So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links

* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…

* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).

* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!

* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)

* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…

* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.

* J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.

* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.

* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.

* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.

* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.

* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!

* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.

* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.

* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.

* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.

* Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.

* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.

* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.

* How to read Infinite Jest.

* Let the children sue.

* Monsters of climate change.

* Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.

What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?

The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.

* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.

* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.

* The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.

* How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.

* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.

* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.

* Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.

* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.

* Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.

* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.

Politics corner!

* It’s been so long since I posted that this caravan of bloodthirsty women and children isn’t even attacking the US anymore.

* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.

* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.

* Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.

* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!

* I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’

* The political theology of Trump.

* Florida. Why is it always Florida?

* The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.

* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.

* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.

* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.

* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.

* Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.

* Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.

* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.

* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.

* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.

* Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.

* Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.

* Why are we in the Middle East?

* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.

* And Wisconsin’s even worse.

Wisconsin voters cast *54%* of their ballots for Democratic state assembly candidates…and won 36% of the seats.

This is not what democracy looks like. https://t.co/OhN4LNY2B3

— Steve Kantrowitz (@skantrow) November 10, 2018

* Trans rights are human rights.

* Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.

* Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.

* Oops! Our bad!

* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.

* A pandemic killing tens of millions of people is a real possibility — and we are not prepared for it.

* Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.

* What is the evolutionary advantage of death?

* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.

* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.

* Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.

* A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.

* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.

* How to revise Lovecraft.

* How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.

* Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.

* The cruelest optimism: Large-scale humanities Ph.D. tracking effort finds most would do it all over again, if given the choice, and that these Ph.D.s believe their programs prepared them for diverse career paths, especially after the first few years following graduation.

* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.

* Fuck yeah.

* “Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.

* Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?

* The story of a serial SWATter.

* The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”

* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.

* The Strand, New York City’s largest independent bookstore, is owned by a millionaire — and the booksellers who work there are all broke.

* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.

* Twilight of Apu.

* Ross MacDonald is a creator of fake period paper props – books, documents, packaging etc – for use in movies and television.

* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.

* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.

* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.

* Losing Laura.

* This seems fine.

* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.

* The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.

* A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.

* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?

* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.

* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.

* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.

Tuesday Night Links!

* ST: TNG: TNG: Patrick Stewart to Return as Capt. Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series for CBS All Access. Well, that’s something! CBS All Access Is Laying the Groundwork for Non-Stop Star Trek.

#STLV Stewart says he may not be the captain anymore. He may be a very different individual. Setting is 20 years past Nemesis. There are no scripts yet. It will be something very, very different. It will be made with love for the material and the fans.

— TrekMovie.com (@TrekMovie) August 4, 2018

* I’m about a thousand times more excited for the Untitled Captain Picard Project than this Star Wars thing.

* Celebrating Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and black creativity at the first-ever Wakandacon.

* Draft schedule for the Worlding SF conference I’ll be keynoting at this December. Looking forward to it!

* Poem of the day: “A Metaphor.”

* Pedagogy flashback: Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.

* How to Prepare for Class. Against the Grade. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.

* Another list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English).

* That rare thing, a good Twitter thread: What is the most interesting and revealing and hard-to-believe/understand statistic you know?

* Gasp, shock: Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions.

* What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism.

* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”

* Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature.” How Not to Talk About Climate Change. No, we didn’t almost s­olve the climate crisis in the 1980s. When Will Capitalism Answer For Its Crimes?

* 2018 Was Probably Already Doomed, But We Might Have Saved 2030.

* The apocalyptic tone of heatwave-reporting doesn’t go far enough – not when the issue is human extinction.

* ‘Many parts of Earth could become uninhabitable’: Study’s grim warning.

* These 360 Drone Photos of the California Wildfires Are Devastating.

* ‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’ by Alain Badiou.

* Brexit continues to give Trump a run for his money in the deliberate-national-suicide-Olympics.

* Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception. The rise of QAnon Is a Sign That Trumpism Might Not Be Primarily About Trump at All. After mainstream exposure, QAnon is starting to fracture.

* Twilight of Alex Jones.

* Trump just keeps confessing to crimes and it just keeps not mattering.

* Alejandra ultimately decided to “self-deport” to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her. U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants. Worker Charged With Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. Man Detained by ICE Claims He Went Blind in One Eye After Agent Didn’t Believe He Had Diabetes. How Trump Radicalized ICE. Border family separation isn’t “zero tolerance” – CBP looked for parents to charge so they could kidnap kids. New Jersey Jail is Holding Nearly Triple its Capacity in ICE Detainees. What happens after ICE tears your family apart: ‘The storm descended.’ Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Judge upholds ruling that DACA must be restored. The Power of Abolish ICE.

* The Idea of Children.

* “We Need to Fight for Aloha”: Hawaii congressional candidate and democratic socialist Kaniela Ing on taking on Hawaii’s biggest corporations, a bold climate change agenda, and the necessity of opposing US imperialism.

* I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.

* Markets in everything: More Schools Are Buying ‘Active-Shooter’ Insurance Policies.

'Socialism or barbarism' is a bad slogan because 'barbarian' is just a term used by imperial extractors to denigrate the non-conforming nomadic & semi-pastoral populations outside their walls. Instead, I propose a dialectical synthesis: Barbarian Socialism

— 🌎 The 🚀 Cosmist 🌌 Insurrection ✊ 🏴 (@yungneocon) August 1, 2018

* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is: It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear.

* Meanwhile, in serious environmentalism: Trump Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific.

* Fields medal stolen moments after it was awarded.

* There’s so much corruption in the federal government at this point it’s impossible to keep track of.

* A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world.

* The Trader Who Made a Massive Short Bet Against Nintendo.

* NRA Legal Strategy / Fundraising Appeal Goes Viral.

* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.

* How the NYPD recriminalized marijuana after the state decriminalized it. Internal documents reveal how Bronx prosecutors are taught to slow down cases.

* Democrats do the darnedest things.

* ‘The most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of’: Trump panel found no widespread voter fraud, ex-member says.

* 1 In 4 Foster Kids In Missouri Are Taking Strong Psychoactive Drugs And The State’s Not Keeping Track, Lawsuit Says.

* How the Cold War Created Astrobiology.

* A small-town couple left behind a stolen painting worth over $100 million — and a big mystery.

* These The Last Jedi Fans Put on a Mock Court Martial for Poe Dameron.

* Missing the point is the point: Pre-reading Young Aragorn.

* You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead.

* The elderly are particularly vulnerable to “post-hospital syndrome,” some experts believe, and that may be why so many patients return.

* Amazing arbitrage opportunity.

* Reading the Rock’s body.

* Sexuality and gender in science fiction games.

* Somebody get me Michel Foucault on the phone: Open Office Plans Increase Employee Stress, Reduce Productivity.

* Ask your doctor if R’lhygrex is right for you.

* Facebook getting pretty brazen even by Facebook standards.

* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage.

* The Great Recession Never Ended.

* Well, if they’re really sorry.

* Potemkin AI.

* The end of the writers’ room.

* The next stage of the Tesla scam.

* Chilling Testimony in a Tennessee Trial Exposes Lethal Injection as Court-Sanctioned Torture.

* Mom Says Doctors Performed ‘Horrifying’ C-Section Without Anesthesia, Gets $25 Gift Certificate for Her Trouble.

* Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors.

* Here comes Captain Tripps.

* And now they tell me! Why punishing your children doesn’t work.

Thursday Morning Links!

There is not a single part of me that doubts that ALF could be a viable contender in the next Presidential election. I’m not saying he’d win…but I do think it’d be close.

— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 1, 2018

* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Pedagogy, and Social Change. CFP: Teaching 9/11 and Its Aftermaths. CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow: New Conversations & Productive Catalysts Across Science and Humanities Boundaries as the Global Emergency Worsens. CFP: Episodes VII, VIII, IX.

* Boots Riley on communism, Sorry to Bother You, and what kind of political action the present moment demands.

* The ‘feel-good’ horror of late-stage capitalism.

What if the problem isn't stimulants but the mandate for productivity
What if the problem isn't benzos but the mandate to stay calm in actual chaos
What if the problem isn't opioids but the mandate to work like a machine that can't suffer to keep you and your loved ones alive

— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) August 1, 2018

* Unreal.

* Twilight of the omniversity.

* All about QAnon, if you’re just catching up to the latest nonsense.

If you call Qanon people crazy it just hardens their stance. Let's open our intellectual debate to the iconoclasts who believe Democrats, Tom Hanks, and US intel agencies are engaged in a worldwide pedophilic conspiracy to take down Trump. (cc: op-ed page editors.)

— George Zornick (@gzornick) August 1, 2018

* Alex Jones, Pursued Over Infowars Falsehoods, Faces a Legal Crossroads. Man, I hope he loses everything.

* Plymouth State University said Wednesday that a retired professor who defended a convicted child rapist in a letter to the court will not be rehired as an adjunct instructor or “in any other capacity.” Two other faculty members who defended the Plymouth State graduate and high school guidance counselor convicted of sexually assaulting a student will complete sexual harassment training prior to their return to campus and will work closely with other professors upon their return, the university also said.

* “The UNC Board of Governors respects each of the varying opinions within the university community concerning this matter. However, after consulting with legal counsel, neither UNC Chapel Hill nor the UNC System have the legal authority to unilaterally relocate the Silent Sam statue,” the board wrote in a statement. “Thus, the board has no plans to take any action regarding the monument at this time, and we will await any guidance that the North Carolina Historical Commission may offer.”

* But in order to turn a story about the U.S. politics of climate change into a story about the entirety of the human species, Rich has to make a strange argument. He has to dispatch with the two most powerful and prominent enemies of a climate policy in the United States: the fossil-fuel industry and the Republican Party.

* A reminder: Just 90 companies are accountable for more than 60 percent of greenhouse gases.

The idea that ‘people,’ as in the entire human species, are failing to act on climate change is based on the assumption that decisions affecting it are democratically made, which is verifiably false.

— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 1, 2018

It’s not so much the heat or humidity as it is the existential dread that comes from realizing that catastrophic climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilization.

— Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) August 1, 2018

* How the Carr Fire became one of the most destructive fires in California history.

* Europe facing its hottest day ever.

* Here’s a different question one could ask: Could it be that reporters like Chait, who are obsessed with finding the next Watergate and tend to err on the side of military intervention, aren’t exercising enough skepticism?

* Snowflake students have become the target of a new rightwing crusade. But exaggerated claims of censorship reveal a deeper anxiety at the core of modern conservatism.

* Months later I not only considered my own future, but the far-reaching political implications of these cases: Why did the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia find it appropriate to hang virtual life sentences over the heads of 214 people after an indiscriminate mass arrest? How could they have so shamelessly gleaned evidence from far-right groups like Project Veritas, a discredited organization known for making deceptive gotcha videos, as well as the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, and still felt they had a legitimate case? Where was the motivation—the conspiracy—to pursue these cases coming from?

* Immigration crackdown: U.S. soldier honored for service could be heading for ICE custody.

* Everything a grift: Kris Kobach went around helping towns pass anti-immigration ordinances, & then got himself hired to defend them in court. Towns then spent millions on legal fees, faced financial crisis, & usually lost— while Kobach earned $800K.

* ‘Like a kidnapping’: ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video.

* Another migrant child molested at a DHS facility. And a WaPo story about the migrant child who died shortly after their release from an unsafe, unhygienic detention center.

* Source close to Ivanka Trump confirms no one so beautiful could be evil.

A “Purge”-like holiday where one day a year American women are allowed to break their NDAs without getting sued.

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) August 1, 2018

* From the archives: What Is Socialist Feminism?

* Can’t anyone in Congress have a normal hobby?

* Inside the first database that tracks America’s criminal cops.

* Breaking: leftist politics are very popular. Still / again / always.

* The art of the murder mystery.

* Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine.

* Maybe it’s possible to have too much money.

* Nobody powerful ever makes a mistake, MCU edition.

Worth considering: basically nobody responsible for the financial crisis, Iraq War or 9/11 intel/security failures was held accountable or faced serious career consequences. In fact, many of them got richer, became more powerful & accrued more social status. This seems important.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 2, 2018

* Something is happening in America.

Yowza. https://t.co/XRBunwsQZ7 pic.twitter.com/6EiiZkqbqa

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) August 1, 2018

* At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream.

* Running for office again is probably the single most destructive Al Franken could possibly do at this point, so I’m sure he will.

* Parents Are Paying Fortnite Coaches So Their Gamer Kids Can Level Up.

* Pope declares death penalty inadmissible, changing Church’s stance.

* …in the U.S., water park rides are not tightly regulated. Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.

* Can Mars even be terraformed?

* Yikes.

* The Songs We Banned From Our Weddings. The answer to a wedding soundtrack is always just all Motown, I think.

* Film Crit Hulk considers Nanette.

* Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia. No detailwas spared, from a food dish for their cat, Snowball II, to Duff beer cans in the fridge.

But controversy soon erupted in this faux-Springfield mock-up. The homeowner’s association wasn’t keen on having a cartoon house that broke conformity requirements by being painted solar yellow. The sweepstakes winner rejected it outright. And the current owner had to learn to live with the property being a source of perpetual curiosity for fans of the show who brazenly turn her doorknobs and peer through her windows at all hours of the day and night. As it turns out, the reality of living in a fantasy can get a little complicated.

Friday Links!

* I didn’t find it an easy question to answer. I couldn’t deny the accuracy of their observations (other than a tendency to neglect or misunderstand the distinctiveness of the situation in Scotland). Successive British governments have enacted a series of measures that seem designed to reshape the character of universities, not least by reducing their autonomy and subordinating them to ‘the needs of the economy’. ‘Marketisation’ isn’t just a swear-word used by critics of the changes: it is official doctrine that students are to be treated as consumers and universities as businesses competing for their custom. The anticipated returns from the labour market are seen as the ultimate measure of success. Last year the government imposed a new wheeze. Universities are now being awarded Olympic-style gold, silver and bronze medals for, notionally, teaching quality. But the metrics by which teaching quality is measured are – I am not making this up – the employment record of graduates, scores on the widely derided National Student Survey, and ‘retention rates’ (i.e. how few students drop out). These are obviously not measures of teaching quality; neither are they things that universities can do much to control, whatever the quality of their teaching. Now there is a proposal to rate, and perhaps fund, individual departments on the basis of the earnings of their graduates. If a lot of your former students go on to be currency traders and property speculators, you are evidently a high-quality teaching department and deserve to be handsomely rewarded; if too many of them work for charities or become special-needs teachers, you risk being closed down. And most recently of all, there has been the proposal to dismantle the existing pension arrangements for academics and ‘academic-related’ staff, provoking a more determined and better-supported strike than British academia has ever seen.

* What the hell is happening at Michigan State? How Universities Deal With Sexual Harassment Needs Sweeping Change, Panel Says.

* Nobel literature scandal deepens as Jean-Claude Arnault is charged with rape.

* ‘They just took them?’ Frantic parents separated from their kids fill courts on the border. Inside Casa Padre, the converted Walmart where the U.S. is holding nearly 1,500 immigrant children. A Twitter thread. Trump looking to erect tent cities to house unaccompanied children. Defense Contractors Cashing In On Immigrant Kids’ Detention. Administration will house migrant kids in tents in Tornillo, Texas: summertime high, 98, December low, 28. ICE Detained a 50-Year U.S. Resident Outside the Home He Owns and Now It’s Trying to Deport Him. “Zero Tolerance” Crackdown Won’t Stop Border Crossings But It Could Break the Courts. Migrant caravan mom calls for family reunification as fate of asylum claim looms. She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center. A grandmother seeking asylum was separated from her disabled grandson at the border. It’s been 10 months. She Fled to the U.S. After Being Raped Repeatedly by Her Husband. Trump’s New Asylum Rules Would Have Kept Her Out. Trump Administration Launches Effort to Strip Citizenship From Those Suspected of Naturalization Irregularities. It’s Happening Here Because Americans Can’t Admit it’s Happening Here. It’s All Too Much, and We Still Have to Care.

What do you think the hygiene conditions will be like in a “tent city” holding 5000 parentless children, many of whom have already come to the US through dangerous means? How do you think this story ends? How is this being even contemplated?

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 13, 2018

The white nationalists who were installed in government after a failed election are building concentration camps for the children they’re kidnapping from asylum seekers at the border. There’s no other news.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2018

I'm on a plane, so might as well do this. Feeling helpless about the family separations at the border? Guess what, there are many people & organizations who need your help & electeds who need to do more. Things you can do to help parents & kids at the border thread below. 1/

— Alida Garcia (@leedsgarcia) June 9, 2018

No one's really arguing about any of that, that's just the public statements. They ran on that. Can we assume it's worse than what we've been allowed to see? Based on the behavior of the federal government during my lifetime I think we have to.

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) June 15, 2018

“We didn’t invent throwing acid in people’s faces. Someone else did. We’re just throwing acid in people’s faces because we are aware of the concept. The Bible backs this up, by the way. St. Paul tells us, ‘I met Jesus, go nuts with being evil, who cares.’”

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) June 15, 2018

We are sitting in at the offices of Customs and Border Patrol.

Release the asylum seekers and reunite them with their children. End family separation. NOW.

Every hour that goes by is another hour of trauma for these moms, dads, little boys, girls and babies. pic.twitter.com/r6ufZy5G6c

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 13, 2018

You shall not wrong nor oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:20)

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) June 14, 2018

* This is an entirely new angle of ICE abuse that is frighteningly authoritarian and the harbinger of very bad things to come.

* The New York State attorney general’s office filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign.

being a Trump Guy must be very stressful pic.twitter.com/AKZpMsTw7J

— flglmn (@flglmn) June 15, 2018

* A rare person of integrity in this nightmare government: Senior Justice Dept. lawyer resigns after shift on Obamacare.

* In the wake of the horrors currently being done to children in America’s name, here’s one thing we can do: Recognize we’re in a linguistic emergency. We have a president whose single-minded praise for macho might is wearing down even those who refuse to overlook his incompetence. Trump, the only presidential candidate to refer to his penis size during a national debate, wants nothing more than to be seen as powerful and manly, and to align himself with those who project the characteristics he desires. And he’s gotten help—from us. If you’ve ever called Trump “tough” on immigration, note that he just called a dictator “tough” for murdering his citizens. (And “very smart” for staying in power.) That should be a wake-up call to journalists responsible for telling the story of this moment: Stop using the words he routinely chooses to describe himself. And think hard about whether you’re accidentally reinforcing the model of power he’s trying to sell.

* FEMA Blamed Delays In Puerto Rico On Maria; Agency Records Tell Another Story.

* Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs.

* Addressing an imagined reader in the all-too-likely “hot dark world” of our all-too-near human future, William T. Vollmann begins his two-volume, twelve-hundred-plus-page Carbon Ideologies (the second volume of which was published last week) with a curious and characteristically audacious gambit. In the opening pages of Volume I: No Immediate Danger, as he sets out upon this tome concerning fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Vollmann explains: “I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived—namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none.”

* In Name of Free Speech, States Crack Down on Campus Protests.

* Never love anything, it’ll only break your heart: Star Trek: Discovery Showrunners Leave CBS All Access Series.

Sources say the decision to oust Berg and Harberts was based not on the creative but instead for leadership and operational issues. Production on Discovery‘s first five episodes of season two are near completion, with Kurtzman likely taking over for episode six and beyond. Berg and Harberts, who were longtime collaborators with original showrunner Fuller, will likely still be credited on the episodes they oversaw. Sources say the budget for the season two premiere ballooned, with the overages expected to come out of subsequent episodes from Discovery‘s sophomore run. Insiders also stress that Berg and Harberts became increasingly abusive to the Discovery writing staff, with Harberts said to have leaned across the writers room table while shouting an expletive at a member of the show’s staff. Multiple writers are said to have been uncomfortable working on the series and had threatened to file a complaint with human resources or quit the series altogether before informing Kurtzman of the issues surrounding Berg and Harberts. After hearing rumors of HR complaints, Harberts is said to have threatened the staff to keep concerns with the production an internal matter.

That they’re openly admitting their best episode came about by accident isn’t great, either.

* World Cup news! As Saudi Arabia played at the World Cup, the country launched a massive attack on Yemen.

* Everyone Should Root for Peru in the World Cup. FIFA’s Rule Changes Won’t Solve Soccer’s Concussion Problem. 2026.

Can't believe the US finally has a government corrupt enough for FIFA to award us a World Cup.

— Jibblescribbits (@Jibblescribbits) June 13, 2018

* Ugh, don’t ask Amy Poehler about comedy when the world sucks this fucking much.

* A Disgruntled Federal Employee’s 1980s Desk Calendar.

* Suicides by Gun Have Steadily Climbed, Federal Data Shows.

* When Cleveland tried.

* In “Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos,” Christian Davenport tells the backstories of the billionaires who are vying for control of the emerging NewSpace industry. In addition to Musk and Bezos, Davenport writes about Branson and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and an early investor in new spaceflight technologies. The members of the quartet are so similar in type that their biographies, as Davenport relates them, start to blur into one. As boys, they mostly read the same science fiction. (Musk has said that his favorite Robert A. Heinlein novel is “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which is set on a lunar colony where young girls marry men and women are either homemakers or work at beauty shops or brothels.) The space barons were all outsiders as young men; they’re all obsessed with rockets; they all want, more than anything, to win. Their space ventures are supposedly driven by a common goal of elevating or saving humankind, but they don’t always treat others humanely. Elon Musk and the Failure of Our Imagination in Space.

* There were signs early on that the jurors deciding whether Rhines should be sentenced to life in prison or to death might have been considering more than the facts of the case before them. During deliberations, the panel sent a note out to the judge. They had a list of pointed questions about what life in prison would mean. Would Rhines have a cellmate? Would he be allowed to “create a group of followers or admirers”? Would he be allowed to “have conjugal visits”? They apologized if any of the questions were “inappropriate,” but indicated that they were important to their decision-making. The judge declined to answer, telling the jurors that all they needed to know was in the jury instructions they’d received. Eight hours later, they sentenced Rhines to death.

* Bipartisan war party panics as Kim meets Trump. The North Korea Summit Through the Looking Glass.

* The Class Politics of Teeth.

* All versions of Star Wars trend towards the unfilmable/unmerchandizable truth that the Force is actually evil.

* Everything you need to know before The Good Place S3.

* DC edging dangerously close to having a good idea for once.

* Dead fandoms.

* Imagining a better boyhood.

* Antarctica and the end of the world.

* According to the results, Côté shares more than a friendship with Snoopy the chihuahua; they share the exact same Indigenous ancestry.

* The position of the nanny—of the family but not in the family; asked to care and love but only while on the clock—is narratively provocative. And yet unless she is Mary Poppins-level magically perfect, in books and films the nanny is mostly a threat. She is the entry point into a family’s vulnerability, she is the stranger we thought we knew. She is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. She is a Lifetime movie about a family broken apart by a nanny’s violence toward the children or sexual advances toward the husband.

* The headline reads, “Nevada’s most notorious pimp wins Republican primary.”

* The Las Vegas Union That Learned To Beat The House.

* Facebook is malware.

* A thought-provoking thread on vegetarianism and colonialism, though I don’t consider it the end of the argument by any means.

* The astronauts disturbed the Moon’s surface soil by walking and driving a rover on it. As a result, the Moon reflected less of the Sun’s light back out to space, which raised the lunar surface temperature by 1-2 degrees Celsius (1.8-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) where it was disturbed. 

* I’ve never trusted Lasik.

* The World’s Best Pickpocket Reviews The Ocean’s 8 Heist.

* A movie ticket costs somewhere between $10 and $15 and yet MoviePass offers monthly subscription packages for $9.95 that let users can see up to one movie a day. How the hell is that supposed to work?

* The epic hunt for the place on Earth where life started.

* Teachers Fight To Keep Pre-Colonial World History In AP Course.

* University of North Carolina Students Accuse Administration of Artwashing.

* Chloe Dykstra details years of abuse she experienced at the hands of Chris Hardwick both during and after their relationship.

* Reconsidering the cop show.

* Hugh O’Connell reviews Ian McDonald’s Luna: Wolf Moon with an eye towards post-Thatcher neoliberalism.

* No one could have seen this coming.

* This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like.

* This is relatable content: Many animals are shifting from day to night to avoid people.

* Where Your Stuff Goes When You Lose It in Tokyo.

* And this is really happening: Measure to split California into three states qualifies for November ballot. I know it’s a trick, but even still, trading 2-4 Senators for a slightly harder path in the Electoral College seems like a good trade to me. But I bet it’s also illegal, so it’s probably a nonstarter either way.

Weekend Links!

* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”

* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!

* Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities will host a 12-week seminar on the work of Bob Dylan.

* All Hail her most Imperial Majesty, Mother of the Fatherland, Overlord of Vulcan, Dominus of Kronos, Regina Andor, All Hail Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius.

* How democracies die.

* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.

* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…

did anyone predict how the mid-century-and-onward increase in number of celebrities would lead to decades of constant mourning?

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) January 24, 2018

* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.

* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.

* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.

* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.

* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.

* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.

* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.

* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”

Authoritarianism is already here, it’s just unevenly targeted.

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) January 26, 2018

Defund ICE, put its leaders on trial.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2018

* On the fifth floor of a beloved New York institution, the @AMNH, the remains of 12,000 people sit in cabinets and cardboard boxes.

* The female price of male pleasure.

* The gig economy and sexual harassment.

* They should carve Aly Raisman’s entire statement into the walls of the lobby of every athletic organization in the world.

* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.

* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.

[2020 Election]

Donald Trump Jr. (R): I am going to build a giant John Deere lawnmower and use it to run over poor people and minorities

John Johnson (D): Woah, woah, woah. That sounds expensive

— Jules (@Julian_Epp) January 26, 2018

* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.

* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.

* Oh no.

* The world’s richest 2000 billionaires could wipe out extreme poverty with one seventh of what they gained last year.

* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.

* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.

* A world without Holocaust survivors.

* A world without football.

* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.

* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.

* On the greatness of Swastika Night.

* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.

* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.

Wednesday Links!

* People are figuring out that the “anthology” era of Star Wars was a bad idea. And a chilling report from the set of Han Solo: Ron Howard Once Defended Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Calling It “Truly Amazing.”

* Behind the Scenes of Disney’s Donald Trump ‘Hall of Presidents’ Drama.

* The Year of Octavia.

* In the same vein, the proliferating but ever meaningless distinctions between the “bad” Uber and the “good” Lyft have obscured how destructive the rise of ride-sharing has been for workers and the cities they live in. The predatory lawlessness that prevails inside Valley workplaces scales up and out. Both companies entered their markets illegally, without regard to prevailing wages, regulations, or taxes. Like Amazon, which found a way to sell books without sales tax, this turned out to be one of the many illegal boons.

* Democrats and the working class.

* Senate postpones health care vote as critical mass of Republicans defect. Keep calling! Tens of thousands per year. Trumpcare kills.

* This chart shows the stunning trade-off at the heart of the GOP health plan.

* Democrats Help Corporate Donors Block California Health Care Measure, and Progressives Lose Again.

* Destroying the university in Illinois.

* Chaffetz calls for $2,500 legislator/month housing stipend.

Buy fewer iPhones, Jason https://t.co/4Hr5OdLRl2

— Jenna Ruddock (@natlsciservice) June 27, 2017

* Sometimes ideology critique just writes itself.

* And Now Director Jon Watts Claims Peter Parker Was In Iron Man 2.

* Someone’s Trying to Adapt Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series Again.

* I say teach the controversy.

* Communism — for kids!

* As Lake Chad vanishes, seven million people are on the brink of starvation.

* The inside story of how TMZ quietly became America’s most potent pro-Trump media outlet.

* So what is lectureporn? It is the media spectacle of a lecture whose audience is the opponent of the lecture’s intended target.

* Trinity Suspends Targeted Professor. And U Delaware. Why can’t free speech advocates ever defend adjunct professors and people of color? Stop firing professors for having controversial views, says academic.

*  But as the land enters its 120th year in the family, the Allens are struggling to hold on to it. Because of ambiguities surrounding the land’s title, there is no primary owner of the property; all of the heirs of the original owners—and there are more than 100 known heirs—are legally co-owners. As such, the land is classified as “heirs’ property,” a designation that makes it vulnerable to being sold without the family’s full consent. As the Allens attempt to overcome a stacked legal system—exacerbated by corrupt lawyers and predatory developers—they are at the center of a decades-long fight to retain black-owned land across the South.

* Social media won’t let toxic grudges die.

* Trump’s EPA won’t let toxic pesticides die.

* Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize.

* Amazing the stories that don’t even rate as scandals in this trainwreck administration.

* As predicted, the Super Nintendo Classic is on its way.

NINTENDO: We have announced the SNES Classic. It contains some of the best games ever made. We have made only one. May the odds be ever in y

— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) June 26, 2017

* The Tory-DUP Deal Proves the Magic Money Tree Is Real.

* Lynching and the sick history of the death penalty.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging—despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, “We’ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.” In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having “avoided” a lynching.

* Huge Star Trek: Discovery scoop: the entire series is a Holodeck program Riker is running during a commercial break.

* When you don’t want your hip retro soundtrack to be scooped.

* “Nuclear power plant faces backlash after choosing interns by way of a bikini competition.” Photos at the link, of course; this is the Internet, after all…

* The ‘i before e, except after c’ rule is a giant lie.

* The weird logic of Facebook’s hate speech algorithms.

* SF short of the night: They Will All Die in Space.

* An AI Generates the Inspirational Posters We Need Right Now.

* And because you demanded it, it’s back up at An und für sich: Why remake The Handmaid’s Tale now? Gilead as ISIS.

Friday Morning!

* Trump White House finding a new bottom, day after day after… whoa. Turning Point? They’re not even pretending. The Biggest Political Story in Decades. In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry. Inside Trump’s anger and impatience. Another inside story. Time to shut everything down. And then on the third day he threatened to blackmail Comey with secret White House tapes. Only the Rock can save us now.

* The primary takeaway of the last 18 months is that no one should ever use email for any reason.

* Though this chart from the New York Times seems pretty definitive that the Comey letter didn’t determine the 2016 election.

DID YOU KNOW when Trump finally goes down in flames and brings half the country down with him your dad will say it was all Obama’s fault

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2017

A person who still supports Trump after this week probably can’t be reached. Sorry.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 11, 2017

COMEY (2041)
COMEY, PART TWO (2043)
COMEY: THE COMPLETE SAGA (chronological re-edit for TV, 2044)
COMEY, PART THREE (2057; regrettable)

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2017

* Huge relief after only 11 million people vote for a fascist.

* Trump’s attacking the Census.

* Journalist arrested for trying to ask HHS Secretary Tom Price a question.

* What if populism is not the problem, but the solution?

* Alcohol and academia.

* Twitter and academia.

* By refusing to negotiate with recently unionized graduate workers, Yale president Peter Salovey has announced in writing that the university will defy US labor law.

* Meanwhile, at the greatest public university in the world: Also included in the itemized spending was a dinner tab worth more than a year of tuition.

[concert]
SINGER: hows everyone doin tonight
CROWD: woo
ME (from the back in a normal speaking voice): it's actually been a tough few months

— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) May 9, 2017

* Locked Up for Being Poor. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county. All the money’s gone, nowhere to go.

* Kristen Gillibrand, for and against. All this for someone who already ruled it out!

* Despite the confidence that the backlash to the healthcare bill will benefit Democrats, this doesn’t seem like good politics to be gleefully cheering on something you think is going to literally kill people. Especially, when you’re just singing over the supposed political benefits.

* History Will Remember These 217 House Republicans for Their Inhumanity.

* The Democratic Party Is a Ghost. Losing West Virginia. Priorities in Delaware. The Resistance, but not just as a joke. Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.

* Trumpism is coming from the suburbs. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.

* A study at Demos says voter suppression flipped Wisconsin. Some Words of Caution.

* I’m sure no one could find this objectionable: A top government official overseeing detentions and deportations is heading to a private prison company at the end of the month, according to a source with firsthand knowledge.

* The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.

* On Black English.

* Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused.

* How a Utah county silenced Native American voters — and how Navajos are fighting back.

*  The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis.

* How Marquette Is Becoming More Diverse.

* Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong.

* This is how SETI plans to find alien life by 2037.

* Chicago Approves Plan To Block Trump’s Name on His Tower With Giant, Flying Pigs.

* A Defense of the Tuvel Open Letter, at the Chronicle. And on the other side.

'In the XKCDification of political protest the demand has been replaced by the in joke, the threat to power by the witty signal to peers'

— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) April 22, 2017

* How many Death Row prisoners are disabled? All of them.

* The length schools will go to cover up for bullies never ceases to amaze me.

* District: The Game of Gerrymandering for the Whole Family.

* Secret military space shuttle rattles Florida.

* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.

* HIV life expectancy ‘near normal’ thanks to new drugs.

* Another neurological disease unexpectedly linked to gut bacteria.

* U.S. to Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe, Officials Say.

* Six individuals who learned that they descended from slaves sold by Georgetown University over 175 years ago reflect on family and life.

* Private schools have a plan to kill the high school transcript that will be totally fair and not offer their students an unfair advantage in any way.

* Stephen Fry is being investigated for blasphemy. Amazing.

* That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox.

* The Girls’ Soccer Team That Joined a Boys’ League, and Won It.

* Winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.

* Write the book you needed to read when you were a child. Troubled Wisconsin man goes on 50 state killing spree. Guns and Roses tones it down. Our future in space. They fucking killed him. Top ten book rebrands, all-time. I hacked into Mike Pence’s email. Maybe I should give the Yankees another look. A new favorite metaphor. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

* And I don’t care how pretty or enigmatic it is, nothing will ever make Blade Runner 2049 a good idea.

February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28

* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…

* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.

* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.

* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.

* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.

* Presenting the Nebula finalists.

* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.

* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.

* Comics studies comes of age.

* The Capitalocene.

* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.

* NEH, NEA, Americorps.

* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?

* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.

* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.

REPUBLICANS: Hi, we’re ethnic cleansers!

DEMOCRATS: And *we’re* the loyal opposition!

BOTH: And together we’re [INHUMAN SCREECHING]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2017

* Donald Trump is unpopular enough that Republicans could lose the House, but there’s a lot of uncertainty.

* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.

* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.

Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.

The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.

* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.

* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!

* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.

* Preserving video games.

* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.

* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.

* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.

* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.

* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.

* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!

* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.

* Why facts don’t change our minds.

* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.

* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.

* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.

* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.

* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.

* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.

* The last days of Standing Rock.

* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.

* Grad student Zachary Turpin discovers a long lost Walt Whitman novel, about a year after he discovered a long lost Whitman self-help treatie.

* “For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings.”

* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.

* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!

* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.

* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.

* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.

* Radical feminism finds a way.

* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.

* Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists.

* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.

* Andrew Cuomo is so obviously the worst possible Democrat for 2020 I don’t see how they can possibly do anything else.

Republicans seek however many votes they need to relegalize slavery.

Democrats seek one vote less than they would need to ever do anything.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2017

* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.

* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.

* The kids are all right.

* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!

* This one’s okay.

* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!

* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.

* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.

* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.

* Uber is doomed.

* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.

Sunday Links!

* CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2017. And here’s a CFP for a special issue on Polish science fiction.

* Do Earth laws apply to Mars colonists?

* The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible.

* When We Feared Skyscraper Living: J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. I thought the recent movie adaptation was great; I wish it had made a bigger splash.

* One of the startling facts to emerge is that while seven Supreme Court justices (Brennan, Marshall, Powell, Blackmun, Stevens, Breyer, and Ginsburg) have indicated that they think capital punishment should be ruled categorically unconstitutional, and several have renounced their previous rulings upholding capital punishment, no justice has ever moved in the opposite direction from questioning the death penalty to upholding it.

* Even the machines have turned on Trump.

* …if the Republican Party does not evolve, the Republican Party is going to die. The Republican Party at the End of the World. If you want a vision of the future.

* America’s cheese glut is really getting out of hand.

* Where are the Dylan McKays of yesterday?

* A viral obituary for the Great Barrier Reef has coral scientists seeing red.

* Good news everyone.

* Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros #copyright for the coin sound (1985).

* Asgardia, Proposed Space-Based Nation Accepting Citizenship Applications.

* How (Not!) To Be Inclusive: Deaf Academic version.

* Always reblog: Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Busy Town Jobs. And elsewhere in the 21st century: Uber’s Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic.

Tom the Dancing Bug 1215 richard scarry

Taking a Break from All Your Thursdays Sure Would Help a Lot

* Building the God Machine: Google is restructuring to put machine learning at the core of all it does.

* Will Robocars Kick Humans Off City Streets? Your Self-Driving Car Will Be Programmed to Kill You—Deal With It.

* More on Game of Thrones‘s plot problems: Game of Thrones’ “Battle of the Bastards” looked great, but it didn’t make any damn sense. This time the big problem is Ramsey Bolton as Republic serial villain.

* There Is No Left Brexit.

* How Not to Study Donald Trump.

* ‘Not Guilty’ Verdict in the Death of Freddie Gray. From the reporting this one sounds like it was always going to be a hard sell.

* Surprise poll: Clinton leads Trump in Arizona. Should Clinton Be More Concerned About Pennsylvania?

* The congressional sit-in was not just cynical political theater — it was for a deeply reactionary cause. The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For a Bad, Stupid Bill. The Use of Error-Prone and Unfair Watchlists Is Not the Way to Regulate Guns in America.

In conclusion, America not only increasingly ungovernable but prone to waves of irrationalism for which no one is ever held to account.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2016

In conclusion, America not only increasingly ungovernable but prone to waves of irrationalism for which no one is ever held to account.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2016

* How Democrats mounted their guns sit-in.

* Four months as a private prison guard.

* The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a race-conscious admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin, putting an apparent end to one of the most closely watched cases in higher education.

* The Death Penalty Case Where Prosecutors Wrote the Judge’s ‘Opinion.’

* How to Prepare Professors Who Thought They’d Never Teach Online.

* The Clintons Have a For-Profit College Problem Of Their Own.

* Racial Literacy as a Professor’s Responsibility.

* Renters Are Making More, And Landlords Get It All.

* “After being roofied twice, I realized I didn’t always know who was watching me. And how dangerous that is.”

* Senate Confirms First-Ever Native American Woman As Federal Judge. I should know better than to be surprised by first-evers at this point.

* The strange and conflicting world views of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

* Uber data suggests that drivers overall in three major U.S. markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — earned less than $13.25 an hour after expenses in late 2015, according to calculations based on more than a million trips.

* True facts: Why Bubba Ho-Tep May Be the Most Perfect B-Movie Ever Made.

* “You’re Not Worried Nearly Enough about China.”

* A Young Athlete’s World of Pain, and Where It Led: Kosta Karageorge, an Ohio State wrestler and football
player who hid concussion symptoms because he felt it was the manly thing to do, killed himself in 2014.

* New Star Trek Fan Film Guidelines Limit Productions To Half-Hour Concepts. Teasing the new Star Trek series: one story over thirteen episodes.

* Oh Man, Bad Plan, No Canal: Panama.

* And if you want a vision of the future.

The ruling class has decided the solution to climate change is to build walls and militarize. Thanks for playing everybody

— Gavin (@gavinsaywhat) June 23, 2016

Off to MLA Links!

* CFP: Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

* “Man who changed name to Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop faces 5 years in prison on drug charges.”

* Kim Stanley Robinson Receives 2016 Robert A. Heinlein Award.

* Your daily dose of pop culture art.

* GOP lawmakers call for firing of Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle.’ Wheaton College seeks to fire Christian professor over view of Islam. Florida Atlantic Fires Sandy Hook Denier. Professor Removed From Course Over Vulgarity Waiver.

* Oregon and the Injustice of Mandatory Minimums. Libertarian Fairy-Tales: The Bundy Militia’s Revisionist History in Oregon.

* How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks.

* “This is the United States of America and we have private property here. This is not a communist country. We own land, and land use is an attribute of property ownership,” he says. “Food doesn’t stay on the farm it was grown on. We share our food, we share our energy, we share our oil and gas. I can sell land to anybody. Why would I treat water any differently?”

* Shelters near capacity in Milwaukee County.

* Wisconsin schools earn a B-, over the nation’s gentleman’s C.

* As it happens, these new Star Wars comics are good comics precisely because they are restricted by the Star Wars franchise. Rather than engage in the default marketing narratives of mainstream superhero comics — killing off a character, or staging a world-changing event, or redesigning costumes, all ways of fooling readers who know better into thinking that things will actually change in significant ways — these comics tell serial stories aimed at no specific resolution. They promise nothing but play. Sure, okay, but where is your God now? More LARB Star Wars: Making Things Right: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.”

* The Secret Origin of The Force Awakens’ Adorably Angriest Stormtrooper. (It’s canon.) What the Seven Star Wars Films Reveal about George Lucas. All the Backstory You Desperately Want to Know About The Force Awakens.

* Jacob Brogan reviews The Census-Taker.

* Elsewhere on the Brogan beat: What’s the Deal With Geoengineering? Your Geoengineering Cheat Sheet.

* Existential riddles.

* Skynet watch.

* SF for social change.

* “The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.”

* Really, though, how did this happen? We are all complicit.

* Social Justice Warrior (level 2).

* Presenting the sperm switch.

* Gene Editing Cures Animal Of Genetic Disease For The First Time.

* Today in unholy abominations.

* Today in the 2016 election: Former U.S. attorney: Clinton could face criminal indictment. Why this social feminist is not voting for Hillary. A warlock in Mexico has predicted that Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of America.

* What not to wear to your MLA interview.

* Grading abolition watch: Better-Looking Female Students Get Better Grades.

* Student evaluation abolition watch: Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness.

* When Your Curriculum Has Been Tumblrized.

* The CEO of your company has probably already earned your 2016 salary this year.

* …according to the state of California, ten-year-olds should also know enough to “voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently” waive their right to remain silent before they are interrogated by police, so the statements that they make are admissible, should there be further criminal proceedings, in a court of law.

* Get this traffic camera a Pulitzer.

* Twitter announces plan to ruin the whole point of Twitter.

* WSJ covers one of my favorite sites on the net.

* That Dragon, Cancer: A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever.

* Education metrics, y’all.

* The Death Penalty’s Last Stand.

* A people’s history of Blossom.

* Annotating Harvard.

* I’m about to have seen things you people won’t have believed.

* The sad core of the gun debate.

* Deadwood Reunion Movie ‘Is Going to Happen,’ Promises HBO President. THAT’S LEGALLY BINDING.

* Rest in peace, Schneider.

* And of course you had me at Gruesome and Surreal Surgical Illustrations from the 15th–19th Centuries.

Star Wars Day! Yay! Episode III Procrastination of the Procrastination

(episode one, the procrastination menace) (episode two, attack of the procrastination)

* Secrets of a lonely childhood revealed!

* A Brief Visual History of People Waiting in Line for Star Wars.

* The Tides of Lust: Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977. In the Butler archives there’s a ton of her thoughts on the Star Wars franchise, including her class notes for the Clarion classes where she discussed it. Really interesting stuff.

* And speaking of which: a CFP for a Butler essay collection.

@hoodedu She loved EMPIRE, thought Lando was a bad joke, didn’t like the Ewoks.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2015

@hoodedu Lando “played painfully self-consciously, written poorly”; she preferred the Yaphet Kotto part in ALIEN.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2015

@hoodedu What I have written down is from her Clarion notebook, where she gave a story lecture using SW: “Sugary cute Ewoks < Wookies”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2015

* Evacuate? In my moment of triumph? J.J. Abrams also apologizes for Star Trek Into Darkness.

SMASH CUT TO: LATER THAT NIGHT https://t.co/H6VxKdHvdy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* Apropos of this New Yorker cartoon, this profile of Ahmed Best is one of the best things I’ve read about Phantom Menace.

* People are still arguing in the mentions of this Tumblr post on jury nullification, over two years later.

* There’s No College P.C. Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters.

* Rewind: How the U.S. Military Turned Santa Claus Into a Cold War Icon.

* Out today: Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself.

* Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight Of The Adjunct Professor.

* I expected to find at least a couple prisons within a mile of a toxic site — after all 89 percent of all New Jersey residents live within a mile of a toxic site. What I didn’t expect is that over half of New Jersey’s state prisons would be toxic sites. The WNYC map, using information from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection website, identifies seven out of the 13 New Jersey state prisons as toxic sites. Plus, these toxic prison sites are often surrounded by more contaminated sites.

* In US, poverty dampens genetic influence on IQ.

* The Silent Collapse Of The Death Penalty In The United States.

* The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing.

* The Disaster Most Likely to Cause Global Famine Is Not an Earthquake, Storm, Tsunami, or Flood. I knew it, it’s capitali–oh, no, drought, it’s drought.

* And Streaming TV Isn’t Just a New Way to Watch. It’s a New Genre.

Tuesday Links!

* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.

* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:

Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”

* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:

October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction

October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)

October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference

* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.

* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).

* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?

* The Humanities at the End of the World.

* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.

* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.

* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.

* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.

* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.

* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.

* The Uses of Orphans.

* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.

* Reading Lolita at 12.

* A Centre for Laziness Studies.

* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.

* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.

* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.

* The politics of the campaign mixtape.

* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.

* The return on the tontine.

* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”

* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.

* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?

* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.

* First, they came for my assault rifle.

* Nihilistic password security questions.

* The end of the Perkins loan.

* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”

* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.

* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.

* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.

* The end of Moore’s Law?

* The end of UNC?

* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.

* If it’s good enough for Zappos…

* Generation Debt.

* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.

* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.

* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.

* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.

* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.

* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.

* Marquette v. Cosby.

* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.

* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?

* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”

* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.

* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.

* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.

* Hydrofracking ruins everything.

* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”

* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.

* Research shows that in Pennsylvania’s public schools skin color, not economics, determines how much money districts get.

* End zero-tolerance school discipline.

* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.

* The law, in its majestic finality…

* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.

* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.

* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?

* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.

* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.

* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.

* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.

* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”

* As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us.

* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.

* What’s the most American ______ ever made?

* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”

* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…

Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost

* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.

* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.

* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.

* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.

* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.

* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.

* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.

* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.

* TurnItIn doesn’t even work.

* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.

* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.

* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.

* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.

* Hobbes v. Snoopy.

* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.

* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.

* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.

* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!

* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.

* Coca-Cola and the denialists.

* Life extension and prison.

* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.

* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.

* What If Stalin Had Computers?

* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.

* On average, it’ll take four minutes for you to get to the end of this piece, and quite frankly you should be spending those four minutes asleep.

* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.

* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.

* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.

* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”

* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.

* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”

* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”

* Understanding Neal Stephenson.

* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.

* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.

* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.

* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.

* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?

* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?

* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.

* The climate hackers.

* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.

* In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

* The bail trap.

* The end of Columbia House.

* An oral history of Six Feet Under.

* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.

* Being Stephen Colbert.

* Happy Earth Overshoot Day.

* The new Cold War is a Corn War.

* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.

* Banksy’s Dismaland.

* Twilight of the Bomb.

* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.

* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.

* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.

* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?

* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.

* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.

* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.

* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.

* Here comes Star Wars Land.

* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!

* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.

* Hell, with same-day delivery.

* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.

* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.

* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.

In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”

* Science proves the universe is slowly dying

* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.

* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.

* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.

* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.

* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”

* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.

* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.

* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.

* Don’t bring your dogs to work.

* Today in Wikipedia hoaxes.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.

* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.

* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.

* Don’t say it unless you mean it.

* And we shall Truffle Shuffle no more forever.

Tuesday Links!

* The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism interviews my friend Ramzi Fawaz about his exciting new book on the X-Men in the 1970s: The New Mutants.

* David Foster Wallace’s blurbspeak.

* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo Will Be Published In October.

* Scientist studies Diplomacy game to reveal early signs of betrayal.

* US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence.

* Whatever happened to Gary Cooper: You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”

* The fire next time: The Pension Crisis at Public Universities.

* The Clinton plan for college. This summary leaves out all the awful disruptivation and neoliberalization stuff that will be part of any actual plan, so it sounds great.

* Widespread use of private email revealed a day after Wise resigns. The Revelations in Phyllis Wise’s Emails. Legal experts react. It’s so bad the board is going to vote on whether to pull her $400,000 golden parachute.

* Academic Freedom at UIUC: Freedom to Pursue Viewpoints and Positions That Reflect the Values of the State.

* More on Duquesne’s proposition that adjunct unions would interfere with its Catholic mission.

* SeaWorld sees profits plunge 84% as customers desert controversial park.

* The Making of the American Police State.

* The Socrates of the National Security Agency.

* Police Union In Missouri Declares ‘Darren Wilson Day’ On Shooting Anniversary. Yankees’ Minor League Affiliate Holds ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Event On Anniversary Of Michael Brown’s Death.

* One Holdout Juror Was Likely Why James Holmes Avoided Death Penalty.

* This Woman Was Awarded $685,737 After Learning Her Boyfriend (And Father of Her Child!) Was an Undercover Cop Sent to Spy on Her.

* Comic book movies and the forgotten art of the ending. You heard it here first!

* Astro Boy and the atom.

* The big Superman reveal (from the pre-52 DC Universe) that DC never got around to revealing.

* Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics.

* No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games.

* Netflix’s Dystopian Show 3% To Be Developed Entirely In Brazil.

3% takes place in a world where most of the population lives in “Hither”: a decadent, miserable, corrupt place. When people reach 20 years of age, they go through the “Process”, the only chance to get to “Thither” – the better place, with opportunities and promises of a dignified life. Only three percent of the applicants are approved by the Process that will take the applicants to their limit, putting them in terrifying, dangerous situations and testing their convictions through moral dilemmas.

* More incredibly bad behavior in SF fandom. A little more context here.

* Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct. Colleges Under Investigation for Sexual Assault Wonder What Getting It Right Looks Like.

* Peter Thiel, übermensch.

* Here come the automated trucks. Kids today don’t even want to drive anymore (or their helicopter parents won’t let them)!

* The Amazonization of Everything.

* On Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon.

* Point: Please don’t have sex with robots. Counterpoint: Humans should be able to marry robots.

* Point: They clearly should have let Max Landis write Fantastic Four. Counterpoint: The Fantastic Four Are Jerks.

* Two interesting essays on sex work and sugar daddies from TNI’s “Daddy” issue: “Letter to a Young Baby” and “You Deserve It, Sweetie.”

* Atlas Shrugs Google Rebrands.

"We named ourselves after a gurgle, clothed ourselves in primary colors and cartoons, and have now graduated to the alphabet."

— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015

Actually, there's probably something to be written about Google's mobilization of signifiers of infancy, hopefully by @tylerbickford.

— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015

Google: “Don’t be evil” Alphabet: “Evil is just one of our businesses”

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) August 10, 2015

Natalia’s tweet became a whole great blog post on modernism, childhood, and tech.

* When Shakespeare toked.

* Why do hotels have ice machines?

* Why do pro wrestlers die so young?

* Did they find Croatoan?

* Prison-industrial-wildfire complex: Nearly half the people fighting wildfires wreaking havoc across California are prison inmates.

* Sandernistas would do well to reflect on one thing.  In a few months’ time, Sanders’s campaign will be gone. He will not win. … But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away.  And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. A useful corrective, I think, though my intuition remains that this is one brand of underpantsgnomism competing with another for underpants-gnome supremacy.

* Diseases of the twenty-first century: Foot Orgasm Syndrome.

* This could actually be interesting: Harvard Professor Larry Lessig To Explore Democratic Presidential Run.

* Because you demanded it: Werner Herzog’s Ant-Man.

* Science has discovered a new pentagon.

* And while the lion still remains at large, Milwaukee remembers its polar bear.