Posts Tagged ‘Dilbert’
Once Upon a Time in… Tuesday Links
* Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, is about male friendships as they evolve or don’t, fall apart or stay the same. It’s his kindest film, the one freest of his ego and the defensiveness of showy camerawork and clever editing. It’s unpretentious in a wholly surprising way, and vulnerable, too, in revealing fears of growing older and, as a consequence, becoming obsolete, soft, a joke. There’s some suicide stuff in that one, so be warned.
* For as much as Tarantino establishes a contrast between Tate on one side of the hedge, and Rick and Cliff on the other, he sees them as equally vulnerable, in different ways. Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s wistful midlife crisis movie. Quentin Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties. ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ takes the Sharon Tate murders — and makes them about men. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood Doubles Down on Shittiness Toward Women. tarantino’s good movies revolve around women & the bad ones don’t. reservoir dogs is sort of an exception, but it also depicts a world without women as a horrific farce. Tarantino vs. Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee’s Daughter Saddened by ‘Mockery’ in ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.’ Let’s Discuss That Massive Inaccuracy in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’ Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood… annotated. ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is a three-hour reminder of Tarantino’s talent — and blind spots. The end of the affair: why it’s time to cancel Quentin Tarantino.
* A few scattered thoughts from me on Twitter. I’m still chewing on it.
* Adam Tooze, historian of the Third Reich’s economy and of the recent 2008 crash, has argued that Neumann’s insights are quite germane today: “That there is no natural harmony between developed capitalism and legal, political, and social order; that modern capitalism is a fundamentally disruptive force that constantly challenges the rule of law as such.” Read this together with the warning by David Frum, conservative political commentator and author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018): ”If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That is the Benjaminian moment of danger we’re in now, looking forward with trepidation to the 2020 elections.
* CFP: Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism. CFP: The Fast and the Furious. CFP: Celebrity Studies — Keanu Reeves. CFP: Fandom: The Next Generation.
* Disney Is A Symptom, Not The Cause, Of The Problems Facing Hollywood.
* Greta Thunberg to sail across Atlantic for UN climate summits.
* Trump aide submitted drafts of 2016 ‘America First’ energy speech to UAE for edits, emails show.
* When you’ve figured out a way to monetize mass shootings.
* While Democrats dither, Republicans are innovating new ways to cheat to win.
* China Claims to Have Released Most of the Estimated 1 Million Muslims Held in Internment Camps.
* Parents Are Giving Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid. I don’t see why every treatment of this leads with “and it’s all legal” when it seems like it’s unquestionably fraud.
* Inside the #MeToo crisis—and coverup—sparked at Golden Valley High.
* Clergy Abused an Entire Generation in This Village. With New Traumas, Justice Remains Elusive.
* Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate.
* She Invented the Gender Reveal Party. She Has Some Regrets.
* Becoming Full Professor While Black.
* Inside the Fortnite World Cup.
* BREAKING (MY HEART): Humans Will Never Colonize Mars.
* This Asteroid Could Have Wiped Out a City. Scientists Almost Missed It.
* And an oldie, but a goodie: Neil and Buzz didn’t go very far.
Christmas Eve Eve Links Links
* There’s a lovely review of my Butler book by Nisi Shawl in the new Women’s Review of Books. It’s not available online so you’ll have to take my word for it, unless your library subscribes…
* And I’m so happy to report that Extrapolation 58.2-3 is finally out, the special issue on “Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre” I edited with Benjamin Robertson. Check out the intro to see what it’s all about, and then check out articles on Dragonlance, the Star Wars and Star Trek expanded universes, Sweet Valley High, Blondie, The Hunger Games, and Game of Thrones and fantasy roleplaying games…
* CFP: Academic Track at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention, San José, California. CFP: Punking Speculative Fiction. CFP: Histories of the Future: Proto-Science Fiction from the Victorian Era to the Radium Age. CFP: Chapter Proposals for “Ecofeminist Science Fiction.” CFP: Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.
* An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried.
* Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Ted Chiang.
* Science fiction when the future is now. With appearances from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, and Lauren Beukes.
* The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen is Alyssa Rosenberg’s at the Washington Post. And the best pro-Last-Jedi piece from Dan Hassler-Forest at LARB. Somewhere in the middle is Abigail Nussbuam’s excellent piece at Asking the Wrong Questions.
* Lightsabers, by the numbers. Secret history of the porgs. Star Wars from below. Thank goodness somebody realized how terrible this would be. The Last Jedi and the necessary disappointment of epilogues. The films that inspired The Last Jedi. Behind the scenes. In defense of Canto Blight. Anti-nostalgia and anti-salvation. Star Wars without the Empire. How to Read Star Wars.
* Winter Is Coming: Climate Change in Westeros.
* How the Sesame Street Puppeteers Play Their Characters. It was only a year or three ago that I realized that on a basic level I’d still believed Big Bird was real; I had never thought or processed the fact that his lips were being moved by a puppeteer’s hands.
* So old I can remember when Sweet Briar was an inspiring story about a college being saved.
* On faculty and mental illness.
* Podcast alert: how does Samuel R. Delany work?
* Comedy writers name their most influential episodes: 1, 2.
* SHOCK REPORT: The tax bill is bad.
* This Congress’s clear priorities: corporations, not children.
* It’ll also tax large endowments. Meanwhile in the academy: We Will Not Be Your Disposable Labor: Graduate Student Workers’ Fight Goes Beyond the GOP Assault. ‘A Complete Culture of Sexualization’: 1,600 Stories of Harassment in Higher Ed.
* Defund every agency that had any part in this. Murder Convictions Overturned, Two Men Are Immediately Seized By ICE. What happens to children whose parents are deported? 92 Somali immigrants deported in “slave-ship” conditions. ICE is abusing immigrant detainees with strip searches and threats. Shock of shocks, it turns out legal immigration is bad too.
* Why Doug Jones’s narrow win is not enough to make me confident about American democracy.
* First #J20 defendants found not guilty.
* The media wealth of African Americans in Boston is $8.
* People are using Uber instead of ambulances.
* The Adult Bodies Playing Teens on TV.
* Monopolies are bad, no matter how much you like the brands involved. Avengers vs. monopoly.
* “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.
* The madness of prison gerrymanders.
* Desegregation never happened.
* Climate refugees in Louisiana. Disability and disaster response in the age of climate change. Losing the wilderness.
* The FoxConn boondoggle gets worse and worse.
* The Next Crisis for Puerto Rico: Foreclosures.
* Revising agricultural revisionism.
* Your Favorite Superhero Is Probably Killing the Planet.
* The Daily Stormer’s style guide.
* Opoids and homelessness. 3,000,000 pills to 3,000 patients in two years. The Opioid Crisis Is Getting Worse, Particularly for Black Americans. What happens after an American city gives a homeless person a one-way ticket out of town.
* The US gymnastics scandal somehow gets worse and worse.
* ‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread.’
* The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife.
* WHAT YEAR IS IT: How to prepare for a nuclear attack.
* Lumberjanes’ Noelle Stevenson is Rebooting She-Ra for Netflix. Sir Ian McKellen Would Totally Play Gandalf In Amazon’s TV Tolkien Adaptations. The Next Bechdel Test.
* “Paradox,” by Naomi Kritzer.
* The Journal of Prince Studies.
* 80% of workers think managers are unnecessary. The other 20% mistakingly think they are managers.
* It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one our Founders built: The Donald Trump droid is live at Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.
* ‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer. 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017. Fascism has already come to America. Life expectancy declines for the second straight year. On brand.
* Heartbreaking interview with Heather Heyer’s mother.
* Still, it does make you ponder all the ways this industry works in service of power, and by extension those who abuse it. So many of comedy’s institutions are, at their core, PR machines. Branded content is Funny Or Die’s bread and butter. Every week SNL promotes someone’s new movie or TV show or album. Late night talk shows, with few exceptions, use jokes to bookend celebrity press tours. Comedians host awards shows because otherwise we might see them for the rituals they are—the wealthy and famous celebrating their own wealth and fame. Comedy normalizes power; it’s so successful at normalizing power that it feels weird to even write that as a criticism. Well, what’s wrong with normalizing power? Lots of things, but to start it lets monsters play the straight man in comedy sketches. It makes them relatable, which makes them less threatening. But power is always a threat, even more so when it seems innocuous, even more so when it seems… funny.
* 2018 is already terrible: there’ll be no more Zelda DLC.
* And remembering the reason for the season: Behold the official policy for destroying the head of Chuck E Cheese.
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
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.
* 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
Tuesday Links!
* Reminder: the deadline for abstracts for SFRA 2016 is the end of the month. MLA CFP: Science Fiction Comics. CFP: “Academic Insecurities: Precarious Labour and the Neoliberal University.”
* Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Sara Goldrick-Rab, the outspoken University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who vowed after tenure protections were changed by state lawmakers last year to leave Wisconsin, announced on her blog Monday night that she has accepted a job at Temple University and will start July 1.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Huge, if true: Universities Run Into Problems When They Hire Presidents From The Business World.
* Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Why Do Colleges Still Use Grades?
* No other discipline of comparable size in the humanities is as gender-skewed as philosophy. Women still receive only about 28% of philosophy PhDs in the United States, and are still only about 20% of full professors of philosophy — numbers that have hardly budged since the 1990s. And among U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving philosophy PhDs in this country, 86% are non-Hispanic white. The only comparably-sized disciplines that are more white are the ones that explicitly focus on the European tradition, such as English literature.
* Northwestern University students who qualify for financial aid no longer will have to borrow to pay for their education, part of a plan announced Thursday to make the school more affordable and prevent students from being saddled with debilitating debt.
* How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?
* Rowling explores the magical history of America.
* My deep wound is video games. In the same way Bell “pretended to be someone else whenever [he] stepped outside of the house” and learned “to never talk about computer games in class or on the school bus,” I learned that my love for video games was excessive and embarrassing. I was swept away by those worlds in a way that nobody else seemed to be, and I walked around with my head full of pixels and quests and ideas. Video games made me very happy and very lonely.
* Case Western in the ne– oh.
This isn’t the first time that an idea in psychology has been challenged—-not by a long shot. A “reproducibility crisis” in psychology, and in many other fields, has now been well-established. A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked for misconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.
* Marquette in the — oh come on.
* How a mistranslation made you think your tongue had ‘taste zones.’
* This simulation helps show you what it’s like to have dyslexia.
* Maps Show Where Bloomberg Aides Thought He Would Have Been Competitive.
* Meritocrats and Egalitarians.
* Reparations isn’t a political demand.
* Some Birds Are Just As Smart As Apes.
* The Future Of Telltale Games.
* “Some supporters of Rubio say bad strategy, poorly run campaign killing his chances.” What do the rest of them think is killing his chances?
* Meanwhile: Report Raises New Questions About Trump’s Ties To N.J. Mob-Linked Figure. Yes, Mitt Romney Could Actually Become The Republican Presidential Nominee.
* The remarkable persistence of the Green Man.
* “What I wish I’d known before I had gender-affirming surgery.”
* Daughter of Civil War vet still getting a pension.
* Actually existing media bias: The Washington Post ran 16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours. Going for the record!
* The Problematic Rape Reporting On ‘This American Life.’
* We want dead bodies to be in the right place. Caring for the dead is a foundational human activity, and so the wrong dead body in the wrong place, or bodies abandoned or desecrated, is considered an affront to the moral order. Why We Need the Dead.
* Mr. Spock and the autism spectrum.
* This is for you: an oral history of The Golden Girls.
* Rise of the hiking game: The Witness and Firewatch.
* What could go wrong? U.S. military spending millions to make cyborgs a reality.
* The neoliberal university will grind us down until there’s nothing left. Choose solidarity.
* Three Thoughts on Westerosi Political Economy.
* Slavoj Žižek and The Twilight Zone.
* And I don’t know about the other two law, but the third law of politics here is pretty much literally the predicament academia and most other public institutions find themselves in in 2016:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Finals Week Links!
* ICYMI: The CFP for the 11th Annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference ends tomorrow.
* College sports’ fastest-rising expense: Paying coaches not to work.
* Huge, if true: While university presidents earn millions, many professors struggle.
* Shakespeare, by the numbers.
* Soviet Science Fiction Christmas Cards.
* The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad.
* In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels. “A long-shot chance to save the planet.” And on the neg: Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments.
* The climate movement as peace movement.
* In a security video obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Strickland is seen in handcuffs, barely conscious and being dragged along the floor by officers, while a prison nurse standing close by does nothing. Even as he lies face down on the floor, near death, guards can be heard shouting, “Stop resisting.”
* Police restraint saves lives.
* Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement.
* For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. “We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!” laughed Miller. “So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.’” And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. “She’s a real stickler for that,” said Miller. “And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.”
* Roar Magazine #0: The Potential of Debtors’ Unions.
* Jacqui Shine at LARoB reviews We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.
* MST3K breaks Kickstarter records, secures 14 new episodes. Let the backlash commence!
* We’re apparently getting two China Miéville novels this year, and the second one sounds incredible.
THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS is an intense and gripping tale set in an alternative universe: June 1940 following Paris’ fall to the Germans, the villa of Air-Bel in Marsailles, is filled with Trotskyists, anti-fascists, exiled artists, and surrealists. One Air-Bel dissident decides the best way to fight the Nazis is to construct a surrealist bomb. When the bomb is accidentally detonated, surrealist Cataclysm sweeps Paris and transforms it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic.
* He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.
* The Senate is so crazily designed it would be literally illegal for a US state to copy it.
* Dilbert minus with too much Dilbert.
* The lost Marxists: what happened to the academics made jobless by communism’s collapse?
* Mockingjay Part 2: Let’s talk about that epilogue.
* Teach the controversy: The sealed mausoleum believed to be a fully-functioning time machine.
* A brief history of trying and failing to impeach Supreme Court justices.
* The Indo-European and Uralic Language Families.
* Your short of the week: “Lost Property.”
* Jessica Jones, Buffy season six, and rape.
* The Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, updated for 2015.
* And rest in peace, Benedict Anderson.
Gerry Canavan 
