesto.
* And Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. But don’t you believe it! Bring on 2016!
Written by gerrycanavan
December 30, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Arizona State University, bad handwriting, Bobby Fischer, Cascadia Subduction Zone, Catholicism, chess, Cleveland, climate change, coloring books, consumptive demand, corruption, cultural studies, culture, Delaware, Disney, DMCA, don't read the comments, drug testing, earthquakes, ecology, Eliezer Yudkowsky, embezzlement, English departments, entrepeneurs, epidemics, Episode 7, ESPN, fairy tales, fallout, Fallout 4, feminism, football, Freddie deBoer, galactic empires, Galápagos, games, gender, genius, George Lucas, Goodfellas, graves, guns, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, innovation, ISIS, Jesuits, leftism, LEGO, loopholes, Loyola, Madison, manifestos, Marx, Marxism, Mary Sue, mascots, methane, MLA, money, MOOCs, my media empire, mythology, N.K. Jemisin, National Geographic, neoliberalism, NSFW, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, opium wars, orgasms, Pacific Northwest, pacifism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photography, police corruption, police state, police violence, pornography, Prince Charles, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, science, science fiction, search committees, SETI, sex, sexuality, shipwrecks, slavery, spoilers, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, superexploitation, Tamir Rice, taxes, television, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, the CDC, The Force Awakens, the internet of things, the Pope, the prequels, the rich are different, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, true crime, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USPS, Vera Nabokov, violence, Vonnegut, water, Wisconsin