Posts Tagged ‘democracy’
Lost in January Links
* Out now: Extrapolation Volume 62.3 explores the representation of cyborgs in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, care in Gen Urobuchi’s science-fiction, and the critique of Western technoscience in Welcome to Night Vale.
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: Neurodiversity and Disability. CFP: Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture.
* Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? Notes on Squeecore. Portrait of the Author As a Component of a “Punk-Or-Core” Formulation. Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed. The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.
* Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature.
* Notes on the Forum of the Simulacra.
* How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.
* How climate catastrophe has consumed popular culture. Ride or Die? Mark Bould and the Fast-and-Furiocene.
* Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock.” Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us. Coming back from a time of illness: how finance can learn from climate change fiction. Melancholy Utopianism: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We Can’t Just Grow Our Way Out of This Climate Mess.
* Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise.
* Pop culture can no longer ignore our climate reality.
* Marvel Movies Made 30% Of The Total Box Office.
* Nnedi Okorafor on SF through an African Lens.
* The Matrix Resurrections and trans life (and death). Unpacking the Hidden Meanings in The Matrix Resurrections. A Muddle instead of a Movie.
* Games Studies Studies Buddies is such a good podcast and this is an exemplary episode. Like and subscribe!
* Joss Whedon fully burns down what’s left of his career. The Joss Whedon Era: A Look Back.
* Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.
* Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
* From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry.
* California’s Forever Fire.
* California, Arizona and Nevada agree to take less water from ailing Colorado River.
* The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record. The Oceans Are Now Hotter Than At Any Point in Human History, Scientists Warn. Here’s how hot Earth has been since you were born. The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment. US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, Noaa report says.
* As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave. How Did We Go From Stimulus Checks to “Go to Work With COVID”?
* The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism. Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens.
* Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection: The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
* Ultras.
* Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump. The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here’s What Life Is Like Inside. The January 6th Republicans (from Jonah Goldberg no less). Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes charged with seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The Rise and Fall of Latinx.
* Don’t Look Up Is a Terrible Movie. Really bad. I ranted.
* The Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’. Why ‘Star Trek’ made San Francisco the center of the universe.
* A Grieving Family Wonders: What if They Had Known the Medical History of Sperm Donor 1558?
* Percentage that would visit the Moon as a tourist, if money were not a factor.
* On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism.
* The end of the pandemic? Study: Omicron associated with 91% reduction in risk of death compared to Delta. Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble. America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire. We are the 3.2%.
* School Closures Led to More Sleep and Better Quality of Life for Adolescents. After last year’s learning loss, we need a plan for students with disabilities. Ideology and school closings. Who is this gentleman, Dude?
* The Mangle of Federalism.
* Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students.
* Becoming Martian.
* Last Year’s Longest Strike Just Ended in Victory.
* Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges.
* Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others.
* This Is the Way the Humanities End.
* A professor welcomed students to class by calling them ‘vectors of disease to me.’ He has been suspended.
* These Tenured Professors Were Laid Off. Here’s How They Got Their Jobs Back.
* So you want to work in academic publishing.
* As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth.
* US inflation reached 7% in December as prices rise at rates unseen in decades.
* Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class.’
* A simple plan to solve all of America’s problem.
* Sea Power, ‘Disco Elysium’, and the importance of being miserable.
* HBO’s Station Eleven Surpasses the Novel.
* Oh boy, they’re finally rebooting Quantum Leap.
* I’d never known this: Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile.
* Wes Anderson’s next sounds like another mistake.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly.
* ‘Invincible’ Animated Series Sparks Profits Suit Against Robert Kirkman.
* What Elmo’s Viral Moment Tells Us About How Parents Watch Kids’ TV.
* A people’s history of the Beatles logo.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Is a Terrible Masterpiece.
* The Wire as copraganda.
* BEHOLD! MEGA-MANHATTAN!
* The Strange Literary Puzzle Only Four People Have Ever Solved. And welcome to the Wordle century.
Friday Links!
- I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence at The Rosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…
- Transfer Orbit dives into the latest on The Last Dangerous Visions.
- In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction.
- Alien again, again.
- Music to my ears: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the MyPillow Guy Are in Huge Trouble. Not as great: A rogue DOJ lawyer almost kept Trump in office.
- When they fantasize about killing you, believe them.
- Breakthrough cases may be a bigger problem than you thought. Children’s hospitals are swamped with Covid patients — and it may only get worse. How the Pandemic Ends Now.
- Census minute: Census Bureau releases population data, starting scramble to redraw congressional lines. We’re Going The Wrong Way. Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show. Milwaukee city workers moved out in droves after the residency rule ended. It was a boon for the suburbs. Wisconsin as democracy desert.
- And in local news: Milwaukee’s comedy market is surging with new Improv club, more shows as people seek escape from COVID-19.
- Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.” Your favorite senator and mine, Ron Johnson, features prominently.
- A people’s history of the Karen.
- The fall of Snopes.com.
- A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Now it’s official!
- Put a man on the moon by whenever you get around to it.
- UFOs and the Boundaries of Science.
- Why Are Young People So Obsessed With Cults?
- A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse.
- What’s the matter with book reviews?
- Climate Denial, Covid Denial and the Right’s Descent.
- A New Idea That Could Help Us Understand Autism.
- And what happens when the bugs all die?
Ye Old Link Roundup!

- I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.
- Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.
- Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
- Remember? Remember? We had fun, didn’t we?
- Panel: People over 75, essential workers next for vaccines. Some more details from the New York Times.
- New ‘worrying’ Covid strain found in South Africa is ‘more severe among young adults.’ Holiday Travel Breaks Pandemic Record Despite Dire Covid Warnings.
- At long, long last: gimme that stimmie.
- Congressional Deal Would Give Higher Ed $23B. Stimulus deal delivers billions in pandemic aid to colleges, but much more is needed, advocates say.
- Congress finally moves to stop surprise medical billing as part of spending deal.
- The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony.
- Unsanitized: Congress Again Taxes the Time of Benefit Recipients. 35% of Americans Could Lose Their Home in Next Two Months, Census Report Says.
- When do you think would be a good time?
- Dragonlance Writers End Lawsuit Against Dungeons & Dragons Maker. I was hoping for Dragons of Fifth Season Postnormality but someone on Twitter pitched prestige Dragonlance TV and now I’m all in on that.
- Kylo Ren Is the Real Hero of Star Wars, The Stand edition.
- The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.
- After 25 years, I’m retiring from ‘takes.’
- And they say love is dead: The Journalist and the Pharma Bro.
- Early humans had the right idea I think.
- Chinese Jesus goes hard.
- Discovery roundup. Architecture roundup. Genre theory roundup. Email etiquette roundup.
- I never promised you an LCD factory.
- Divorce as a tool of class struggle.
- 19 years.
- Star Wars, explained.
- And the flood is gonna get here any day.

Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night
- Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
- Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
- What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
- The College Degree Is Dividing America.
- Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
- 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
- Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
- Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
- Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
- If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
- The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
- It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
- Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
- How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
- ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
- Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
- From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
- The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
- Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
- Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
- Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
- Great, more work.
- And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right
And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too
- ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
- How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.
- Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
- Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.
- America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
- A Possible Majority.
- Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.
- Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
- Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
- U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
- KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
- Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
- White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.
- Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
- Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
- Respectfully disagree.
- Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
- Dibs.
- How Long Can Gyms Survive?
- And I’m listening…
Saturday Night Links!
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

Happy Captain Picard Day Links!
* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.
* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.
* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).
* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.
* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.
* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.
* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.
* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.
* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.
* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.
* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.
* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.
* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?
* It would sell! It would sell.
* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.
* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.
* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.
* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.
* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.