Posts Tagged ‘dark side of the digital’
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Jul 24, 2019; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; A cat disrupts play in the second half between Tigres UANL and the Real Salt Lake during their Leagues Cup game at Rio Tinto Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – 13095176
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
(and so on)
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
Monday Morning Links! All of Them! ALL OF THEM
* Of course you had me at Zelda propaganda posters.
* Special issue of Deletion: Punking Science Fiction.
* Editorial: We Should Create a Honors College to Propagandize on Behalf of the People Who Already Control Everything.
* A surprisingly large number of Obama-era ICE and HHS horrors got rediscovered as if they were new to Trump this weekend. This is a case where Trump’s horror truly is as much continuity as break.
* Even despite that continuity, though, we seem to be moving to a new energy state: Taking Children from Their Parents Is A Form of State Terror.
* Fighting spectacle with snores, or why Trump could easily win a second term.
* Is America heading for a new kind of civil war?
* Fascism is back; blame the Internet.
* I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.
* After a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville in 2017, Facebook pushed to re-educate its moderators about hate speech groups in the US, and spell out the distinction from nationalism and separatism, documents obtained by Motherboard show.
* Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Milwaukee PD Misconduct Has Cost the City $22 Million Since 2015.
* When a Nashville man named Matthew Charles was released from prison early in 2016 after a sentence reduction, he’d spent almost half his life behind bars. But in a rare move, a federal court ruled his term was reduced in error and ordered him back behind bars to finish his sentence.
* Man, 79, sentenced to 90 days of house arrest in 5-year-old girl’s rape.
* She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.
* This has created a problem that has not been seen before: voluntary, intentional, migrating, mobile, functional, litter. The bikes and scooters are disruptive to the locations where they are abandoned and, because they are constantly moving, the issues of abandonment and refuse are constantly cycling (sorry) throughout an urban region. Yesterday’s bike or scooter blight might be around today, or it might move for a few days and then return. In short, the bikes and scooters share a civic pattern similar to that of homelessness. Thus, in an unexpected way, the dockless bikes and scooters are also competing with the homeless for pieces of urban space upon which to temporarily rest.
* Mike Meru, a 37-year-old orthodontist, made a big investment in his education. As of Thursday, he owed $1,060,945.42 in student loans.
* Executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further. Also, rich people are going to be needing your blood so they can stay young forever, just FYI.
* Be more like Chipotle, Jerry Brown tells California universities.
* Report Says Rising CO2 Levels Are Ruining Rice. Allergy Explosion Linked to Climate Change.
* For Women of Color, the Child-Welfare System Functions Like the Criminal-Justice System.
* Now that’s what I call ideological state apparatus™.
* A new front in the drug war.
* HUGE IF TRUE: Hollywood isn’t on the side of the resistance.
* Teen Vogue and woke capital.
* Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of ‘bear arms.’ I think a better description here is “not even wrong”; originalism is a rhetorical style, not a claim of fact.
* Sexpat Journalists Are Ruining Asia Coverage.
* A People’s History of Superstar Limo, Disney’s “worst attraction ever.”
* Solo crashes and burns, even underperforming Justice League. I haven’t seen it yet, but it certainly sounds like it had it coming. Relatedly: The Ringer takes a deep dive into the now-decanonized Han Solo prequels from the EU.
* Wakanda fans might be interested in the very odd turn the comics have taken. Relatedly: ‘Black Panther’ meets history, and things get complicated.
* Janelle Monáe for President.
* Conducting a posthumous interview with science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Your People Will Find You: A Podcast with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. And Ayana Jamieson’s authorized biography of Butler has a Patreon.
* Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history.
* Wendy Brown at UC: What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?
* Interesting Twitter thread on emergency and the suspension of the law.
* Half the budget, half the fun: A Star Trek World May Be Coming to Universal Studios.
* Power vs. responsibleness. Politics y’all. Existence is objectively good.
* This is an urgent reminder: Mindflayers are not sympathetic.
* As Kip Manley said, this is the flag of the Anthropocene.
* And I want to believe! US aircraft carrier was stalked for days by a UFO travelling at ‘ballistic missile speed’ which could hover above the sea for six days, leaked Pentagon report reveals.
Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!
* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.
* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?
* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.
* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.
* The market can’t solve a massacre.
And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”
* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.
* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.
* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.
* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.
* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.
* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.
* The rise of the prison state.
* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.
* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.
* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.
* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.
* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.
* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.
* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.
* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.
* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.
* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.
* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.
* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.
* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.
* Hate spree killings in Austin.
* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.
* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.
* Happy International Women’s Day.
* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.
* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.
* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.
* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.
* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Gerry Canavan 
