Posts Tagged ‘delicious Coca-Cola’
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* CFP: Tolkien/Whedon.
* A people’s history of New Coke.
* The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage.
* Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.
* Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say. Scientists are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.
* Ugly academic war ends with unprecedented apology from USC, $50-million settlement.
* The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim. Alaska is having an environmental and political meltdown. Alaskan glaciers melt at fastest pace in centuries. Trump Administration Is Suppressing Science and Public Opinion to Drill the Arctic Refuge. Six shocking climate events that happened around the world this week. Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans? A Ferocious Heat in Delhi. India staring at a water apocalypse. All Mississippi Beaches Close Due To Toxic Algae Bloom. The Internet Is Drowning. Fish die-offs in Wisconsin expected to double by 2050, quadruple by 2100, report says. Breaching a ‘carbon threshold’ could lead to mass extinction. And sure let’s go back to killing all the bees while we’re at it.
* Fear of immigration raids looms as plans for ICE ‘family operation’ move forward. FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches. (81% of ‘suspects’ flagged by Met’s police facial recognition technology innocent, independent report says.) Hungry, Scared and Sick: Inside the Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex. ‘It’s a Terrible Existence’: The Crisis of Emergency Dialysis Care for Undocumented Immigrants. ICE deports dozens of Cambodian refugees. Officials expect Trump to try and add citizenship question to the census via executive action this week — an idea officials say was not a serious one as recently as Wednesday. Attorney General Barr tells SC reporters he’s found a legal recourse on Census question. Trump Lied to the Supreme Court, and Four Justices Don’t Care. Whatever’s coming, the career folks couldn’t abide.
* On the migrant crisis, European governments are failing the first test of climate change.
* The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders.
* Amazon Workers Plan Prime Day Strike at Minnesota Warehouse.
* Democratic candidates’ school integration plans, explained.
* Democrats will never allow the system to be reformed.
* But this time around, I don’t think 2007–8 produced anything. The resulting policies were, if anything, even more neoliberal. But the problem is that neoliberalism has lost its attractiveness and legitimacy, so is now enforced by authoritarian and right-populist means.
* The Millennial Condition: History, Revolution, and Generational Analysis.
* To see how the Koch brothers’ free-market utopia operates, look no further than Corpus Christi.
* I’ve always been cold on Russiagate, but I’ll believe any conspiracy theory you have to sell me about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained. The Mystery Around Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune and How He Made It. How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime. Epstein indictment renews questions about earlier case handled by Trump Cabinet official. When Jeffrey Epstein Joked About Sex Abuse. DA knew Jeffrey Epstein was a dangerous pedophile when arguing for leniency. Flashback to 2003. Inside Epstein’s $56 Million Mansion: Photos of Bill Clinton, Woody Allen and Saudi Crown Prince. Barr won’t recuse, again.
* So much corruption you can’t even keep it all straight: Investigation Intensifies Into Top Trump Fund-raiser.
* Nancy Pelosi Has Chosen Her War, and It’s With Her Own Party’s Future.
* Progressive Boomers Are Making It Impossible For Cities To Fix The Housing Crisis.
* The Bernie-Warren Suicide Pact to Save America.
* Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It. Don’t Count on U.S. Regulators to Make Self-Driving Cars Safe for Pedestrians.
* MSP troopers blow through stop sign, arrest driver that ran into them.
* Most Americans like to think of their country as a meritocracy, a system that rewards hard work and intelligence over privilege. But if you look at how things actually work, @sarahrlnrd argues, it’s clear the U.S. is more of an aristocracy…
* Far from Home saving the MCU from itself.
* MLMs Are A Nightmare For Women And Everyone They Know.
* When Philip K. Dick turned to Christianity.
* Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now.
* When a car crashed outside of tiny Tonopah, Nevada, volunteer EMS workers raced to the scene in minutes. But ever since Tonopah’s hospital closed, the town is now hours away from the nearest emergency room.
* Another animal intelligence roundup.
* Zoos Called It a ‘Rescue.’ But Are the Elephants Really Better Off? Despite mounting evidence that elephants find captivity torturous, some American zoos still acquire them from Africa — aided by a tall tale about why they needed to leave home.
* Principal Refused to Call the Holocaust a Fact. Five seconds later: Principal Who Tried to Stay ‘Politically Neutral’ About Holocaust Is Removed.
* Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt.
* On average, older adults spend over half their waking hours alone.
* A retired teacher found some seahorses off Long Beach. Then he built a secret world for them.
* The Rise of the Professional Dungeon Master.
* Baseball has a home-run problem.
* Will Impossible Burgers be the norm for Gen Z?
* And if aliens call, what should we do? Scientists want your opinion.
The Sadness(es) of BACK TO THE FUTURE
Longtime readers will know I have a very soft spot for Back to the Future, a series of films I have adored since I was a child and now internalized to a degree that is perhaps unwise. So it’s something of a mixed bag to have lived too long and made it to October 21, 2015, both in the obvious sense that we never got our hover cars and also in the more abstractly philosophically sense that this is the last day depicted in the series, and thus we are now definitely and irrefutably living in that weird space of sadness after the future itself.
We’re doing a small Back to the Future event tonight on campus where I plan (of course) to talk a little bit about the familiar problems posed when you start to overthink the nominally happy end of the movie: the very big problem of the briefly glimpsed Second Marty, who travels into 1955 totally unequipped to replicate the events we’d just witnessed, as well as the longer-term problem of our Marty, Marty 1, who is the last survivor of an obviated timeline and thus surrounded for the rest of his life by the uncanny duplicates of the people he once loved but with whom he now shares no memories or any genuine connection.
But I also want to talk about the original script a little bit, which I find a really fascinating document. Most people know that in the original script the time machine is a refrigerator — changed so that kids wouldn’t climb into them hoping to travel in time — and that the lightning strike is the blast from an atomic test (the two together forming an image that stuck with Spielberg long enough for him to use it to ruin Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). But there’s some other really amazing stuff in there too. The thing is shot through with fears about oil depletion and the end of progress: it’s the subject of a lecture at Marty’s high school in the beginning of the script and something he keeps trying to ask the people of the 1950s about later, to no effect. That sort of science fictional nostalgia for a future that no longer seems possible is really a major theme in the original script, which is reduced to jokes about UFOs and “all the fallout from the atomic wars” in the produced film — the sense that the zany Jetsons future of technological world-transformation we once collectively looked forward to has been lost and the only one left for us is a much more depressive vision of imminent deprivation and catastrophe. (In this sense any eventual 2000s-era “dark, gritty reboot” would actually just be a return to the themes of the original script.)
But something weird happens at the end. In the original script Marty is the co-creator of time travel when he accidentally spills some Coca-Cola on the time device; Coke’s unique chemical formula turns out to contain tremendous energy inside it, easily providing the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to power the Flux Capacitor. Marty’s trip to the past ultimately tips Doc off to Coke’s unknown energistic property, and so when Marty returns to the future at the end of the film he isn’t hopping into a very similar timeline where he just happens to have grown up rich instead of poor, but into an incredible retrofuturistic world of free energy and robot servants and flying cars — precisely the cartoonishly optimistic milieu that is relocated to 2015 for the gag at the end (and later, the sequel). (Doc’s pouring of the half-empty soda can into Mr. Fusion at the end of the film is, I think, the last remaining trace of this original idea.)
In this way “Back to the Future” was actually originally a pun: Marty goes not just back to his future but back to the future, the good future we were supposed to get, instead of the lousy one we actually did…
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 Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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…
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.”
* 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.”
All the Links, Half the Calories
* Fake Blood and Blanks: Schools Stage Active Shooter Drills. This is utterly horrific. The country has lost its mind.
* Mass shootings in America, 1999 through 2013.
* Arkansas man guns down 15-year-old girl for egging son’s car as a prank.
* Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery. These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit. Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in bondage at the White House.
* Jefferson had a number of slaves who gained their freedom by various methods. He freed two slaves in his lifetime and five in his will. Three others ran away and were not pursued. (Still others successfully ran away despite pursuit.) All ten freed with Jefferson’s consent were members of the Hemings family; the seven he officially freed were all skilled tradesmen. About 200 slaves were sold at estate sales after Jefferson’s death.
* In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?
* On the Killing of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn: I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson’s genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington’s abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge, that the G.I Bill’s accolades are somehow inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting which, likely to the end of our days, we shall unerringly return. I had never heard Oney Judge’s story before. What a life. More, more.
* Justifiable Homicides Up 200 Percent in Florida Post-Stand Your Ground. Just make sure you don’t get more than one DUI a year or you could miss out in the horrible war of all against all.
* Terrible news, everyone: Change In Jet Stream Is the Likely Cause of Brutal Winter. Arctic getting darker, making Earth warmer. Rise in malaria forecast for tropical highlands.
* On Friday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Missoula County Attorney’s Office in Montana, alleging that it has found “substantial evidence” that prosecutors there systematically discriminate against female sexual-assault victims.
* But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Norton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.
* 8 Book Historians, Curators, Specialists, And Librarians Who Are Killing It Online. #4 with a bullet: Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas.
* California police use taser on deaf man trying to communicate with them via sign language.
* Facets of Hope for Adjunct Faculty.
* Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now.
* Loyola Marymount U. Is Accused of Interfering With Adjuncts’ Union Election. Strike at UIC.
* National recruitment sources have become necessary because most Black youth from our city who attend college outside of Milwaukee decide never to return. And you can’t blame them given the fact that several studies have shown Milwaukee to be among the worst cities in the country for African Americans.
* And it gets worse for the Cream City.
* The NFL wanted him… until he was named a Rhodes Scholar.
* After Historic UAW Defeat at Tennessee Volkswagen Plant, Theories Abound. A Titanic Defeat.
* Snake-handling star of ‘Snake Salvation’ reality show dies from snake bite.
* The Duke Chronicle profiles a first-year student who also works in the porn industry.
* Behind Frank Underwood’s Medieval Senate Maneuver In ‘House Of Cards.’ * Political Drama Without Politics: The Nihlism of House of Cards.
* Where do you go after you leave the cast of The Real World?
* 20 Practical Uses for Coca-Cola That Prove That It Should Not Be In The Human Body. So good though.
* Event in NYC: All the Women in Capital.
* BDS as psychological warfare.
* Apple working on heart attack prediction device.
* Previewing the coming disaster at Qatar World Cup 2022.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* New Zealand Prime Minister publicly denies being a lizard person.
* A Pushing Daisies Stage Musical?
* And The Cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel Says Wes Anderson Is a Genius Hardass. Hurry up and get here, March!