Posts Tagged ‘DC Cinematic Universe’
#SFRA2017-turday Links!
* Keep watching #SFRA2017! It’s been a great conference. And it contains gems like this. Two other little theoretical highlights from my scattered live-tweeting:
* The audio from last week’s Octavia Butler conference at the Huntington is now up at Soundcloud. I’m track 7!
* Sci-Fi Legend Samuel R. Delany Doesn’t Play Favorites.
* Will losing health insurance mean more US deaths? Experts say yes. Republicans Left Ron Johnson for Dead Last Year, Now He Could Kill Their Health Care Bill. Crowdfunding is the Sad, Dark Future of Healthcare.
* Trump’s Twitter and the judgment of history. Bill to create panel that could remove Trump from office quietly picks up Democratic support.
* The Internet Is Actually Controlled By 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys.
* After the president’s tweet, I must withdraw my support for everything but his agenda.
* Getting closer and closer to the point where Republicans say it was good that Trump colluded with Putin. This is 100% guaranteed and will be the official position of Your Dad in six months.
* More on the voter suppression commission.
* The Trump Administration Is Using Immigrant Children as Bait to Deport Their Parents. Afghanistan’s All-Girl Robotics Team Can’t Get Visas To The US.
* Why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand running for president? Or is she?
* The moral code of Chinese sex workers.
* Political correctness is destroying this country’s cultural heritage.
* When someone says something mean to me. The kids just call it “Twitter.” And I want your secret.
Monday Links!
* Academic freedom in Wisconsin.
* This is silly, but I confess I found it an interesting wrinkle: Wonder Woman Actor Says Chief Is Actually a Demi-God.
* People shouldn’t live in Arizona.
* Democrats Don’t Need Trump’s Voters To Retake The House. The overall message of 2017 special elections is that Republicans are in trouble. Why Paul Ryan’s race for Congress next year bears watching, even if he’ll be hard to beat. An Associated Press study of U.S. House races found that Republicans may have gained up to 22 additional seats in the 2016 election due to redistricting. The AP’s analysis also found four times as many states with GOP-skewed state legislative maps as Democratic-skewed ones. Voter suppression is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than Russian election tampering, if you can imagine it.
* Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers.
* Senate GOP expected to add new penalties for the uninsured into their health bill. Privately, health plan worries Senate bill would “cause most small employers’ premiums to go up.” Coverage Losses Under the Senate Health Care Bill Could Result in 18,100 to 27,700 Additional Deaths in 2026. Crazy waivers: the Senate bill invites states to gut important health insurance rules. Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes. You’re Probably Going to Need Medicaid. Pure Class Warfare, With Extra Contempt. Can the moderates save us? Even Ron “Horrible” Johnson: ‘We should not be voting’ on healthcare this week. (But, you know, partial credit at best.) The principled support for the bill is apparently pass it no matter what’s in it just cause Team Red. Trump and Social Darwinism. Keep calling.
* What we have just witnessed can, I think, be legitimately referred to as the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble. That is, the ending of the assumption that a tepid, compromised, market-friendly, bureaucratic centrism that nobody actually liked was the only form left-of-centre politics could take, because everyone was convinced that everyone else thought so.
* What It Was Like to Star in the Trump-Themed Julius Caesar.
* Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please.
* Trump’s Deflections and Denials on Russia Frustrate Even His Allies.
* Remember when we had laws and dumb stuff like that? God, we were such dorks.
* NJ Assembly Passes Bill Requiring Kids Be Taught to Interact With Police. Maybe give some of the same training to off-duty cops next?
* Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed.
* I wasn’t one, but congratulations to all the Locus Award winners!
* The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man.
* Pale Blue Dot. The Weinersmith Test for Artificial Intelligence. Everything happens for a reason. Hot lava. Markov dating.
* Alarmingly, one source speaking to THR claims that upon the announcement to the crew that Ron Howard would step in to take over the film a day after Miller and Lord’s firing, applause broke out. Report: Lucasfilm Was So Concerned About Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo Performance It Brought in an Acting Coach. What a mess.
* The race to save Florida’s devastated coral reef from global warming.
* Crimebook noplane freedomhate.
* High Court Mostly Revives Trump Travel Ban, Will Hear Appeal.
* High-stakes scenarios and market failure.
* The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it.
* Everyone, get your guesses in! Last call for Kennedy bets.
* This is no time for optimism.
* Prince Was a Secret Patron of Solar Power.
* Flashback: David Bowie’s Failed Attempt to Adapt George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
* 150 times actors were forced to say the title of the movie they’re in.
* Riot at Disney tonight, details TK.
* Superhero Rescues Put Everyone in Danger, Urge Scientists.
* This is why we can’t have nice things. Do not panic; the authorities are in complete control. Bitch I might be. Happy last week of summer school.
* And I’ve said it all along: don’t blame me, blame the world.
Tuesday Links!
* I should have realized the Nevada Medicaid for All bill was just a ratfuck. Let my guard down.
* On television, in journals, in the halls of Congress, none of the old methods by which American liberals enforced their claim to superior expertise are working anymore. For all their “resistance,” the greatest impediment to Donald Trump remains his own stupidity. Despite every evil and crime of his administration, the most ambitious Democratic victory on the horizon is making Mike Pence president. Our liberals are right: none of this is normal. This isn’t how it used to be. Everywhere, our best and brightest blink. Are they still in the desert? Is all this an hallucination, a bad dream? The Blathering Superego at the End of History.
* New Study Shows What Really Happened in the 2016 Election.
* Wisconsin and climate denial. As water quality worries grow, Wisconsin plots strategy on phosphorus.
* Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Potentially Monumental Political Gerrymandering Case.
* GOP Data Firm Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly 200 Million American Voters.
* Constitutional crisis may be Trump’s only hope.
* The DCEU has a problem — everybody likes Wonder Woman.
* itshappening.gif: Yes, The Dark Tower Movie Is a Sequel to the Books.
* thisisfine.jpg: It’s so hot in Phoenix, they can’t fly planes.
* The Official Reason for Star Trek: Discovery’s Many Delays Is ‘World Building Is Hard’.
* 8°C.
* Sad.
* An Oral History of Quentin Tarantino as Told to Me by Men I’ve Dated.
* Zadie Smith reviews Get Out.
* The Cars universe continues to suggest the existence of a Car Hitler.
* And some personal news: I’m a Republican now.
Infinite Sunday Infinite Reading
* From last week, a rare “actual content” post: White Male Critic Asks Why If Wonder Woman Is Really So Great Why Didn’t She Prevent the Holocaust.
* Princess Buttercup Became the Warrior General Who Trained Wonder Woman, All Dreams Are Now Viable. The Strange, Complicated, Feminist History of Wonder Woman’s Origin Story. Who mourns for the space kangaroos? I’m Pretty Sure Steve Trevor Lied About His Dick Size in Wonder Woman. Classic DC.
* Black Panther next! Everything We Learned From the Black Panther Teaser Trailer.
* Why you should go to the Octavia Butler sci-fi conference at the Huntington. I’ll be there!
* Bob Dylan Delivers His Nobel Prize Lecture, Just in Time.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Evergreen.
* Evergreen headlines: Humanities Majors Drop.
* Eight reasons why universities can’t be the primary site of left organizing.
* UWSP student asks court to force poetry professor to give her an A.
* The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History.
* Fifty years of One Hundred Years of Solitude. No Magic, No Metaphor.
* Corbynmania! How Labour Did It. Why Corbyn Won. Theresa May’s desperation could undo peace in Northern Ireland.
* Excerpts from James Comey’s Opening Statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee or from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? The Comey testimony was riveting reality TV. I asked 6 legal experts if Trump obstructed justice. Here’s what they told me. Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren’t Going to Impeach Him. How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money into His Business. Trump’s DOJ says Trump can still get paid. Our A.I. President. A Noun, a Verb, and Vladimir Putin. All this and Trumpcare isn’t even dead. What Will Happen to Us? Four Cartoonists on A Life Without the Affordable Care Act.
* Reporter Covering Inauguration Protests Now Faces 75 Years in Prison.
* I think we may have had the Russians all wrong.
* Noam Chomsky explains the twentieth century.
* What if Your Cellphone Data Can Reveal Whether You Have Alzheimer’s?
* What’s really warming the world?
* Twilight of the comics direct market.
* Before I go: A mother’s hopeful words about life in its waning moments.
* The toddler survived with some scar tissue—but not everyone who gets Powassan, POW for short, is so lucky. With no treatment available, half of all people who contract the virus suffer permanent brain damage; 10 percent die. And while POW is nowhere near as prevalent as that other tick-borne summer scourge—Lyme—it is starting to show up more often.
* People tend to avoid sick people, even if they don’t consciously now that they are sick, according to a new study published in PNAS.
* The addicts next door. Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever. In one year, drug overdoses killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War did. The last words of a ‘heroin junkie’: There seems to be no escape.
* Not only will this happen in your lifetime — this tweet has accelerated the process.
* Shock finding: Tax evasion is shockingly prevalent among the very rich.
* On Aug. 15, 1977 at 10:16 p.m. ET Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected a curious signal from deep space. Nearly 40 years later, we finally know what caused it and, sadly, it’s not aliens.
* Donald/Donald. Don’t stop till you find the panda. How to succeed. Now my story can be told. Should we be concerned about that? What’s the problem with Florida? Can I interest you in a war on non-transport accidents? If you want a vision of the future. The state is that human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Zoos.
* In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground. Gut-wrenching.
* How Bostonians Defeated the Olympics.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* Peanuts and the Civil Rights Movement.
* ‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book.’
* For the first time ever, a video game has qualified for an Academy Award.
* When David Fincher nearly directed a Star Wars sequel trilogy.
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man…
* How Wookieepedia Tackles the Insanely Difficult Task of Chronicling the Entire Star Wars Universe.
* This week in the richest society in human history.
* At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard.
* I’ve always known this is how it will end for me.
* Everett Hamner will be recapping Orphan Black season five for LARB.
* Some economies just can’t be disrupted. Grilled cheese for instance.
* So is — Mary Poppins? Fine, I guess.
* C. L. R. James in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism.
* Al Franken was a great guest on Marc Maron, if you missed it. Crazy to say it, I think he might actually run for president. Then again, why not him?
West’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is, and will always remain, the single most important screen incarnation of the character, for better or worse: For better because it was the most surprising, at times confounding, interpretation of the Caped Crusader, feather-light and hilarious precisely because of the character’s seeming lack of self-awareness; for worse, in the eyes of some fans, because it encouraged millions of people who had never picked up a Batman comic, or any comic, to be amused by the sight of adults dressing up in wild outfits and pretending to punch each other in the face. Every subsequent, high-profile reinvention of Batman, whether in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Tim Burton’s alternately perverse and sincere Batman and Batman Returns, Christopher Nolan’s operatic trilogy, and Zack Snyder’s funereal Batman vs. Superman, is, first and foremost, a reaction against the Adam West–driven Batman series.
* And the bad news never stops: Sleeping In Is Deadly, Popular People Live Longer, Adolescence Lasts Forever, and So Does High School.
White Male Critic Asks Why If Wonder Woman Is Really So Great Why Didn’t She Prevent the Holocaust
As I mentioned on Twitter earlier this morning, the hype turns out to be right: Wonder Woman is really pretty good, especially by the poor standards of the DC Cinematic Universe. DC would be absolutely crazy not to use Wonder Woman as the model for production going forward rather than Batman v. Superman or (god forbid) Suicide Squad; it’s the only one in the DCCU that has been remotely successful from either a political or artistic point of view. (A Twitter friend even suggested that this might be (another) way the film might replicate Captain America, beyond the obvious, templating future entries in the shared universe and becoming the new franchise anchor after a somewhat slow start.) It gives me hope that Wonder Woman (and, soon, Batgirl) can show DC there’s real money in female-oriented superheroes.
I’ll admit I did have some trouble with how obviously the film was cloning Captain America, and I don’t think this is mere pushing-up-your-glasses nerdery: World War II, and the Holocaust especially, hangs over the film in a really direct way, I think, and not only because of Gal Gadot’s Jewish ancestry and its place in the strange debate over whether or not this Wonder Woman qualifies as a woman of color. WWI vs WWII is not a situation where you can just change the dates and tell the same sort of triumphalist story; WWI is simply a very different sort of moment, and a WWI narrative mandates a sort of bitter aftertaste even at its most triumphant.
At least since Star Wars SF and fantasy trilogies have tended to follow a particular template:
- optimism
- disillusionment
- recuperation
The historical existence of World War II is the original and ultimate dark, gritty sequel, a nightmare that like so many filmic sequels was made possible by the conditions of victory of the first one. The choice to set Wonder Woman during WWI thus makes both WWII and WW2 its necessary extension, a situation the film itself even nods at by having its poison-gas-themed villainous Dr. Poison spared by Diana and escape at the end (presumably to help develop Zyklon-B somewhere down the line). Our foreknowledge of the Holocaust — and Wonder Woman’s own retrospective knowledge of it in the film’s unexpectedly quiet frame narrative — haunts the film’s apparently victorious climax, telling us immediately that there is something off or incomplete about her apparent defeat of the God of War: that in some way it was deceptive or incomplete, perhaps, or potentially that her seemingly liberatory victory over Ares only made things worse. The obligatory Empire-Strikes-Back dark turn of Wonder Woman 2 is built into the historical logic of the film’s WWI setting from the jump — and similarly makes any sort of final recuperative turn in WW3/WW3 somewhat hard to imagine. (Perhaps a temporarily pacifistic Diana Price using the spy look from the 1970s comic stops nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis? I’m just spitballing.)
Another Twitter friend had an idea for WW2 I thought was great, and wrote this longer post more or less entirely to popularize: a Wonder Woman film that sidesteps the stale supercharged-Nazi-demons angle in favor of street-level resistance in a Warsaw ghetto:
Depowered or in some other way hamstrung by the Spear of Destiny, perhaps, but still needing to make a difference where she can… In the same way that some MCU movies can be political thrillers and others can be heist movies, Wonder Woman 2 could be and should be a Holocaust film. Knowing nothing about screenwriting and caring nothing about money, I really think that’s the way to go.
Sunday’d Reading!
* Presenting the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
* On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest.
* A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* So old I can remember when Eric and Donald Jr. were going to run the business and not have a political role. (January.)
* Cool, thanks for looking into it.
* Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI.
* The Republicans Broke American Politics, and Media Elites Are Blind to It. A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.
* The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It’s too late, of course, the cultists will believe in it for all time.
* Horrific hate crime in Portland. Seems to be part of a disturbing trend.
* New Orleans principal loses job after wearing Nazi-associated rings in video. Glowing 2015 profile.
* Meanwhile, in Arizona. In New Jersey.
* New Jersey not doing great in my newsfeed today generally. Though this was good.
* U.S. Airstrike Killed Over 100 Civilians in Mosul, Pentagon Says. The U.S. Is Helping Allies Hide Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria.
* ‘Mostly Toddlers’ Among 31 Drowned.
* A spectre is haunting Goldman Sachs.
* Trump going to the mattresses.
* How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative.
* Democrats doing much better, still can’t win a damn thing. The only answer is to keep offering them nothing and telling them they’re stupid, until they finally come around. Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment. Donald Trump Is A Big Reason The GOP Kept The Montana House Seat.
* Remember how terrible the AHCA is?
* Sheriff Clarke and some totally appropriate, not at all batshit insane behavior.
* A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance.
* A 31-year-old undocumented Honduran bicyclist, Marcos Antonio Huete, was hit by a car in Key West, Florida, on his way to work. The policeman’s camera shows him inquiring about the victim’s immigration status before offering medical assistance. He was later detained by the Border Patrol.
* “We want you to think Luke is bad” is an awfully large part of Last Jedi hype. I have to think that means they won’t actually do it…
* Title IX Policy shift at the University of Oregon: Faculty members at the University of Oregon will no longer be required to notify campus authorities when students confide in them that they’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed but say they don’t want the information reported.
* Wealth, I realized, is the adult version of magic: an incredibly powerful but ultimately arbitrary resource that transfers primarily through inheritance. It has some logic to it— but also enough randomness that those without can hope for a spontaneous windfall in the form of an improbably lucrative investment or a secret inheritance.
* Unexpected and interesting: Joss Whedon isn’t just finishing Justice League; he’s been working on it for a while.
* Truly, ours is the darkest timeline.
* A chance meeting with Mr. Rogers.
* If you’d bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you’d be worth $35M.
* Uber: a cheap scam all the way down.
* Original draft of Revenge of the Sith actually treated Padme as an interesting character.
* Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.
* These birds have the right idea.
* This one cuts me. When you’re in your thirties. Call CPS. #TheResistance.
* Everything was connected, and I was fucked.
* Can someone please explain the physics of Casper?
* And N6946-BH1 is all of us right now.
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Close Every Tab from the Semester or Die Trying Links
* Some nice conference acceptance news: My semester of David Foster Wallace will end with a panel on “Infinite Jest at Twenty” with Lee Konstantinou, Carrie Shanafelt, and Kate Hayles at MLA 2017. I’ve put the full panel description in the comments for anyone interested…
* David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen. Guest appearance from my friend from grad school, Meredith Farmer!
* It’s been such a busy week I haven’t had time to crow about Jaimee’s poem appearing on Verse Daily.
* An obituary for my friend and Marquette colleague Diane Long Hoeveler.
* CFPs from Foundation: The Essay Prize (for graduate students and adjuncts) and a special issue on SF theater.
* Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor.
* For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER: Nigerian players dominate tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible.
* Want to See Hamilton in a City Near You? Buy a Subscription and Wait Two Years. Okay, maybe I will!
* How Hamilton Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda Is Building A Brand For The Ages.
* google d&d player’s handbook truth: The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist.
* Burlington College Will Close, Citing Longstanding Financial Woes. What Killed Burlington College?
* Ending HBCUs in North Carolina.
* Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. And on the Harry Potter Social Justice Wizard beat: a genderqueer student comes to hogwarts and…
* How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth.
* More data on learning and laptops — but you’ll never convince me that students benefit more from pen-and-paper notes than from a searchable, permanent archive of their entire academic career Spotlight can access and retrieve instantly.
* Big-Time College Sports Neglect Academics, Deflect Blame.
* Huge, if true: In other words, the rush to embrace entrepreneurship is ideological rather than practical.
* Diversity defunded in Tennessee.
* UW English Chair Caroline Levine: Enough with Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m leaving.
* Texas School District Votes to Build Totally Tasteful $62 Million High School Football Stadium.
* A new documentary, Agents of Change, describes the five-month SF State protest and a similar strike at Cornell University through the voices of former students like Tascoe who were involved. The film is a gripping case study of the meticulous organizing, community engagement, and careful planning that went into two of the most effective student strikes in American history. Black Studies Matter.
* I was seriously thisclose to writing a #TeamCap blog post to comicsplain Civil War to the confused, but Mightygodking got there first.
* Milwaukee in the ne — oh for fuck’s sake.
* Wisconsin communities dominate “Drunkest Cities” report.
* Wisconsin woman has confirmed case of Zika virus.
* “Rare detailed personal memory a burden, and ultimately a gift.”
* “This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager.”
* “Why do all old statues have such small penises?”
* Probably the most honest thing ever said about this election: 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead. Meanwhile, this is just totally bananas: Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself.
* What Would It Take for Donald Trump to Deport 11 Million and Build a Wall?
* A First-Person Account of a Texas Artist’s Deportation.
* From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent “burn it down” turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I’ve seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it’s not clear that this time we have any countervailing force – adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.
* Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election.
http://mobile.twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/732583842175975428
* Almost starting to see a pattern here, Disney: Shane Black reveals Iron Man 3 scrapped a female villain because of toy sales. Why Disney needs a gay princess.
* A brief history of the giraffe.
* “When you have a child with a life-threatening illness, you have an irrevocably altered existence,” Barbara Sourkes had told the Levys, and Esther feels that is true. She had always felt in control of her fate, but now she believes this to be a fiction. She finds it difficult to reconcile bitterness over the blight of Andrew’s illness with gratitude for the reprieve. “We are the luckiest of the unluckiest people in the world,” she says. “I truly believe that.”
* Can Graduate Students Unionize? The Government Can’t Decide.
* After all this time, who can say really who sent whom to Robben Island for 27 years.
* I too like to live dangerously: Uber Says Riders Will Pay the Most When Their Phone Battery Is Dying.
* Small Beer Press to Publish 400-Year-Old SF Novel.
* On Kim Stanley Robinson and “solarpunk.”
* Nate Moore, 37, is the lone African-American producer in the film division at Marvel Studios. And elsewhere in Marvel news: Agents of SHIELD Star Says Marvel Doesn’t Care Enough About Its Own TV Show.
* DC has, to all reports, done something utterly crazy. Big shakeup in their film division to boot. Can Booster Gold save the DC Cinematic Universe?
* Not even $100 million can make Daniel Craig give a fuck about James Bond.
* World-famous ethicist isn’t.
* What terrible luck! The CIA has “mistakenly” destroyed the sole copy of a massive Senate torture report in the custody of the agency’s internal watchdog group, Yahoo News reported Monday.
* Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions.
* University title and salary generator.
* Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals.
* Attempt no landings etc: Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected.
* Outrageous slander: The Warriors Still Aren’t the Best Team Ever.
* Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets. Bruenighazi.
* Against the Crowdfunding Economy.
* In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.
* What Kinds of Difference Do Superheroes Make?: An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz. Part Two.
* NCDOT tries something new to thwart Durham’s Can Opener bridge.
* The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut.
* The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.
* Ted Chiang vs. Chinese logograms.
* An unorthodox anthropologist goes face to face with ISIS. Is the payoff worth the peril?
* CBS All-Access gets a second show. And that’s why The Good Wife had a terrible ending!
* Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen.
* I’m feeling pretty on board with Luke Cage, I have to say.
* As with the comic before it, the film version of The Dark Tower will likely detail a different, later iteration of the series’s defining time loop.
* “Perfect” Donkey Kong score achieved.
* The only Twitter account you need: @LegoSpaceBot.
* No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before. Get with the program, Great Lakes!
* What drought? Nestle plans $35 million plant to bottle water in Phoenix.
* Alas, Venezuela: There has never been a country that should have been so rich but ended up this poor.
* Project Earth is leaving beta.
* In the back room of the morgue.
* But it’s not all bad news: Our Solar System Could Remain Habitable Long After Earth Is Destroyed.
Happy graduation day, Marquette!
Gerry Canavan 