Posts Tagged ‘Deadpool’
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I’ve been doing:
- I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
- I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
- I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
- We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
- I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
- I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
- My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
- I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
- I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
- And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
- SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
- Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
- Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
- Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
- CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
- The war on critical race theory.
- The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
- The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
- Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
- Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
- Ground operations.
- Reflections on the Market.
- Dark academia.
- How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
- The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
- The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
- Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
- Firsting in Research.
- A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
- “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
- Reagan broke everything.
- The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
- Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
- Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
- All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
- A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
- University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
- The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
- ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
- Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
- Every day a new sadness.
- Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
- How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
- Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
- Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.
- How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
- Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
- We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
- Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
- The Airline Safety Revolution.
- Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
- Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
- Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
- It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
- No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
- A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
- Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
- Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
- The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
- The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
- Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
- The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
- How much money does a writer need?
- Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
- The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
- Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
- The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
- It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.
- Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
- So you want to acknowledge the land?
- Decolonize Oregon Trail.
- Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
- Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
- Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
- How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
- There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
- Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.
- We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
- How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
- Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
- America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
- A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
- What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
- Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
- 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
- The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
- The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
- I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
- How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
- Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
- “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
- ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- Two from Ted Chiang: “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
- Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
- Sertãopunk.
- The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
- Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
- Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
- The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
- The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
- The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
- Top 20 Irishisms.
- Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
- 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.
Thursday Links!
* * The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.
* My colleague C.J. Hribal’s essay “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” has won a Pushcart Prize.
* Sure! Why not.
* We did it! Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes.
* CFP: Indiana Jones and the Edited Collection. CFP: Blackness and Disability. CFP: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom.
* WISCON 42! “Doing Justice To The Archive: The Octavia E. Butler Papers.”
* There is only one Trump scandal.
* Stolen election pays big dividends.
* No one could have predicted this shocking turn of events.
* I’ll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy’s net returns to the University. Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish. Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA’s Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million). There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period. There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated. More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements. (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.) And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.
* Profession: The Sky Is Falling.
* Scandal after scandal focuses scrutiny on USC leadership, culture.
* The Best Question To Ask on the Last Day of Class.
* ‘Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay’: the rise of the religious left.
* Traditional Disobedience: Renewing the Legacy of Catholic Activism.
* After decades of dwarfs and elves, writers of color redefine fantasy.
* Magic: The Gathering and capitalism.
* Killing All Humans: A Flowchart.
* David Foster Wallace was terrible to women.
* The Two Crucial Filmmaking Elements Causing All Your Movie Feuds.
* Arrested Development season five has been managed so badly by Hurwitz and Netflix that it’s practically begging to be boycotted. More here.
* Marvel and the End of Counterprogramming.
* HBO’s Watchmen series sounds worse than I imagined.
* What Deadpool 2’s fridging controversy says about comics culture’s gender gap.
* Two Americans were detained by a Border Patrol agent after he heard them speaking Spanish. Gay Army chaplain struggles to save husband from deportation. Trump Gang Dragnet Caught a Teen Who ICE Said Looked Like He Was in MS-13. He Wasn’t. “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
* Breaking #MAGA: A man posed for months as an ICE agent. A traffic stop led his girlfriend to unravel the truth.
* Jordan Peterson, The Intellectual We Deserve.
* Shock: 2013 Chicago School Closings Failed To Help Students.
* The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica. Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system.
* Milwaukee cops abuse NBA star Sterling Brown. New York Jets chairman, brother of Trump ambassador, says he’ll pay fines for team players who protest during anthem.
* He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill.
* Immortality. Statement of teaching philosophy. Can YOU hit the bullseye?
* And huge, if true: America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!
* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.
The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.
* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?
* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.
* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”
* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.
* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.
* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.
* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.
* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.
* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.
* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.
* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?
* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.
* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.
* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.
* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.
* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”
* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.
* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.
* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.
* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
Friday Links Part Two Has Sent Layoff Notices to All Employees
* With state funding cut off due to the ongoing budget impasse, Chicago State University has announced all 900 employees, including the university president, are receiving layoff notices. This is stunning.
* On the other side of the country and the other side of pessimism: SFSU pledges to maintain funding for College of Ethnic Studies. “College faculty, however, said the financial boost promised Thursday won’t cover all of its costs.”
* The Secret History of Deadpool.
* R-Rated Superhero Stories Are Inherently Revisionist.
* Nobody ever said creeping fascism has to mean no laughs. Well, maybe one person said.
* Sci-Fi/Fantasy “Best Of” Lists: A Visualization.
* A Statistical Analysis Of Stephen Colbert’s First 100 Episodes Of ‘The Late Show.’
Gerry Canavan 