Posts Tagged ‘dinosaurs’
Wednesday! I Think!
* Amazon, Walmart, FedEx workers plan walkout on Friday. Too soon to declare victory over coronavirus, say experts. Model predicts higher death toll in US amid states reopening. Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality. ‘Heads we win, tails you lose’: how America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit. Federal bailout money bypasses hard-hit N.Y., California for North Dakota, Nebraska. Closed Hospitals Leave Rural Patients ‘Stranded’ as Coronavirus Spreads. The reopening, Texas-style. I’m Reopening My Hair Salon, and I’m Terrified. Under pressure to reopen this fall, school leaders plot unprecedented changes. Teachers union: ‘Scream bloody murder’ if schools reopen against medical advice. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
* How the Coronavirus Might — or Might Not — Slow Research Universities’ Ambitions. As the Trump Administration Offers Relief, Pandemic-Stricken Colleges Ponder the Risks of Taking It. There’s No Simple Way to Reopen Universities. The Evolving Fall Picture. How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America. When universities are hospitals: Losing $3m a day, UVa Health furloughs employees, cuts executive and physician pay.
Our new research shows that even according to Yale's own targeted endowment spend rate, they have underspent $648 million since 2013. But now they invoke austerity and cut budgets across the university? We don't buy it. #spendityale pic.twitter.com/q4FbeYPJaR
— Local 33 UNITE HERE (@33unitehere) April 29, 2020
* The Predicted Coronavirus Catastrophe Hasn’t Arrived In Sweden. What’s Next? Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is worse than America’s but better than New York City’s.
* Life in Wuhan after coronavirus. The post-coronavirus world doesn’t look good for China.
* CDC confirms six more coronavirus symptoms showing up in patients over and over. Study: Most coronavirus patients in hospitals didn’t spike a fever. We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us. The virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen. According to a CDC report, nearly 90% of patients hospitalized with coronavirus (COVID-19) had one or more underlying health conditions. In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead. 6 monkeys given an experimental coronavirus vaccine from Oxford did not catch COVID-19 after heavy exposure, raising hopes for a human vaccine. U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19. U.S. tops 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases — nearly a third of the global total. The successful Asian coronavirus-fighting strategy America refuses to embrace. No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out.
* Coronavirus Relief Often Pays Workers More Than Work. “As each day goes by, it gets more stressful”: Millions struggle amid delays in stimulus and unemployment. Millions can’t access unemployment benefits so actual job losses are likely greater than data shows. How Delivery Apps May Put Your Favorite Restaurant Out of Business. A business of razor-thin margins. The plan. How the Pandemic Will Change Retail. Nearly half of the Q1 decline in GDP can be attributed to healthcare, which is presumably delaying of elective procedures. American optimism is becoming a problem. Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus.
* Trump wants to use coronavirus aid as leverage to force blue states to change immigration policies. To Pressure Iran, Pompeo Turns to the Deal Trump Renounced. Controversial tech company pitches facial recognition to track COVID-19. Companies’ use of thermal cameras to monitor the health of workers and customers worries civil libertarians. No fireworks.
The Blue Angels fly-by is just an extension of this post-WWII/20th century mindset that America still clings to, that every crisis and problem can be solved by spectacles of might and prowess at war.
It's a relic of a bygone era and just feels so impotent and insulting.
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020
We don't need to continue sinking money into militarism. We need to completely restructure our economy and undo the damage of Reaganism, which combined war obsession with unequal hypercapitalism.
It's not time to rally around the flag. It's time to reconsider what the flag means
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020
* Social Distancing As Demonstrated in Wes Anderson Films.
* In one month, the meat industry’s supply chain broke. Here’s what you need to know.
* The real state of exception.
* Leave Milwaukee alone! Haven’t we suffered enough?
* The Biden situation. Feminism Should Make You Uncomfortable. Trump’s focus on his base complicates path to reelection. Hell of a way to win an election. Beneath contempt. Climate Activists Need to Keep Turning the Heat Up on Joe Biden. Republicans’ Senate majority is now in very real jeopardy. This entire class of Democrats is not up to the challenge of delivering a basic message HANDED TO THEM ON A SILVER PLATTER. Justin Amash Moves Toward a Third-Party Bid for President.
Decades-old assault allegations are necessarily very hard to adjudicate fairly. But everything that was said about Kavanaugh — why stick with this incredible mediocrity when there are myriad candidates who haven’t been accused of anything? — applies just as completely to Biden.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 29, 2020
* Really helpful thread — solved a problem I was having with my own wifi.
* Game over: FTC goes after board game campaign gone wrong in first crowdfunding case.
* A brief history of the post office. But why tell a version of this story that starts in 1792 when this whole problem can be directly traced to a 2006 law passed by Republicans that required the USPS to refund its pensions for 75 years in advance, a requirement not placed on any other business in existence?
* The Cast of The Goonies Reunites for a Goofy Video and a Good Cause. We Could Be Getting a Goonies Sequel from the Creator of The Goldbergs. Dr. Strange is messy bitch who loves drama. Dinosaurs Is the Only Family Sitcom Grim Enough for This Moment. The last word on Joss Whedon.
* I’m doing my part! Belgians urged to eat frites twice a week to deplete coronavirus potato mountain.
* No one saw it coming, except Netflix: Police Investigating Death of Arizona Man From Chloroquine Phosphate.
* damn that’s bleak. understanding college. in praise of pessimism.
prof asked me what his department could do to improve career outcomes for phd students and I said stop accepting students into your programs who want to be professors.
— Hannah Alpert-Abrams 🤖✊ (@hralperta) April 28, 2020
they have to open the universities in the fall because society depends not on the budding bourgeoisie learning whatever material (which can be done remotely) but on the students having sex. thats basically how ppl accept the legitimacy of all the debt
— m.crumps (@mcrumps) April 28, 2020
all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us” and I’ll look down and whisper “no” pic.twitter.com/tCoLIzphce
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 28, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
April 29, 2020 at 11:21 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, Brett Kavanaugh, CFPs, China, class struggle, college, coronavirus, Democratic National Convention, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, depression, dinosaurs, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, eating meat, epidemic, feminism, fireworks, Fourth of July, French fries, game studies, games, general election 2020, Goonies, hospitals, How the University Works, I feel seen, immigration, Iran, Joe Biden, Justin Amash, Kickstarter, labor, medicine, Milwaukee, pandemic, pedagogy, pessimism, politics, post office, science, sitcoms, social distancing, state of exception, strikes, surveillance society, Sweden, tech support, the economy, the Senate, true crime, USPS, vaccines, Wes Anderson, wifi, work, Wuhan, Yale
Thursday Links!
* Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.
* Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis.
* Scenes from dystopia: MUPD updates active shooter training for students.
* Steven Salaita: My Life as a Cautionary Tale.
* Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah.
* Bodies Aren’t Binary, So Why Are Sports?
* Why Aren’t More Women Working? They’re Caring for Parents.
* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.
* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.
* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.
* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.
* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?
* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.
* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.
Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.
Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’
* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.
* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.
* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.
* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.
* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 29, 2019 at 9:22 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolitionism, academia, activism, America, apocalypse, apps, Brazil, Captain America, class struggle, climate change, crunch time, darts, DEA, debt, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, dinosaurs, Donald Trump, drugs, eldercare, Elizabeth Warren, free speech, fully automated luxury communism, games, gender, gig economy, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, guns, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, Kenya, kids today, labor, Los Angeles, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel Comics, mass shootings, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, networking, New York, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police corruption, politics, post-industrial cities, prison abolition, race, racism, rainforest, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, segregation, socialism, Steven Salaita, taxes, Telltale Games, the Amazon, the kids are all right, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trans issues sports, true crime, war on drugs, white nationalism, white people, white supremacy
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
Some of y’all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK
— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c
— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019
you, an intellectual: we can’t afford a better society
me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they’re currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019
I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 4, 2019
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it
— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
in this regard, Yang’s “higher ground” remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we’re going to hear more and more of. don’t mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019
(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu
— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 31, 2019
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA
— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 5, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 8chan, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, ADA, Africa, Alaska, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, animals, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, autism, bears, Berkeley, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, capitalism, CBP, Charles Manson, Chicago, climate change, collapse, debt, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, deserts, dinosaurs, disability, Domino's, ecofascism, ecology, El Paso, Elon Musk, English majors, Extrapolation, fascism, fonts, Frankenstein, fraud, games, gaming, gerrymandering, grading, Greenland, Guam, guns, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, immigration, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, Larry Niven, literature, Marianne Williams, Marine Todd, mass shootings, Mexico, MFAs, military-industrial complex, Museum of Science Fiction, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Netflix, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, open borders, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, phone farms, progress, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rich people, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Simpsons, slavery, social media, socialism, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Tesla, the Amazon, The Boys, The Fast and The Furious, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rock, the truth is out there, toxic masculinity, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Utopia, video games, Walter Benjamin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wealth, white men, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, Wisconsin veto, writing, X-Men
Behold! Links!
* CFP: Forming the Future.
* CFP: The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces (Warsaw, December 2019).
* CFP: Decolonizing the Undead.
* CFP: Adaptation and Nostalgia.
* In Urging Faculty Not to Unionize, Marquette Cites Catholic Identity. Better doublecheck that citation.
* I went on a little tear about Slaughterhouse Five some people seemed to like.
* Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures.
* Science fiction and the path back.
* What Western Media Got Wrong About China’s Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth.’
* My point in observing that atmospheric carbon levels have gone up about about 14% while Game of Thrones has been a thing is that geological time is now faster than pop-cultural time. This has only ever been true before of earthquakes and volcanoes.
* Counterpoint: Climate change should be the subject of every DNC debate.
* There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for a disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place. Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years. Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Housing policy is climate policy. Striking at the End of the World. Climate Change Drove Neanderthals to Cannibalism, New Research Suggests. Fascism and ecology. Fascism, ecology, and misogyny. Neoliberal catastrophism. The road to civilizational collapse. Sounds like a lovely place for the last 10,000 people alive to hold up. Now do I have your attention?
* It’s only going to get worse: Trump Just Purged DHS Because Its Leaders Weren’t Breaking the Law Enough. Trump told border agents to break U.S. law and defy judicial orders.They all belong in jail.
the cruelty is the point, yes, but it is also a means to an end: normalizing and legitimizing ever-greater cruelty as a sober and patriotic response to accelerated conditions of suffering which they and we all know are coming. it's a pedagogy in brutishness
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) April 5, 2019
I love how we're all just going about our 9-5 jobs and normal habits while the fact that–short of immediate, transformative action–a near-term mass die-off alongside the collapse of civilization is the most plausible scenario.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) March 25, 2019
once this deleuzian I knew shared a reading of The Matrix about how "resistance" was an electrical engineering pun that also described how the movie's human body batteries functioned to power the system that enslaved them and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think of this often
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 15, 2018
* Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats.’
* Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the “embarrassing” kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for “elites” from “elite” institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class.
* Huge, if true: Assessment Is an Enormous Waste of Time.
* Exciting new horizons in making student evaluations even worse.
* Teaching in the time of Campus Reform.
* ‘I started dreading going to class’: Women speak out about sexual harassment experiences at Duke. Elsewhere on the Duke beat: Duke to Pay $112.5M Over Allegations of Falsified Research. Duke’s Nursing School Failed Them. They Say Their Race Played a Role.
On James B. Duke whose "true “innovation” came not in the 1880s, when the cigarette machine transformed the production process" but in the expansion of corporate power, partially through the manipulation of the 14th Amendment to protect corporate interests https://t.co/Sug2Vl8scf
— corinne blalock (@corinneblalock) April 5, 2019
* The death of an adjunct. This is how you kill a profession. How to talk to NTT faculty. There’s a lot of pain in academia today. So many workers/scholars are feeling left behind in the job market. If you are, too, you’re not alone. I talk to 8 working-class scholars who have been pushed out of the academy in this special Working episode.
* Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research. Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated. What happens to faculty after a college closes?
* A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?
* The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend.
* I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?
niche tweet: I re-wrote the opening of Never Let Me Go for VAPs pic.twitter.com/Fzx9M4J55y
— Jacquelyn Ardam (@jaxwendy) April 4, 2019
* Amazing coincidences happen every day.
* The digital humanities debacle.
* Unsilencing the writing workshop: creative writing heresy from Beth Nguyen.
* Chinese schools are using facial recognition on students. But should they? I say teach the controversy.
* Start school later! This is the lowest hanging fruit for educational improvement there is.
* A Note From Your Colleagues With Hearing Loss: Just Use a Microphone Already.
* Love to live in an apartheid state: “GOP leaders criticize Gov. Tony Evers’ lead pipe replacement plan, raising concerns that too much money would go to Milwaukee.” And a flashback to October: As the tax dollars paid to the state rose 19% between 2009 and 2015, an increase of more than $400 million, the amount of revenue the state shared with the county did not grow, according to county officials.
Every urban area in America gets looted three times: first by city officials redirecting resources to wealthy white residents, then by county officials outflowing money to the white suburbs, then by state officials outflowing money to other, whiter regions of the state.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019
…which doesn’t even factor in the way the federal payments system loots densely populated Democratic regions for the benefit of tiny populated Republican regions.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019
* Buzzfeed returns to Baraboo, Wisconsin, site of the infamous Nazi prom photo.
* ‘Disgusted by it:’ Whitefish Bay High School students accused of using racist language.
* Make Milwaukee Socialist Again.
* Abigail Nussbaum’s Us link roundup.
* In the history of gaming there are just 14 playable black female characters.
* Real Native history in a video game: An Indigenous take on The Oregon Trail.
* The Suprising History of the Ball Pit.
* All the absolute worst people in the world, working together and on the same page.
* Bidenwatch: when the cool uncle becomes the creepy uncle.
the real stakes of the Democratic primary are not about policy or about winning the election but about which group of crooks, scammers, and amoral hangers-on get cushy jobs with a tremendous amount of power and influence for the next decade, so you can see why people care so much
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2019
* The Senate having another extremely normal one.
actual quote from the Senate floor today: "You'll notice … important features here: First of all, the rocket launcher strapped to Pres. Reagan's back & then the stirring, unmistakeable patriotism of the velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag." https://t.co/mv4h6oSKd0
— Rex Santus (@rexsantus) March 26, 2019
* Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to dril. Give it to Bill Watterson, too!
* Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. ‘Think of the mothers of sons’: Notre Dame mom begs female students to stop wearing leggings, sparking protests. Sports-Bra Outrage.
* “New bills would ban pelvic exams without consent.” You mean they aren’t already — what?
on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed- pic.twitter.com/rbYadoG4Dn— matt lubchansky (@Lubchansky) March 29, 2019
* The US government is holding Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement again. It’s a vindictive, unconscionable attack on a brave truth teller.
* The changing face of homelessness in America in 2019.
* The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century.
* Minimum wage increases are associated with reduced numbers of suicide deaths.
* Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths.
* 13% of the world’s companies are ‘zombies.’ That’s not healthy.
* Today in the richest society in human history: Why I Am Stockpiling Insulin in My Fridge. The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.
* Epilepsy patient refuses to leave Vancouver hospital until her health needs are met.
we write "Millenials Are Killing The [X] Industry" because when you write "Unsustainable Profit-Driven Systems Are Crumbling Around A Wage-Suppressed Global Populace Serving Roughly 2000 Aging Billionaires" people get too depressed to click through & watch our hair cream ads
— regular gem (@Choplogik) April 5, 2019
* The keeper of the secret: one man’s devotion to uncovering the details of a single lynching case from the 1920s.
* A majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds.
* They tried to warn us: Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries.
* The Joker trailer legitimately seems like an SNL digital short about trying to make a prestige, Oscar-bait comic book movie. I can’t believe it’s real.
* The Deep Space Nine Anniversary Documentary Is Hitting Theaters for One Day Only.
* Fossil found from the day the dinosaurs died? Seems hard to believe, but wow.
* Click this link if you dare, but remember that some things that are learned cannot be unlearned.
* Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped.
* It’s Rupert Murdoch’s world, we’re just all going to die in it. I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.
* The rent is still too damn high.
* Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won’t Heal. This week in Hell World.
Nearly 20 years after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, students there are putting stickers on their ID & cellphones to indicate their desire for images of their bodies to be publicized & shared if they are killed by gun violence.https://t.co/Ynvy1oA0ml via @CNN
— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) April 1, 2019
* First photo of a black hole. An informative Twitter thread.
* How Animators Created the Spider-Verse.
* That’s me in the corner. Atheism and democracy.
* How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care.
* A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.
* Depressing, yes, but also sort of comforting.
* Just going to go ahead and green-light this Goodfellas sequel.
* I assume this is already a CBS procedural.
* Putting academic knowledge to real world use: Experts Determine Whether Tyrion And Sansa Are Still Married On ‘Game Of Thrones.’
In the 1960s a woman lived in a house with a dolphin, tried to teach him English, and jerked him off daily. The experiment failed because the lead scientist was obsessed with giving the dolphins LSD. The experiment shut down and the dolphin killed himself https://t.co/VgikyScg4c
— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) April 4, 2019
* About ten years too late, it’s a start: How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?
* The Avengers: Endgame theory that Ant-Man kills Thanos by expanding inside his butt, explained.
* Miracles and wonders: Unless I’m mistaken this is the first time gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has ever gone to human trials.
* It is amusing the Dungeons and Dragons- a game for small children- has a more accurate model of intelligence than the Quilette people do: it’s a minor bonus to an extremely noisy stochastic process that is easily swamped by situational advantage modifiers.
* Meet Leigh Cordner, Medieval Times’ creative director.
* Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex.
* The unexpected philosophical depths of the clicker game Universal Paperclips.
* Just kidding! There’s no plan for either problem.
* Great news from the elite world of comics podcasting.
* Coming Spring 2026: Fatigue: A Star Wars Story.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 10, 2019 at 12:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adaptation, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alien, Alien: The Musical, Amazon, America, animals, animation, Ant-Man, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antifa, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, assessment, astronomy, bankruptcy, Bitcoin, black holes, Boeing, books, bosses, California, Campus Reform, Canda, cannibalism, Captain Marvel, Catholic social teaching, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, Chelsea Manning, China, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, Columbine, comics, conferences, conspiracy theories, creative writing, deafness, debt, Deep Space Nine, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, diabetes, digital humanities, dinosaurs, DMCA, documentary, dolphins, Donald Trump, Dril, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, Endgame, English departments, epilepsy, facial recognition, fascism, FiveThirtyEight, fossils, Fox News, Game of Thrones, games, Garfield, geologic time, Gollum, Goodfellas, grading, guns, Harvard, Hayden White, health care, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Huntington's disease, IBM, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, immiseration, indigenous peoples, insulin, intelligence, Into the Spider-verse, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Johns Hopkins, Jordan Peele, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, labor, lacrosse, Langston Hughes, lead poisoning, libraries, literature, LSD, lynching, Marquette, Marx, Marxism, mass shootings, MCU, Miami, Mike Gravel, Miles Morales, millennials, Milwaukee, minimum wage, misogyny, musicals, Nazis, Neanderthals, neoliberalism, Never Let Me Go, New Jersey, Nike, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, oral history, Oregon Trail, Ozymandias, paperclip maximizer, paradise, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, play, podcasts, Poland, politics, post-antibiotic bacteria, race, Rachel Maddow, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, Revolutionary War, road trips, Robert Mueller, Rupert Murdoch, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, sexism, sexual harassment, Skrulls, Slaughterhouse Five, SNL, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, student evaluations, Subway, suicide, the humanities, The Joker, The Marix, the meaning of life, The Onion, the rent is too damn high, the Senate, the Singularity, the university in ruins, The Wandering Earth, Tolkien, transgender issues, travel, underwear, ungrading, unions, Universal Paperclips, Us, VAPs, Vonda McIntyre, Vonnegut, war on education, water, Waterworld, Watson, Whitefish Bay, Wild Seed, wildfires, Wisconsin, wizards, Working, workshops, writing, zombies, Zora Neale Hurston
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
The much-hyped MOOCS still have an astronomical dropout rate of about 96 per cent on average over five years – and this figure had not improved between 2013-14 and 2017-18.https://t.co/4U6F1jN1X6 #mooc #embarrassing #dropout #hype #online #HigherEducation @bureaucatliu @cnewf
— peter krapp (@pkrapp) March 4, 2019
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
a cool thing about the last few years is that the U.S. became the leading exporter of the intellectual machinery of western fascism and one of the leading domestic debates about it is whether undergrads are treating the people behind it politely enough
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) March 15, 2019
There is virtually no institution in American public life where you have greater freedom of speech than the university. And the depressing corollary: you will probably never again be as free to express yourself in public as you were when you were a student.
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 4, 2019
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
something something about how–because we cannot actually address the root causes of school shootings–we will instead ritualistically perform them https://t.co/llYZF6i8vf
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 21, 2019
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
so about fifty days in and it’s very clear that the story of the Dem Resistance Congress is going to be about the party’s decrepit leadership scuttling any positive movement on any subject and then demanding to be thanked for it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2019
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
you (stupid, hasnt read foucault): haha i hope i dont get thrown in prison for my tweets )
me (wise, has read foucault): twitter is the prison— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) March 6, 2019
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
a fun thing about the next Avengers movie is that all the characters are going to spend the entirety of it being very very very sad
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 14, 2019
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 22, 2019 at 12:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, academic publishing, activism, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, AI murder policy, air travel, airplanes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic culture, aliens, alt lit, America, Andy Daly, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, Antarctica, artificial intelligence, Aunt Becky, autism, automation, Barack Obama, BethAnn McLaughlin, Boeing, books, Captain Marvel, catastrophe, Catholicism, CBP, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college admissions, computers, creepypasta, data, David Foster Wallace, Daystrom Institute, dementia, Democrats, deportation, digital horror, dinosaurs, disability, Doki Doki Literature Club!, drugs, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, eco-fascism, ecology, education, Electoral College, empire, EPA, equality, ethnic cleansing, Europe, Facebook, fascism, Fermi paradox, film, floods, Foucault, Fox News, fraud, free speech, Full House, fun, Gabriel García Márquez, games, Garret Hardin, gay marriage, general election 2020, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, hateclicks, Hayao Miyazaki, heartbreak, HIV and AIDS, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, Infinite Jest, innovation, J.K. Rowling, jobs, Jurassic Park, juries, kids, kids today, killer death robots, labor, legacy media, literature, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Lyft, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, Max-8, MCU, medicine, Michael Jackson, Mitch McConnell, Momo, MOOCs, Mound builders, MPAA, my pedagogical empire, Nabokov, Native Americans, Nazis, Nebraska, Netflix, New Sincerity, New York, Nobel Prize, Normal Porn for Normal People, Norway, nuclearity, NYPD, Octavia Butler, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Open Access, Orientalism, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, plagiarism, playing, podcasts, police brutality, police corruption, politics, pon farr, potholes, poverty, prison-industrial complex, privilege, propaganda, public transportation, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, rabbits, race, racism, ratings, recycling, religion, Review, rich people, robots, Rutgers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, sea level rise, security, self-checkout, self-driving cars, slavery, sleep, small colleges, socialism, Spock, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Wars, strikes, Stuyvesant, suffering, suicide, surveillance society, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the courts, the Democrats, the law, the Sixties, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Tolkien, tragedy of the commons, travel, trigger warnings, true crime, Trumpism, TurnItIn, Twilight of the Elites, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of California, UT Austin, Vanderbilt, Vietnam, visas, voting, Voyager, Vulcans, Wal-Mart, Waldo, water, wealth, where are they?, white nationalism, white settlers, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, World Wildlife Fund, writing, YouTube, zombie ethics, Zora Neale Hurston
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2018
I don’t see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We’re losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2019
climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy
— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody’s too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:
7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly
200-1000 absolutely useless losers
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 18, 2019
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 30, 2019 at 12:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2018, 2019, AAVE, ACLU, administrative blight, adoption, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, AlphaZero, altac, Alzheimer's, Amazon, anger, Antarctica, anthropology, apocalypse, Arizona, art, artificial intelligence, Australia, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, baby it's cold outside, Bandersnatch, Black Mirror, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Bolsonaro, Boston, Brazil, breastfeeding, Bryan Singer, burnout, butterflies, California, Cambridge History Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, CBP, CBS All-Access, CEOs, CFPs, Chernobyl, Chicago, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, college admissions, comedy, Confederate monuments, corpocracy, cosmetology school, cyberpunk, de-extinction, deportation, dinosaurs, disability, diversity, DNA, Donald Trump, dystopia, Ecology and Ideology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, EpiPen, extinction, Facebook, forced arbitration, Fox News, Foxconn, game studies, games, genocide, George Saunders, gig economy, GoFundMe, Great Lakes, grifts, gym class, Hamilton, Hampshire College, Harry Potter, Harvard, health care, Hitler, hoaxes, hope, hopepunk, hospitals, How the University Works, humanism, ice, improv, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, IRBs, Isaac Asimov, J.K. Rowling, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, journalism, Kamala Harris, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, language, Larry Nassar, last names, layoffs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lisa Klarr, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Louis CK, lunch debt, Lyft, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, Medcare for All, medievalism, MFAs, Michelle Yeoh, millennials, Milwaukee, MLA, MSU, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazism, neoliberalism, Netflix, nurses, Octavia E. Butler, oh no, online preschools, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, photography, podcasts, polar vortex, politics, Polygraph, pornography, poverty, public transportation, pyramid schemes, queerness, R. Kelly, race, racism, rage, Random Trek, rape, rape culture, rich people, Richard Feynman, Running Man, Ryan Vu, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sea level rise, Sears, self-driving cars, sex, Ship of Theseus, slavery, Snowpiercer, social justice, socialism, Sokal hoax, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Trek: Discovery, statistics, student debt, suicide, Supernova Era, surveillance society, syllabi, tag, taxes, teaching, Tesla, the Arctic, the canon, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, The Jetsons, the law, the secret of my success, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, Utopia, veterinarians, Voyager, vulture capitalism, war on education, Washington D.C., Waukesha, weather, webcomicname, whiteness, wildfires, William Gibson, Wisconsin, writing
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
When it comes to climate, if it's not action at disruptive scales and speeds, it's predatory delay.
That's when we are, now, after decades of inaction. That's the curve we're on.
We're completely out of time for gradual, incremental approaches and small comfortable steps.
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 13, 2018
Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017 (The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C) https://t.co/sqreCwhbDu pic.twitter.com/eY4TyVXmFh
— Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 (@kerim) August 24, 2018
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
There has been weather monitoring in the city of Wilmington, NC for nearly 150 years.
The most recent NCEP WPC rainfall prediction for Hurricane #Florence would shatter the historical record for 7-day rainfall accumulation by more than a foot. pic.twitter.com/CsSrSfRMKE
— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) September 13, 2018
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
Here’s where I would like to propose a thought experiment. Fast forward 66m years. Imagine some intelligent life form arrives (or re-evolves) on earth. It wants to know: what “caused” the sixth great extinction? What are they likely to conclude from the available evidence? 9/
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) August 26, 2018
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
The popular scifi of the 21st century will be Americans sublimating their guilt by imagining themselves as victims, and the rest of the world sublimating the nightmare that is an actually-existing hostile, amoral entity antithetical to human life
— بوكيبلينكي (@pookleblinky) August 14, 2018
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
Toni Morrison: 40
Mark Twain: 41
Marcel Proust: 43
Henry Miller: 44
JRR Tolkien: 45
Raymond Chandler: 51
Richard Adams: 52
Annie Proulx: 57
Laura Ingalls Wilder: 65
Frank McCourt: 66
Harriett Doerr: 74
Harry Bernstein: 96
No, you’re not too old to publish your first book.— Allison K Williams (@GuerillaMemoir) August 19, 2018
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 13, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, #TheResistance, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, academia, academic jobs, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air pollution, algorithms, aliens, America, animals, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, autism, Baylor, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, Brett Kavanaugh, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, college football, concussions, Confederacy, conferences, conspiracy theory, corruption, cryogenics, David Foster Wallace, decolonize everything, deportation, DHS, diabetes, dinosaurs, divorce, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Elon Musk, empire, ethics, evangelicals, fascism, fear, fecal time bombs, flooding, Florida, football, futurity, games, genre, god mode, guns, Haggerty Museum of Art, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Florence, hurricanes, I grow old, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Infinite Jest, insulin, intelligence, Japan, Jimi Hendrix, John McCain, Johns Hopkins, Ken Starr, labor, labor movement, lead, Louis C.K., mad science, magic, manure, Marquette, Maryland, mass shootings, McSweeney's, medicine, mental illness, Mexico, MFAs, Miami, millennials, Milwaukee, Minecraft, MLA, monkeys, Mt. Everest, musicals, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, natural disasters, NCAA, NFL, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, obituary, Octavia Butler, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pesticides, Philip Pullman, philosophy, police corruption, politics, poverty, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, Puerto Rico, Purdue, QAnon, race, racism, rape culture, real estate, real wages, Reddit, religion, Republicans, rich people, rivers, Sable Elyse Smith, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Second Life, self-driving cars, Serial, sexual harassment, SFRA, Silent Sam, socialism, souls, Space Force, sports, strikes, student debt, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, television, the courts, the humanities, the law, the middle class, the Moon, the Navy, the rich are different, the rule of law, the shy, the university in ruins, the VA, The Village Voice, there is not such thing as a natural disaster, time travel, Twitter, UFOs, UNC, unions, University of Akron, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, Veronica Mars, veterans, virtual worlds, volcanoes, Wakanda, weird Twitter, welfare, Wes Anderson, West Virginia, whiteness, wiffle ball, Wilmington, Wisconsin, work, writing, you and I are gonna live forever, zunguzungu
Monday Morning Links!
* Discovery vs. the canon. All of these so-called violations can be solved with creative thinking, you cowards!
* The day Star Trek: The Next Generation was truly invented.
* This is not the dystopia we were promised. Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans.
* I really think every person who has anything to do with assessment knows it is completely meaningless but fears some other actor in the system who they think truly believes in it. Great piece from the Chronicle on just how bad it is.
* Natalie Portman on being 13 in Hollywood. Five strategies of sexual harassers.
* Kalamazoo doctor detained by ICE after forty years in the US. ICE looks to be targeting Niec, despite a permanent green card, due to some misdemeanor property damage convictions from 17 years ago.
Border security spending, in equipment and manpower, has exploded in the last ten years. It's never ever enough, even as apprehensions have dramatically declined and net unauthorized flows have slowed to zero. https://t.co/1TJdLPiAyx
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 21, 2018
Democrats should be talking about where they are going to house Dreamers to protect them from ICE for 3+ years.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 22, 2018
We remember Truman primarily as the person who was president when the atomic bombs were first used. We should also remember him, as I have argued before, as the person who ordered that the atomic bombs stop being used. And the person who, over the course of his presidency, did the most to establish that atomic bombs were not weapons to be deployed lightly ever again. One might see this as irony, but in my interpretation, it is not: it the reaction of someone who realized he had been badly out of the loop once, and wore that on his conscience, and determined it would not happen again.
* What it’s like to be a convicted felon.
* The Corruption Thesis, dystopia, and authoritarianism.
* Invasion of the German Board Games.
* I say all this because I think it’s important to bear in mind when considering the substantial subset of UCB that doesn’t get paid for its labor: the improvisors, stand-ups and sketch comics who perform nightly at its theaters. All of them work for free, and often at a loss. To perform on a UCB house team, you must complete UCB’s core curriculum, or four courses at $450-500 apiece. You must also be approved for study in an Advanced Study course—another $450-500. (Through its diversity scholarships, UCB waives these fees for 175 students each year). That’s at least $2,250 and at most $2,500 simply to be eligible to audition for UCB’s flagship Harold and Lloyd teams. If you make it, which you probably won’t, the costs continue to accrue. Members of UCB’s house teams are required to pay their coaches, and many also pay for rehearsal spaces and props. They do not recoup these costs.
* Republicans want to make it easier to kill whales and dolphins.
* As metaphors go, it’s a little on the nose.
* And the New York Times asking the tough questions: Formidable tail weaponry is nearly absent in living animals. Scientists have an explanation for what happened to the clubbed tails of the ankylosaurus or the spikes on a stegosaurus.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 22, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, animals, assessment, authoritarianism, Batman, canon, comedy, corruption, deportation, dinosaurs, do what you love, dolphins, dystopia, felons, film, games, Germany, How the University Works, ice, immigration, improv, labor, Las Vegas, monopsonies, Natalie Portman, neoliberalism, nuclearity, NYPD, Philip K. Dick, police, police corruption, politics, rape, rape culture, real wages, Republicans, Settlers of Catan, sexual harassment, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Statue of Liberty, TNG, Truman, UCB, whales, work
Last Weekend Before Classes Links!
* CFP: Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Gathering. MLA 2019 CFP: Stephen King at 45. Call for applications: The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.
* A special issue of Palimpsest on The Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.
* Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi. Parable of the Butler as an opera.
* Syllabus: Good Grief: Humor and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature.
* There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Very nice long read in the Guardian on what depression is and isn’t.
* Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance.
* Black Mirror did this one already: Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner’s mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.
* The 90s, World War II, and the War on Terror. Great little bit of cultural analysis in comic form, derived from a Chris Hayes essay from 2006.
* Tiny books of the resistance.
* Can the humanities be defended? Well, it depends.
* The Fierce Urgency of “How.”
* Trump’s offshore drilling plan defies ‘wishes of every coastal state, city and county.’ Insurance after climate change. Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, Ground Zero in the Fight for Climate Justice. Climate change and the global south. A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise.
* UBI already exists for the 1%. A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem.
* 5 things to know about Puerto Rico 100 days after Hurricane Maria.
* But the most notable difference in the table is political: no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance’s book.
* The woman behind the “Shitty Men in Media” list. How I Learned to Look Believable. Why Dan Harmon’s sexual-misconduct confession is actually worth listening to.
* “Every single neighbor I’ve had has died of cancer.” This Town Is So Toxic, They Want It Wiped off the Map.
* This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love. On Liking Women.
* Justice Department Announces Court Order Revoking Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue. Washington state AG sues Motel 6 over giving ICE info on 9,000 guests. 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection. Trump may deport thousands of Indian H-1B visa holders as they wait for green cards. To fulfill Trump’s vision on immigration, sheriffs are trampling over constitutional principles. The head of ICE is calling for mayors and local city councilmen to be arrested. Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor. ICE to move forward with deportation of paraplegic boy’s caregiver. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence. Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words. And of course.
* This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.
* If the President Is Uniquely Dangerous, Treat Him That Way.
* Child protective services and artificial intelligence.
* The end of computer security. An amazing coincidence.
* How students pay for graduate school.
* Bringing back indentured servitude. Let’s let kids mortgage their social security while they’re at it.
* We Finally Know Why People Are Left- Or Right-Handed.
* The case for (and against) the tiger living on LSU’s campus.
* College football has the money to pay players. The College Football Playoff proves it.
* North Carolina gerrymander ruled illegal, again.
* You Won’t Live to See the Final Blade Runner Movie.
* Uh Oh—CRISPR Might Not Work in Most People.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* Police departments nationwide agree: guns officially have more rights than people.
* Solo, oh no. Star Wars fatigue is real. Why So Many Men Hate The Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why. The Last Jedi and fandom. The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen. Poe Dameron apologetics.
* Teaching the controversy the Duke way.
* Marxism and Nintendo? I love my Switch, so anything that keeps me from not feeling too bad about owning it… Nintendo’s Resurgence Was the Best Tech Story of 2017. More at MetaFilter.
* Airline travel has become so safe even I’m barely afraid of it anymore.
* Southwest Flips on Big Three Airlines in Cartel Case.
* Boomeranging the boomerang effect.
* Web comic of the month: “Three Jumps.”
* The Handmaid’s Tale after Margaret Atwood.
* Flight of the Conchords forever.
* Stop speculating about Trump’s mental health.
* The end of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Era? We’ll see.
* Hamilton in London. Hamilton in Milwaukee. Next up: Saga, the Musical?
* As for the bots themselves, #R2DoubleD and #TripleCPU are indeed a very cool sight to behold but (in my opinion) don’t come close to anything ever approaching “arousing.”
* Carrie Fisher’s private philosophy coach.
* Updated rules for Settlers of Catan.
* Choose Your Own Adventure, in graph form. Interactive map of every Quantum Leap time jump.
* What happens to the mind under anesthesia?
* And you’ve already seen it, but just for the record. Almost been one year. Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven’t Even Imagined Yet. There’s no way out.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 13, 2018 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1990s, 9/11, Abu Dhabi, academia, air travel, airlines, airports, algorithms, America, anesthesia, animals, Antarctica, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, books, boomerang effect, cancer, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, CEOs, CFPs, child protective services, China Miéville, Choose Your Own Adventure, class struggle, climate change, college football, computer security, conferences, copyright, Dan Harmon, debt, debt collection, deportation, depression, dinosaurs, Disney, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, Episode 8, family, fandom, fascism, Flight of the Concords, Fox, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, global south, graduate school, graphs, guns, Hamilton, homelessness, How did we survive the 1990s?, How the University Works, human capital contracts, humor, hurricanes, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income inequality, Intel, left-handedness, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literature, Lovecraft, LSU, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marxism, mental health, mental illness, Mickey Mouse, MLA, mortgages, NCAA, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, no exit, no way out, North Carolina, North Korea, Octavia Butler, offshore drilling, opera, Parable of the Sower, parenting, pedagogy, philosophy, police state, politics, pollution, prison, Puerto Rico, Quantum Leap, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rise of the machine, Rise of the Machines, roads to nowhere, robots, Saga, Saving Private Ryan, science, science fiction, SCUMM, segregation, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexual harassment, Slenderman, Social Security, Solo, Southwest, Star Wars, Stephen King, student debt, syllabi, teaching, The Handmaid's Tale, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the university in ruins, tigers, time travel, trans* issues, universal basic income, Uno, Utopia, Vonnegut, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, Wisconsin
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
There’s way more empirical evidence that men can’t be trusted with power than that women are bad at math. [gestures broadly, to everything]
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 5, 2017
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2017 at 10:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, #TheResistance, academia, academia jobs, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, affirmative action, Africa, Afrofuturism, agricultural civilization, agriculture, aliens, Amazon, America, anti-trust, anxiety, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, arguments, artificial intelligence, asteroids, backfire effect, bar jokes, Battlestar Galactica, Big Data, Bob Mueller, books, carceral studies, CFPs, charts, Chris Ware, Christianity, cities, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, cognitive presses, college basketball, comics, Confederacy, Constitutional Convention, Cory Doctorow, courts, CWRU, dark side of the digital, Darko Suvin, debt ceiling, Democrats, deportation, digitality, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, dystopia, Escape from LA, FCC, film, friendship, Game of Thrones, game theory, games, gender, gerontocracy, Ghana, GIFs, Google, grad student nightmares, grade inflation, grading, grand juries, Greenland, hacking, Hamilton, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, human extinction, humanity, humor, ice, immigration, Internet-connected fish tanks, interviews, iPhones, Jaimee, Jedi, John Carpenter, John Kelley, Karate Kid, kids, Klingons, Kurt Russell, labor, love, machine learning, maps, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, midterm election 2018, milkshakes, misogyny, murder, my teaching empire, names, NASA, NCAA, Netflix, neurolinguistic programming, New Jersey, New York City, nuclear war, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, perpetual motion, Planetary Protection Officer, poetry, Poland, police, police dogs, police violence, politics, prehistory, prison, prison-industrial complex, private prisons, privilege, Putin, race, racism, regenerations, relationships, Rex Tillerson, robots, Rotten Tomatoes, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, sea level rise, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, SFRA Review, simulations, Sinclair Broadcasting, smartphones, social media, Space Race, speeding tickets, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, State department, student athletes, student labor, subalternity, suicide, syllabi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, teen girls, the Constitution, The Dark Tower, the Devil, the Force, the Internet, the law, the subway, the truth is out there, Thor, Tolkien, Tommy's, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Twitter, undergraduates, University of California Irvine, university presses, Utopia, voting, Voyager, Voyager 2, Voyager spacecraft, walking, Westeros, white victimhood, whiteness, wildfires, women, words, work, writing, you are the product, young adult literature
#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!
* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.
* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.
* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.
* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).
* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.
* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.
* Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.
* GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.
* Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.
* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.
* The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.
any remaining pieties of respectability inhering in the institution/office/process really shouldn't survive this term. but it will, OC
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 29, 2017
C
R
A
Z
Y
M
Is anybody going to do anything about this situation
K
A— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 29, 2017
my problem with Trump is just my outdated belief that the President of the United States shouldn't be dumber than the dumbest person I know
— maura quint (@behindyourback) June 29, 2017
* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.
* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.
* On desistance and detransition.
* Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.
* US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.
* SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.
* Just what is happening at Disney?
* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.
* And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 30, 2017 at 1:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a republic if you can keep it, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Afghanistan, AHCA, America, Anthropocene, apocalypse, austerity, Barbara Lee, California, Canavan's Razor, CFPs, Chernobyl, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coups, CUNY, democracy, desistance, detransition, dinosaurs, Disney, Don't mention the war, ecology, Emma Watson, film, Frankenstein, general election 2016, guns, H. G. Wells, hacking, Han Solo, Handmaid's Tale, heath care, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, hyperspace, IKEA, Illinois, Infowars, Inhumans, Iran, Iraq, Islamophobia, Joe Scarborough, Jurassic Park, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mars, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, maternity, Medicaid, mediocrity, Mika Brzezinski, Mike Flynn, MSNBC, my scholarly empire, NASA, National Enquirer, neoliberalism, NRA, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, police violence, politics, public health, Putin, race, racism, radiation, Rick and Morty, Ron Howard, Russia, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, SFRA, short fiction science fiction, Star Wars, Stephen King, Steve Shaviro, the presidency, the Senate, this is why we can't have nice things, trans* issues, transition, travel ban, voter suppression, women
Return of the Son of Occasional Linkblogging
With new and unexpected obligations in the last few months it’s become very hard for me to keep up with the link-blogging. Sorry! It’s bad enough that I’m considering putting this function on the blog on (likely permanent) hiatus. But, for now at least, some links…
* Wordless, but one of the best things about parenting I’ve ever read: Dan Berry’s “Carry Me.” Made me cry each time I read it.
* For the night, which becomes more immense /and depressing and utter / and the voices in it which argue and argue. / For this conflict with the stars. / For ashes. For the wind. / For this emergency we call life. All-Purpose Elegy.
* This is really good too: “the best Spider-Man story of the last five years.”
* CFP: Utopia, now!
* Class, Academia, and Anxious Times. From Duke’s Own Sara Appel.
* Hugo nominations 2017! How well did the new rules do against the Sad Puppies? Meet the Hugo-Nominated Author of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex.
* The African Speculative Fiction Society holds the Nommo Awards to celebrate the year’s greatest speculative fiction written by African authors.
* A list of contributors has been announced for Letters to Octavia, which has been renamed Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (which I’m in, by the way — I’m the rascal writing about “whether we should respect Butler’s wishes about not reprinting certain works”). I’m also a small part of the Huntington’s current exhibit of the Butler archives, presenting at the associated research conference in June.
* I wrote a small encyclopedia article on “Science Fiction” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, which is live now…
* Desperation Time: Visions of the future from the left.
* ‘Doomsday Library’ Opens In Norway To Protect The World’s Books From Armageddon.
* The 43 senators who plan to filibuster Gorsuch represent 53 percent of the country.
* The history of all heretofore existing society is the history of archery dorks. Evidence that the human hand evolved so we could punch each there.
* Check out my friend David Higgins on NPR’s On Point, talking dystopias.
* War, forever and ever amen. What We Do Best. Trump’s bombing of Syria likely won’t be met with a wall of “resistance,” certainly not within the halls of power. That’s because for nearly all liberal and conservative pundits and politicians, foreign wars — particularly those launched in the name of “humanitarianism” — are an issue where no leader, even one as disliked as Trump, can ever go wrong. The Syrian Catastrophe. A Solution from Hell. Profiles in courage. There are no humanitarian wars. 7 Charities Helping Syrians That Need Your Support. The only answer is no.
"In that moment, I think, he became presidential" is one of those phrases that can be the caption to any New Yorker cartoon
— Tim Murphy (@timothypmurphy) April 7, 2017
Omfg. Bolivia, who called today's Syria meeting at the UN, holds up Colin Powell's 2003 picture, saying to remember that ISIS was the result pic.twitter.com/dRxKoSEYlH
— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) April 7, 2017
* Incredible story: Hired Goon Drags Man Off United Flight After He Refuses to Give Up Seat. More details here. It’s only going to get worse.
* Trump Conspiracy Tweetstorms Are The Infowars Of The Left. It is shocking how these things erupt through my timeline day after day, then evaporate utterly as if they’d never happened.
* This week in the richest country that has ever existed in human history.
* Being Wealthy in America Earns You 15 Extra Years of Life Span Over the Poor.
* New York will no longer prosecute 16 and 17 year olds as adult criminals.
* I loved this story about the connections that expose us: This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account.
* We did it guys, we did it. But let’s not lose our heads yet.
* What Happens When Your Internet Provider Knows Your Porn Habits?
* Activism we can all believe in: Protesters raise more than $200,000 to buy Congress’s browsing histories.
* Democrats Against Single Payer.
* How to Survive the Next Catastrophic Pandemic.
* An epidemic of childhood trauma haunts Milwaukee. An intractable problem: For the last half-century, Milwaukee has been caught in a relentless social and economic spiral. Milwaukee celebrates groundbreaking of new Black Holocaust Museum site.
"why am i so sluggish today" he whispered to himself after spending every minute of the past decade staring at glowing rectangles of sorrow
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) April 4, 2017
* Dolphins beat up octopuses before eating them, and the reason is kind of horrifying.
* Wild situation in X-Men Gold #1. The artist’s statement.
* If nothing else, Operation Blue Milk had me at “Nnedi Okorafor.” Everything Cut from Rogue One. The Final Star Wars Movie Will Include The Late Carrie Fisher.
crazy shot on air force one from reuters pic.twitter.com/ZyMAKBQKPy
— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) April 6, 2017
* The Minnesota Eight Don’t Want to Be Deported to a Country They’ve Never Lived In. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE Yesterday.
* 7 Tips for Writing a Bestselling Science Fiction Novel.
* Can the Great Lakes Be Saved?
* Does This Band Name Start With The? A Quiz.
* America’s first female mayor was elected 130 years ago. Men nominated her as a cruel joke.
* Diabetes is even deadlier than we thought, study suggests.
* The Biggest Employer in Each US State. Look at all those universities we don’t need!
WARNING: This film contains ADULT THEMES. All the characters are really tired and in debt.
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) March 30, 2017
* Already old news, but worth noting: whether out of general interest or revenge Joss will be doing Batgirl. If I had Joss’s ear I’d pitch about 20-30 minutes of kung-fu action girl Batgirl and then have her paralyzed and do the Oracle plot instead. It’d be something different in this genre and something different for Whedon too, as opposed to something we’ve frankly seen from him a few too many times by now.
* Pedagogy watch: Why won’t students ask for help?
* More on the history of sleep: Why Do We Make Children Sleep Alone?
* When Every Day Is Groundhog Day: The Danny Rubin Story.
* No thanks: Disney Could Go Westworld With New Patent Filing for Soft ‘Humanoid’ Robots.
* There are dozens of us! Dozens! The Life Aquatic might not be Wes Anderson’s best film. But it is his greatest: The director’s misunderstood classic knows that sadness can’t be defeated, only lived with.
* Star Trek: Discovery ZZzzzzzzZZzzzzzZzzzz.
* Joe Hill (son of Stephen King): In the late 1990s I asked my Dad how to write a cover letter for my short fiction submissions. He was glad to help out.
* I always call Chuck Schumer the worst possible Democrat at the worst possible time, but Rahm Emanuel really gives him a run for his money.
* Margaret Atwood is dropping hints about a Handmaid’s Tale sequel. She even wrote a little bit extra, just in time for me to teach it this summer!
And so, Dr. Baloo finds himself leaping from life to life, hoping each time that his next leap… will be the leap home. pic.twitter.com/YBBhTnwx1t
— Matt Moylan (@LilFormers) March 12, 2017
* KSR talks NY2140. KSR talks world building. KSR in conversation with Adam Roberts and Francis Spufford.
* Geoengineering watch. Sadly, this is probably our civilization’s only hope.
* These Are the Wildly Advanced Space Exploration Concepts Being Considered by NASA.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Tyrannosaurus rex was a sensitive lover, new dinosaur discovery suggests.
* PS: Conservatives and liberals united only by interest in dinosaurs, study shows.
* The proliferation of charter schools, particularly in areas of declining enrollment and in proximity to schools that have closed, is adding financial stress to Chicago’s financially strapped public school system, a new report co-authored by a Roosevelt University professor shows.
* How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons.
* Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data.
* The Original Ending of Alien Was Both Terrifying and a Huge Bummer.
* Fuck You and Die: An Oral History of Something Awful.
* The arc of history is long, but New York now has more Mets fans than Yankees fans.
* Congratulations to North Carolina.
Salaries left to right: $0, $0, $0, $0, $3,000,000, $0, $2,088,577, $0, $0#nationalchampionship pic.twitter.com/OUJT13pmLE
— Jack M Silverstein (@readjack) April 4, 2017
* OK. OK. But I’m watching both of you.
* Teach-Ins Helped Galvanize Student Activism in the 1960s. They Can Do So Again Today.
* The Uses of Bureaucracy. Browser Plug-In Idea. A Brief History of Theology. To thine own self be true. Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Politics. Democracy. Art. #2017. Submitted for Your Approval. We lived happily during the war. Five years later. Pretty grim. Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice. How to tell if you are sexually normal. Juxtaposition of wish fulfilment violence and infantile imagery, desire to regress to be free of responsibility… Join the movement. Know your sins.
* And even in the darkest times, there is still hope: Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 10, 2017 at 5:53 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1960s, 2017, academia, Adam Roberts, Africa, Afrofuturism, air travel, airplanes, Alien, America, America's Black Holocaust Museum, animals, apocalypse, archery, art, Australia, Baloo, baseball, Batgirl, boxing, bureaucracy, California, Carrie Fisher, Carry Me, catastrophe, CFPs, charter schools, Chicago, children, Chuck Schumer, class, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, Colorado River, comics, conferences, conspiracy theories, cultural preservation, Dan Berry, David Higgins, death, debt, democracy, deportation, depression, diabetes, dinosaurs, Disney, dolphins, Donald Trump, Doomsday Vault, Duke, dystopia, ecology, elegy, Episode 9, evolution, Francis Spufford, futurity, geoengineering, Great Barrier Reef, Great Lakes, Groundhog Day, Hamlet, Harry Mudd, health care, hope, How the University Works, Hugo awards, humanitarianism, Huntington Library, ice, if you want a vision of the future, immigration, Infowars, Invincible, James Comey, Joe Hill, John Scalzi, Joss Whedon, kids, Kim Stanley Robinson, libraries, literature, lunch-shaming, malice, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, Mega Man, Mets, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, museums, music, my scholarly empire, NASA, NCAA, neglect, Neil Gorsuch, neoliberalism, New York, New York 2140, Nnedi Okorafor, Nommo awards, North Carolina, Norway, NPR, ocean acidification, Octavia Butler, octopuses, Operation Blue Milk, Oracle, outer space, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, pandemics, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Frase, podcasts, poetry, politics, polls, Polonius, porn, poverty, public health, Quantum Leap, Rahm Emanuel, rich people, Richard Scarry, Robert Kirkman, robots, Rogue One, sadness, Sara Appel, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, sin, single payer, slavery, sleep, social media, Something Awful, Spider-Man, spiders, standup comedy, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Stephen King, stepmothers, student activism, student debt, Supreme Court, Syria, T. rex, teach-ins, teaching, the courts, the filibuster, The Handmaid's Tale, the Internet, the kids are all right, the law, The Life Aquatic, The Three Hoarsemen, theology, to thine own self be true, Transformers, Twilight Zone, Twitter, Uber, United, Utopia, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Watchmen, water, wealth, Wes Anderson, Westworld, white people, women, X-Men, Yankees, Zoey
2016 Links!
* This Man Is Claiming To Be Able To Bring The Dead Back To Life By 2045. That’s good news, because Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Perhaps relatedly.
* So tragic: These parents cryonically froze their toddler in the hope she might live again.
* More bad news for my particular demographic.
* I’m at MLA this week, giving a paper on Saturday evening on Richard McGuire’s fantastic graphic novel Here for a panel on “The Anthropocene and Deep Time in Literary Studies.”
* The Year of the Imaginary College Student.
* Facebook ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back.’
* Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 24: Sullen. Also, here’s John Pat’s current syllabus on Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept.
* I think this one is old, but maybe it’s not old to you: Soc 710: Social Theory through Complaining.
* This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick.
* That’s when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed an amended lawsuit against the two companies, this time asking for them to give back all the money they made in New York State, to give it back to those who lost money and to pay a fine of up to $5,000 per case.
* I Studied Oregon’s Militia Movement. Here’s 5 Things You Need to Know.
* What Writing Shared World Fiction Taught Erin M. Evans About Worldbuilding.
* 12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system.
* Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels.
* David Harvey on Consolidating Power.
* No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape.
* Some Last Words on Pessimism.
* New Heights (Lows?) in Philosophy Job Application Requirements.
* The Far-Out Sci-Fi Costume Parties of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
* When a prison closes, what happens to the prison town?
* Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits againstUber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws.
* Tufts in the news! Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans.
* The novelistic sublime: Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline for Catch-22.
* If Google is a school official, I wonder if it’s a mandatory reporter.
* Tom Lutz and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* Through the looking glass: Game of Thrones author George RR Martin misses last TV deadline for new book.
* On reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On reading Ten Little Indians.
* Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes.
* Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
* The Sherlock special “The Abominable Bride” was terrible. Has this show completely lost its way? My DVR, in a noble effort to save my sanity, opted not to record it.
* It’s all happening again: Infinite Winter. A flashback.
* What I learned not drinking for two years.
* Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection.
* Harvard’s Find of a Colonial Map of New Jersey Is a Reminder of Border Wars.
* What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word?
* U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List From The Cold War Declassified For The First Time.
* This Asian Time Travel Thriller Could Be Next Year’s Breakout Action Movie.
* An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday.
* When Gene Roddenberry’s computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. Here’s how this tech mystery was solved.
* Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added.
* The rising academic field of David Bowie Studies.
* A Brief History of Farting for Money. (via)
* Hybrids. Uncanny Valley. And then there’s the weirdest, most unbelievable SF short film I’ve ever seen.
* Barbasol presents Disney’s James Cameron’s Avatarland.
* And of course there’s always more Star Wars links: The Feminist Frequency Review. Editing The Force Awakens. Listening to Star Wars. The Original Star Wars Concept Art Is Amazing. A Not-So-Brief History of George Lucas Talking Shit About Disney’s Star Wars. Is Han Solo Force-Sensitive? The Bigger Luke Hypothesis. Cross Sections of TFA Spaceships and Vehicles. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate. Are droids slaves? Rey & BB8. Reading Anakin Skywalker after Jessica Jones. If you want a vision of the future.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 5, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #readyforhillary, academia, academic jobs, academic publishing, Agatha Christie, alcohol, aliens, austerity, Avatar, Barack Obama, Bauhaus, Beatles, Beauty and the Beast, books, Bowie, cancer, Catch-22, Charlie Stross, children, class struggle, college students, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, comics, complaining, computers, conferences, copyright, cryogenics, David Foster Wallace, David Harvey, death, deep time, dinosaurs, Disney, droids, drugs, Episode 7, erotica, Facebook, fantasy football, farting, film, Florida, gambling, Game of Thrones, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, George R. R. Martin, Google, Great Lakes, Great Recession, Han Solo, Here, immortality, Infinite Jest, Infinite Winter, innovation, Jerry Seinfeld, Jessica Jones, Joseph Heller, Jurassic Park, kids today, labor, Lake Michigan, libraries, Looney Tunes, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lyft, mandatory reporting, Michael Lewis, Michigan J. Frog, militias, Milwaukee, MLA, mortality, my particular demographic, neoliberalism, nerds, New Jersey, New York, nitpicking, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Oregon, parenting, periodic table, pessimism, police, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, public domain, rape, resurrection, Richard McGuire, robots, science, science fiction, Sherlock, short film, slavery, Star Trek, Star Wars, statute of limitations, student movements, technology, Ten Little Indians, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, The Big Short, the Cold War, the courts, The Force Awakens, the law, the Left, the truth is out there, The Winds of Winter, theme parks, theory, time travel, Tom Lutz, Uber, UFOs, virtual reality, worldbuilding, worry, writing
Weekend Links!
* We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively — they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”
* Yet in spite of these lofty commitments and goals, not everyone is impressed with the proposed solutions that are surfacing ahead of the Paris talks. This includes the leading climate scientist James Hansen, who published an editorial on Friday in which he derided an Obama-led climate initiative as “unadulterated 100% pure bullshit.”
* The Wampanoag Side of the First Thanksgiving Story. What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale. The Secret History of the Pilgrims and Beer.
* My Favorite African Science Fiction and Fantasy (AfroSFF) Short Fiction of 2015. I liked both “Discovering Time Travel” and “Last Wave” a lot.
* The story of the first Black Friday.
* 40 maps and charts that explain sports in America.
* Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, applauds President Obama who signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.
* How The House Of Representatives Voted To Make Refugee Resettlement Impossible.
* Assassinating Terrorists Does Not Work.
* Dinosaurs in Science Fiction.
* “Bad News For The Planet,” Says The World Meteorological Organization.
* The circle of life at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
* For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. Cows and calves, rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, deer, and fauns, goats, gazelles, and horses, seals and walruses, perhaps cats and dogs on occasion were rendered into scrolls and codices, bindings and booklets, charters and mezuzot. A large part of our written inheritance survives as a great mass of animal remains.
* Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out.
* Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control.
* “false testimony occurred in hundreds of trials, incl. 32 death penalty.”
* Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.
* How Did Doctor Who Manage To Waste a Companion Like Clara Oswald Actress Like Jenna Coleman? However they did it, they certainly did…
* I’ve seen this movie. Though this one is intriguing: We Still Don’t Know Why the Heck There Are So Many Blue Tarantulas.
* It’s Time to Change Your Amazon Password.
* The case for letting children vote.
* Star Wars as its own genre. The Heartwarming Story Behind R2-KT, And How She Joined Star Wars Canon.
* A Unified Theory of the Rocky Movies.
* And now they tell me: Childless adults are generally just as happy as parents.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcohol, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, beer, Black Friday, black holes, bullshit, cancer, charts, circle of life, climate change, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, early childhood education, ecology, FBI, film, Hawaii, James Hansen, Jessica Jones, kids today, labor, maps, Marvel, Medical College of Wisconsin, murder, Native American issues, outer space, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Pilgrims, police, property rights, R2-KT, rape, rape culture, refugees, robots, Rocky, Rojava, science, science fiction, short stories, spiders, sports, Star Wars, Supreme Court, tarantulas, teaching, terrorism, Thanksgiving, the courts, the law, time travel, true crime, unions, Utopia, Wampanoag, war on terror, Won't somebody think of the children?
Thursday Links!
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) November 4, 2015
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Written by gerrycanavan
November 5, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Aaron Sorkin, Ark of the Covenant, astronauts, atheism, Barack Obama, BBC, Ben Carson, Bush, Cheney, class struggle, Democrats, dinosaurs, Elmo, football, gender, globalization, His Dark Materials, How did we survive the 1990s?, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Iraq, Kate Hayles, McKenzie Wark, military-industrial-academic complex, NASA, neoliberalism, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, patriotism, Philip Pullman, Pixar, Player Piano, politics, propaganda, stories, teach the controversy, technology, the Anthropocene, the dark side of the digital, the digital, the pyramids, time travel, Uber, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, writing