Posts Tagged ‘dinosaurs’
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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!
* 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!
* 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.
* OK. OK. But I’m watching both of you.
* each-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.
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.
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?
* 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!
Thursday Links
* America, I just want you to know there’s still time to stop this.
* Really got our number here: All Possible Humanities Dissertations, Considered as Single Tweets.
RT @gerrycanavan: This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.
* Scholarly Associations Defend Tenure and Academic Freedom in Wisconsin.
* Now Cooper Union’s president is out, too.
* Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this. Fascinating, frightening read.
* Unhappy career advice from the Chronicle: “You might not be ready for promotion.”
* UNC gets put on one-year probation for its recent student-athlete scandals. In other news, accreditation is a joke.
* 11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents.
* History is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake George R.R. Martin.
* Clever girl: Reviewer From The Guardian Says Jurassic World Passes Bechdel Test Because of Female Dinosaurs. See also.
* Teach all girls self-defense.
* Bold new horizons in student debt moralism.
* The history of America, as seen through the Census.
* Doogie Howser, M.D. gets the gritty reboot you never knew it needed.
* Harriet Potter and the Very Dedicated Parent. There really should be an app for this.
* Male film critics are apparently unable to understand the explicit, surface text of Goodfellas.
* Alanis Morissette, before Jagged Little Pill.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* This is close, but I for one believe the hottest take is still out there.
* And I guess some people just see farther.
Weekend Links!
* South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott. The police can’t police themselves. And now the public is too scared to cooperate with them. Police Reform Is Impossible in America. The Police Are America’s Terrorists. Man Who Recorded Walter Scott Murder Is Worried Police May Kill Him. White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.
* Montreal professors stare down riot cops.
* Colleges are raising costs because they can.
* How self-segregation and concentrated affluence became normal in America.
* How to survive a mega-drought.
* The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct.
* In The Midst Of Toxic Oil Spill, Vancouver Announces It Will Go 100 Percent Renewable.
* Report: Hillary Clinton Overlooked Labor Violations After Millions in Donations. Guess what I’m #ready for?
* Is Hillary Clinton even any good at running for president?
* Elizabeth Warren Is Right About Everything.
* The Columbia Report on Rolling Stone‘s Rape Story Is Bad for Journalism.
* The Brontosaurus Is Back. Take that, science!
* A Map Showing UFO Hot Spots Across The United States.
* The analysis concluded that, over the past 10 years, the five pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said in an interview on Wednesday.
* The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early.
* What Was On a 1920s Membership Application for the KKK?
* Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale.
* Wired proves the laws of physics don’t apply to Legolas.
* Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get even more boring spinoff. If that’s possible.
* Memorial for the “Unknown Deserter” – Potsdam, Germany.
* The Photographer Who Took This Picture Barely Escaped With His Life.
* This Probably Made Up Reddit Story About a Potato Is Incredibly Good.
* There’s nothing sweet in life.
* Lili Loofbourow takes the bait on the “is that all there is?” Mad Men and boredom thinkpiece. Also from Lili: You Should Be Watching ‘Fortitude,’ A Murder-Mystery That Makes Climate Change The Real Villain.
* Arrested Development returning for 17 episodes, according to Brian Grazer.
* A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies.
* 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* And I really hope they catch him this time.
