Posts Tagged ‘Disney’
Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!
- SFFTV 15.1! SFRA Review 52.1! And some upcoming projects: a special issue of SFFTV on disability! Uneven Futures!
- Syllabus for Film Theory: Disability & Technology.
- CFP: Anticolonialism as Theory Symposium. CFP: Popular Fiction. The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.
- A great piece from Adam Kotsko on having to come to terms with the unfortunate late work of a great thinker who helped shape his career.
- “Lena” is a true story. You knew it was when you read it.
- 40 useful concepts you should know.
- Drawing blood: notes on Maus. The real reason some people are so afraid of ‘Maus.’ Why Maus Opened the Door to Comics as Literature in Schools.
In light of a Tennessee district banning MAUS, I'm sharing the greatest two pages ever written and drawn about the importance of children's literature and protecting children's access to books, starring Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak. From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997. pic.twitter.com/hC2jyHicPN
— andrewkarre (@andrewkarre) January 27, 2022
Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?
… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?
- Batman Swallowing His Own Cape: The Modern Caped Crusader’s Narrative Autocannibalism.
- Comixology was basically perfect for what it wanted to be, so of course Amazon trashed it.
- Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics.
- Mysteries of free speech: ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill: Florida Senate passes controversial LGBTQ school measure. Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns. Wisconsin Republicans advance bills that would let 18-year-olds carry concealed weapons at school. Wisconsin GOP votes to limit race theory at UW schools. Republican lawmakers plan legislation to break up MPS, expand vouchers to all students in a proposal to overhaul K-12 education. North Carolina superintendent abruptly removes MLK-themed novel from 10th grade class. Idaho librarians could face jail time for lending “harmful” books.
- This Is the End of Affirmative Action.
- What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example.
- The University Crisis: Does the pandemic mark a breaking point? College Endowments Saw Stellar Returns as the Market Soared. Academic Freedom and Tenure: University System of Georgia. What the heck is going on in Georgia higher ed? Tenure Without Teeth. Grotesque Inequity. Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions.
- The Overbuilt Campus.
I’ve been in college continually since 1998 (now in 36th grade) and I think it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been similarly present to comprehend just how much worse the student experience has gotten since the 90s https://t.co/ZkXX5XXnRf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2022
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2022
- Mold, radon in FSU building tied to eight cancer cases in faculty report.
- Cripping the Neoliberal University – We need a Politics of Care.
- The Academic Conference Will Never Be the Same.
- The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class.
- U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries. What Do Masks Do to Kids? It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading.
- New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump. ‘The Dark, Forgotten Carnival.’ Jan. 6 committee says Trump violated multiple laws in effort to overturn election. Criminal Charges Against Trump Just Became Way More Real. Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.
- Detroit overtaxed homeowners $600M. Years later, advocates still seeking reparations. Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole.’
- ‘Shadow pandemic’: Advocates worry lockdowns have fuelled surge in partner violence.
- The school shooting generation grows up.
- How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood.
- Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development?
- I’ve always wondered about this: Texas trampoline parks aren’t regulated or inspected. We found 494 injuries in DFW region.
- Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Climate Reality? In a First, Alaska’s Arctic Waters Appear Poised for Dangerous Algal Blooms. US military faces crisis in Hawaii after leak poisons water. This 1882 surveying error saved a patch of forest from logging. IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown. Carbon dioxide will have to be removed from air to achieve 1.5C, says report. How to Repair the Planet. Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it.
the problem in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/B3zDH15jI3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022
I have been exploring the work of Nukina Shunichi, a 19th century Samurai turned scifi writer recommended to me by one of my undergrads.
— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022
Why don't we have this writer on more syllabuses? He's completely overturned my view of the development of SFF.https://t.co/eAVuFrlQyk
- Climate Change Lurking Behind Every Corner: Review of Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious.
- From ‘Dune’ to climate change, UChicago scholar draws from unique experiences in new course.
- The Death of Philip K. Dick Brought to Life.
- The Octavia Butler Novel for Our Times. Not that one. Not that one either.
- Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress.
- I should teach this again: The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society.
- Defamiliarising Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction.
- Disney Censors Same-Sex Affection in Pixar Films, According to Letter From Employees.
- Enough people purchased a chemical on Amazon to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts. Amazon has continued to sell the product.
- Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete.
- PSA: Renting From Hertz May Get You Arrested. For real: If you’ve rented a car from Hertz, there could be a warrant out for your arrest.
- He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return.
- And on the pedestal these words appear: After Burning for Days, a Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks.
- Against the Contemporary American Essay.
- What is Love in African Fiction?
I think it’s bad for knowledge production that once a term reaches a certain level of obvious importance (like “Anthropocene”) it suddenly becomes “boring.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2022
- Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned: How a struggling bartender became the face of a resurgent left.
- Biden’s signature legislation expired. Recipients are wondering: WTF happened? The devastating effects of losing the child tax credit.
- Household debt jumped by $1 trillion in 2021, the most since 2007. Inflation rose 7.9% in February, as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years. Rents reach ‘insane’ levels across US with no end in sight. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee Is Helping Workers During COVID. As inflation heats up, 64% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.
I think Democrats were more or less certain to get slammed in the midterms no matter what they did — the real problem is that this window was their only opportunity to get anything done for the next decade and (just like in 2009) they blew it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2022
One US Senator “heard stories” about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit “for drugs” without any evidence or data to back it up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2022
He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying https://t.co/kOyuFp6ig4
- A Rhodes scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks.
- Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer. ‘This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out. How Ukraine could become a nuclear crisis. Russian bombs. Why It’s Important To Debate Foreign Policy Even In Times Of Conflict.
- You don’t exist. I’ve been saying it for years!
I’ve said it before but I think it’s at least plausible that contemporary history seems so bizarre because there’s only a handful of universes where humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cold War https://t.co/CMjcSFlbEE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 28, 2022
If you’d told me then that the late 90s were just about as good as things were going to get, man, I’d have had a lot of questions
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022
- No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
- Star Wars: You know, for kids.
- ‘The history of fantasy is racialized’: Lord of the Rings series sparks debate over race.
- Villeneuve’s “Dune”: Blending Spectacle and Cultural Erasure.
- Star Trek 2023 Movie To Reunite Kelvin Crew, Production Set To Start By End Of Year. What Happened to Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Film? Every Detail About His Canceled Pitch. Star Trek: Picard’s narrow tightrope.
- Futurama is back, again, again.
- Five years on, Breath of the Wild’s open world is still unmatched.
- “It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max Feud.
- Back to the Future: The Musical.
- Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China. ‘Fight Club’ Author Chuck Palahniuk Says China’s Censored Ending Is Actually Truer to His Vision.
- The US has plans to patrol the space around the moon. The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say. We’re Not Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds. The quest to avert an asteroid apocalypse is going surprisingly well.
privatizing the Earth didn’t wipe out poverty did it https://t.co/xyWhdvxp1H
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2022
- Garbage Hunters: Deciphering North Korea Through Its Trash.
- ‘I just feel like Rhode Island has failed’: The family of a 12-year-old girl with autism is among those in limbo because of the lack of services for those in crisis.
- Dividing Up the Autism Spectrum Will Not End the Way You Think.
- The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Enough Truck Drivers.
- As intended: The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans.
- Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale. Cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit. Snowpiercer Asks Us to Imagine the End of the World — And the End of Capitalism. The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage Are Wrong.
I have a crypto curious person in my life who explained that it’s because no one knows what happens with crypto when the power goes out for a long time, which is a pretty big problem for something that is supposed to be prepper currency https://t.co/U3fe0kl4KK
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2022
- We need to talk about this Scarlet Witch action figure.
- Mapping the celebrity NFT complex. Web3 is the future, or a scam, or both.
- New Data Shows 61% Rise in U.S. Prison Deaths in 2020. Only One (1) Media Outlet Reported On It.
- The U.S. is limiting compassionate release in plea deals. Many say that’s cruel.
- Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions. Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.
- Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
- Marquette has changed its university seal. Indigenous Education at Marquette.
- The Dawn of Everything.
- Against longtermism.
- A Henry Darger Dispute: Who Inherits the Rights to a Loner’s Genius?
- In my 35 years as a reporter, I have never seen anything of Afghanistan’s magnitude.
- Rich people, y’all.
- Types of dissertations.
- Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies.
- Giant spiders expected to drop from sky across the East Coast this spring.
- Vegetarians have 14% lower cancer risk than meat-eaters, study finds.
- What I Learned From Recording My Thoughts for an Immortal A.I. I mean…
- And the arc of history is long, but…
which in turns suggests he grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series on TV https://t.co/qo7GK6pvdy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2022
— This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists (@unflicuneballe) January 22, 2022
most of the cast is simply too old https://t.co/qkcc9bTYKW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2022
Written by gerrycanavan
March 12, 2022 at 6:38 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, Ada Palmer, Adam Kotso, administrative blight, affirmative action, Afghanistan, African literature, Afrofuturism, Agamben, Alabama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon, America, anti-colonialism, asteroids, autism, Batman, biopolitics, books, Breath of the Wild, bullying, cancer, capitalism, CFPs, child poverty, China, China Miéville, climate change, comics, Comixology, conferences, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, denialism, Detroit, disability, Disney, dissertations, Dune, East Germany, ecology, elections, essays, Facebook, Fight Club, FIYAH, Fledgling, fossil fuels, free speech, FSU, games, gay rights, geoengineering, Georgia, guns, Hawaii, Henry Darger, Hertz, How the University Works, humanitarianism, indigeneity, inflation, IPCC, Jacobin, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, kidney donation, Kim Stanley Robinson, longtermism, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, marriage, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, Maus, Minnesota, MMAcevedo, Moby-Dick, moral panics, musicals, neoliberalism, NFTs, Nintendo, North Korea, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Omega Point, Ozymandias, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, Pulp Fiction, Putin, race, racism, Russia, Scarlet Witch, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, SFFTV, SFRA, SFRA Review, slavery, Snowpiercer, spiders, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Starbucks, Stasi, suicide, Superman, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Census, The City and the City, the Moon, theory, Tolkien, trampolines, truck drivers, true crime, Trump, Twitter, Ukraine, Uneven Futures, unions, vegetarians, violence, war on education, World War 3, yachts, Zelda
Lost in January Links
* Out now: Extrapolation Volume 62.3 explores the representation of cyborgs in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, care in Gen Urobuchi’s science-fiction, and the critique of Western technoscience in Welcome to Night Vale.
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: Neurodiversity and Disability. CFP: Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture.
* Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? Notes on Squeecore. Portrait of the Author As a Component of a “Punk-Or-Core” Formulation. Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed. The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.
tired: hopepunk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 17, 2022
wired: popehunk
* Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature.
* Notes on the Forum of the Simulacra.
The SF/F studies variant of this (along with pop culture studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature, often film and tv, etc etc) is the way that these adjunct-staffed get-them-hooked courses so rarely translate into permanent lines for specialists in those fields. https://t.co/dU6iw9Qgo5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 10, 2022
* How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.
* How climate catastrophe has consumed popular culture. Ride or Die? Mark Bould and the Fast-and-Furiocene.
* Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock.” Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us. Coming back from a time of illness: how finance can learn from climate change fiction. Melancholy Utopianism: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We Can’t Just Grow Our Way Out of This Climate Mess.
* Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise.
* Pop culture can no longer ignore our climate reality.
* Marvel Movies Made 30% Of The Total Box Office.
* Nnedi Okorafor on SF through an African Lens.
* The Matrix Resurrections and trans life (and death). Unpacking the Hidden Meanings in The Matrix Resurrections. A Muddle instead of a Movie.
Zizek commenting on Resurrections is like an Exile from a previous instance of the Matrix coming back to fight Neo https://t.co/pck0vcZ5T4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 10, 2022
* Games Studies Studies Buddies is such a good podcast and this is an exemplary episode. Like and subscribe!
* Joss Whedon fully burns down what’s left of his career. The Joss Whedon Era: A Look Back.
* Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.
* Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
* From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry.
* California’s Forever Fire.
* California, Arizona and Nevada agree to take less water from ailing Colorado River.
* The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record. The Oceans Are Now Hotter Than At Any Point in Human History, Scientists Warn. Here’s how hot Earth has been since you were born. The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment. US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, Noaa report says.
* As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave. How Did We Go From Stimulus Checks to “Go to Work With COVID”?
it’s really fascinating how Trump’s near-total lack of ideological commitment made possible all sorts of things that are just completely foreclosed now https://t.co/Anc4hI9aVj
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 4, 2022
* The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism. Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens.
* Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection: The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
* Ultras.
* Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump. The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here’s What Life Is Like Inside. The January 6th Republicans (from Jonah Goldberg no less). Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes charged with seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The Rise and Fall of Latinx.
* Don’t Look Up Is a Terrible Movie. Really bad. I ranted.
* The Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’. Why ‘Star Trek’ made San Francisco the center of the universe.
* A Grieving Family Wonders: What if They Had Known the Medical History of Sperm Donor 1558?
* Percentage that would visit the Moon as a tourist, if money were not a factor.
* On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism.
* The end of the pandemic? Study: Omicron associated with 91% reduction in risk of death compared to Delta. Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble. America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire. We are the 3.2%.
In terms of lived, everyday experience, I think the pandemic will be over by:
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 13, 2022
* School Closures Led to More Sleep and Better Quality of Life for Adolescents. After last year’s learning loss, we need a plan for students with disabilities. Ideology and school closings. Who is this gentleman, Dude?
The vision of schools as businesses is currently ascendant. That is: schools should respond to what their customers want.
— Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) January 12, 2022
I have a few major concerns about this.
1/
* The Mangle of Federalism.
* Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students.
* Becoming Martian.
* Last Year’s Longest Strike Just Ended in Victory.
* Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges.
liking every single tweet about Columbia grad student workers’ big win. I got chills when I heard. it is nothing short of epic to bring a union-busting behemoth of a hedge-fund to the table and WIN. solidarity now, solidarity forever. so proud of and excited for @SW_Columbia.
— lil uzi veritas (@nadirahdixit) January 7, 2022
* Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others.
* This Is the Way the Humanities End.
* A professor welcomed students to class by calling them ‘vectors of disease to me.’ He has been suspended.
* These Tenured Professors Were Laid Off. Here’s How They Got Their Jobs Back.
* So you want to work in academic publishing.
* As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth.
* US inflation reached 7% in December as prices rise at rates unseen in decades.
* Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class.’
* A simple plan to solve all of America’s problem.
* Sea Power, ‘Disco Elysium’, and the importance of being miserable.
* HBO’s Station Eleven Surpasses the Novel.
* Oh boy, they’re finally rebooting Quantum Leap.
* I’d never known this: Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile.
* Wes Anderson’s next sounds like another mistake.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly.
* ‘Invincible’ Animated Series Sparks Profits Suit Against Robert Kirkman.
* What Elmo’s Viral Moment Tells Us About How Parents Watch Kids’ TV.
* A people’s history of the Beatles logo.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Is a Terrible Masterpiece.
* The Wire as copraganda.
* BEHOLD! MEGA-MANHATTAN!
ok but only if it is a maximum-security, open-air prison https://t.co/g6e1DcsAxm
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 14, 2022
* The Strange Literary Puzzle Only Four People Have Ever Solved. And welcome to the Wordle century.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think the human brain can truly comprehend that there’s no such thing as “cold,” only different directions of heat transfer https://t.co/kbafi5i5hC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 3, 2022
Stand by Me: Still Standin’ (2023)
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 15, 2022
Porky’s Legacy (2024)
Return to Return to Oz (2024)
57 Candles (2025)
sex, lies & nonfungible tokens (2025)
Christ Origins: First Temptation (2026)
Turner & Hooch: Afterlife (2027)
Star Wars in chronological order pic.twitter.com/WmD8j20wQm
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 15, 2022
Written by gerrycanavan
January 17, 2022 at 4:05 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abundance agenda, academia, Achille Mbembe, Afghanistan, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, America, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, banned books, Beatles, Bernie Sanders, California, capitalism, childbirth, class struggle, climate change, Colorado River, comics, copraganda, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cringe, critical race theory, crypto, democracy, Democrats, disability, dismissive incomprehension, Disney, Don't Look Up, Donald Trump, ecology, education, Elmo, Extrapolation, fascism, federalism, film, games, games studies, genetics, geoengineering, gonzo journalism, graduate student movements, Hamilton, Harry Potter, Haruki Murakami, hopepunk, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, inflation, Invincible, January 6th, Joe Biden, Joss Whedon, journalism, Judaism, Jurassic Park, Latinx, literature, Luddites, Mars, Marvel, MCU, medical humanities, melancy, New York, Obama, omicron, pandemic, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, pregnancy, publishing, Quantum Leap, quantum physics, race, Republicans, Roald Dahl, Robert Kirkman, school closures, Schrödinger, Schrödinger's Cat, science fiction, science fiction studies, Sesame Street, squeecore, Star Trek, Station Eleven, strikes, tenure, the humanities, The Matrix, The Matrix Resurrections, The Santa Clause, The Wire, unions, water, Wes Anderson, Whedon Studies, Wordle, Zizek, Žižek
Wednesday Night Links!

* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.
* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!
UCSB Lit and Environment Research Center is proud to host Prof. Gerry Canavan on June 8th, 12pm (PST) as he presents his current research on the impacts of works by celebrated science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
— UCSB English (@UCSB_English) June 2, 2021
All are welcome!@baker_r_r @me1odiousone @gerrycanavan pic.twitter.com/7XJwiOmWom
* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.
* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.
* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.
* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.
* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.
“Some institutional leaders seem to have taken the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to turbocharge the corporate model that has been spreading in higher education over the past few decades.”@AAUP’s report on COVID-19 and Academic Governance. https://t.co/TtzA8vk8OP
— MarquetteAAUP (@MarquetteAAUP) May 26, 2021
“…it also offers a hopeful counterpoint by documenting an increase in faculty influence at some institutions, including those where faculty members benefited from leadership transitions or from being more vigilant and outspoken.”https://t.co/l3GQgeVEhr
— MarquetteAAUP (@MarquetteAAUP) June 2, 2021
* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.
* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?
If yesterday's story about the low rate of tenured Black woman in the US was the shot, here's a bleak chaser: in the obit today for the playwright and professor Robbie McCauley, the Globe says she was, at Emerson, "the first Black person to to receive tenure without a lawsuit."
— Jeff Melnick (@melnickjeffrey1) May 28, 2021
brb founding a journal where the only thing we do is publish articles like this pic.twitter.com/yRnNGvJjns
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2021
you've heard of unpaid internship but have you heard of reverse financed internships? pic.twitter.com/lrULKunC2M
— dexxe (@dexxe) May 28, 2021
* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.
* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.
*This* is the source of the "evidence" that caused Boise State to shut down a 50-section class and the legislature to enact a new statute https://t.co/15wSuTy7h0 pic.twitter.com/u8e54mw0fe
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) May 24, 2021
American states making it illegal to tell the truth about American history is such a cartoonishly dystopian development and yet here we are https://t.co/fCigv6aSae
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2021
* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.
* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.
* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.
* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.
* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.
* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.
https://t.co/kZhIwYzhzK pic.twitter.com/hv1lFTevyV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 2, 2021
- Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?
“sleepwalking” implies they aren’t consciously choosing this outcome knowing full well it is happening and what the outcome will be https://t.co/cS4z17P7jE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2021
that Trump had the precise mix of narcissism, impetuousness, and indiscipline to be able to open the door, but not step all the way through it, is a sort of miracle we are perversely determined as a country not to benefit from https://t.co/eyj4vGaXAq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2021
rough prediction of where we're headed:
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) June 1, 2021
1) no filibuster reform -> no voting rights protections
2) last Dem bill passed is infrastructure/welfare thing ~25-50% as big as promised
3) huge Republican wave in 2022, democracy abolished in most swing states
4) second Trump term

* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.
* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.
* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.
* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.
* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?
* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.
* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.
* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.
* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.
* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.
* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?
* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.
* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.
* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.
* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.
* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.
The truly compassionate will shed the most tears for children that couldn't possibly exist in any universe, like the child of Marie Curie and Clark Kent. This is where our sympathy should really be directed. https://t.co/GoQ2mYJzfC
— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) June 1, 2021
* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.
* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.
* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.
* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!
* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.
* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.
* The world’s riskiest project.
* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…
* The Oral History of A Different World.
* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.
bear didn’t put up his best effort imo https://t.co/YQgwOi3ixJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2021
I don’t care for it https://t.co/z96yAZrH4Y
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2021

Written by gerrycanavan
June 2, 2021 at 4:06 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with A Different World, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, AAUP, academia, actually existing media bias, ADHD, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, apartheid, artificial intelligence, Associated Press, Augustine, Aurora, bears, Bill Gates, BMI, Boise State, cancel culture, capitalism, China, class struggle, climate change, coronavirus, County College of Morris, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdfunding, Cuba, dams, debt forgiveness, decolonize everything, democracy, depression, disability, disaster capitalism, disaster patriarchy, Disney, dress codes, drones, dyslexia, dystopia, ecology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, English majors, extrasolar planets, fascism, film, free speech, games, geoengineering, Grad School Achebe, Grad School Vonnegut, Greater Idaho, gymnastics, health care, housing market, How the University Works, Idaho, J.J. Abrams, Joe Biden, Kickstarter, kids today, killer death robots, Kim Stanley Robinson, Koch brothers, labor, language, minority rule, mommyblogging, Monopoly, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, nuclearity, Oklahoma, Oregon, outer space, pandemic, parenting, Peter Singer, philosophy, podcasts, police, police state, police violence, politics, potatoes, QAnon, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Samuel R. Delany, science fiction, science fiction studies, settler colonialism, shared governance, skydiving, Skynet, social democracy, social justice, Spanish Civil War, Star Trek, Star Wars, stimulus checks, stimulus package, strikes, student debt, talks, Ted Chiang, tenure, the economy, The French Dispatch, the rent is too damn high, Tracee Cocoo, trans* issues, trivia, Tulsa, Tulsa massacre, UCSB, unions, unpaid internships, USPS, Utopia, vaccination, video games, voter suppression, voting, war on education, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, white nationalism, Wisconsin, work, Wuhan, young people
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I’ve been doing:
- I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
- I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
- I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
- We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
- I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
- I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
- My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
- I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
- I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
- And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…
“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021
“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021
- SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
- Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
- Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
- Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
- CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
- The war on critical race theory.
- The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
- The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
- Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
- Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
- Ground operations.
- Reflections on the Market.
I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.
— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021
- Dark academia.
- How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
- The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
- The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
- Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
- Firsting in Research.
- A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
- “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
- Reagan broke everything.
- The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
- Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
- Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
- All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
- A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
- University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
- The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
- ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
- Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
- Every day a new sadness.
- Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
- How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
- Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
- Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ
— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021
if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021
- How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
- Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
- We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
- Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
- The Airline Safety Revolution.
- Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
- Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
- Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
- It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
- No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
- A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
- Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
- Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
- The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
- The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
- Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
- The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
- How much money does a writer need?
- Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
- The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
- Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
- The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
- It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.
My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."
— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021
- Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
- So you want to acknowledge the land?
- Decolonize Oregon Trail.
- Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
- Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
- Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
- How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
- There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
- Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.
https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC
— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021
- We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
- How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
- Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
- America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
- A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
- What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
- Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
- 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
- The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
- The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
- I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
- How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
- Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
- “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
- ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- Two from Ted Chiang: “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
- Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
- Sertãopunk.
- The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
- Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
- Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
- The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
- The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
- The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
- Top 20 Irishisms.
- Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
- 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.
it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities
— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Written by gerrycanavan
May 11, 2021 at 1:41 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic job market, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Adorno, Afrofuturism, airplanes, Alan Moore, Amazon, America, animal studies, animals, apocalypse, arigata-meiwaku, artificial intelligence, austerity, Brazil, cancel culture, capitalism, Carl Sagan, CFPs, Chen Qiufan, chess, Chronicles of Pyrdain, civilization, climate change, college sports, conferences, course evaluations, COVID-19, Deadpool, democracy, digital immortality, disability, Disney, dissertations, dolphin intelligence, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Said, existentialism, fascism, Fermi paradox, financialization, Fledgling, futurity, games, glitches, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, gymnastics, Hawaii, Hayao Miyazaki, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, indigeneity, indigenous issues, Irenosen Okojie, Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, Kameron Hurley, Karate Kid, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, land acknowledgment, late style, LEGOs, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, malaria, McCarthyism, meritocracy, millennials, Milwaukee, mRNA, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nebula Award, neofeudalism, NFTs, Nisi Shawl, novels, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, orcs, pandemic, perimenopause, podcasts, pollution, race, racism, Random Trek, reparations, Republicans, research, rich people, Romania, Ronald Reagan, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sertãopunk, SFRA, Sherryl Vint, slavery, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, student debt, Ted Chiang, tenure, the Antarctic, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Muppets, The Outer Wilds, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UCR, unions, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, WandaVision, water, wealth, white supremacy, Wikifeet, wildfires, Wisconsin, wokeness, words, writing
It’s Been a Minute: Links!

- There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
- I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
- Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
- Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020
Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY
— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020
The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020
(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.
— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2020 at 3:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Amazon, America, artificial intelligence, austerity, Baltimore, Black Panther, Bolsonaro, books, CFPs, cinema, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, Cookie Monster, COVID-10, cyberpunk, Democrats, demographic cliff, disability, Disney, ecology, elections, fantasy, fascism, futurity, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Georgia, Guilford College, Harlan Ellison, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, intergenerational warfare, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Mars, millennials, Mitch Daniels, moms, MUPD, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Octavia Butler, pandemic, podcasts, police, politics, publishing, Purdue, race, racism, Republicans, roleplaying games, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, SFRA Review, shared governance, socialism, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, stimulus checks, student debt, syllabi, Ted Chiang, tenure, Texas, the Amazon, the Arctic, the economy, The Fifth Season, The Last Dangerous Visions, the Left, The Ministry for the Future, the university in ruins, Tolkien, true crime, UVM, vaccines, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing
Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday
* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…
* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”
* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).
* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!
* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.
* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”
* A Message from Future Generations.
* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.
* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”
* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.
* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.
* Which doesn’t count the die-in.
Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette’s English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB
— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020
Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.
— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020
* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.
Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I’m not going to try and hurt them.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 29, 2020
* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.
Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ
— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020
* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.
* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.
* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”
* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.
If you’ve ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W
— stefanielaine🌹 (@stefanielaine) September 1, 2020
* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.
Obama is, mostly quietly and behind the scenes, the single most powerful counter-revolutionary force in 21st-century US politics https://t.co/QjAnCDOKCS
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 28, 2020
* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America’s Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.
* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin’s record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.
I think people outside the state just can’t fathom that Wisconsin’s gerrymander is real. Republicans take 60%+ majorities in the legislature no matter how many people vote for them. In 2018 they took 64% of the Assembly on 46% of the vote. https://t.co/FExUcedl4Z
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2020
* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America’s future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and ‘Triggering the Libs,’ Former Classmates Say.
* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. “When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society.” Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven’t killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission.
* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD’s Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.
Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality — including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred — in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) August 28, 2020
not sure anything has quite gotten to me the way the drive to make rittenhouse a right-wing hero of self-defense has. it is, to me, the single most ominous development of the year.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020
Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) “order.”
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020
Looking at what's gone down in Kenosha these few days—the police shooting, the immediate crackdown, the militia shooting—is just staring off a dizzying edge into the abyss, knowing things are about to get so much worse & hoping like hell there's some way we don't take the plunge.
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 26, 2020
* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.
* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after ‘rapid spread’ of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed’s Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here’s What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I’m weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I’ve got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students’ positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don’t Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.
* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We’re Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.
* Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here’s what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.
* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University’s Debt—And Who’s Paying for It.
* Legionnaire’s Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.
* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.
* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.
* Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.
Liberals hate leftists for the same reason you'd hate someone at a theater who kept yelling "These are all actors, none of this is real." Liberals are trying to enjoy a fictional performance about their side being heroic protagonists, and leftists keep disrupting the illusion.
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 27, 2020
* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.
* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we’re not talking about a government shutdown, are we? ‘We shouldn’t have to beg’: Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.
* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but “pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower” actually made me wince in pain.
* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.
* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens’ anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.
* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here’s why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.
* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.
* The Literature of White Liberalism.
* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada’s COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.
* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.
* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.
* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.
* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series’ real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.
* Why Uber’s business model is doomed.
* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season.
* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.
To get a sense for how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 1, 2020
* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).
* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on ‘Black Panther’ Without Chadwick Boseman.
* All roads lead back to All My Children.
* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it’s about time.
* Stan Lee’s American pantheon.
* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.
* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.
* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.
* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you’re feeling positive enough to get through your day.
* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labor Organizing Threats.’
One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."
— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020
* Understanding Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.
* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).
* Development ceases on Amazon Prime’s CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.
"Money implies poverty." — an adage in The Culture, Iain M. Banks
— Michael (Noble Continuation) (@OmanReagan) April 9, 2020
* Ah dinnae ken this: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots.
I was today years old when I learned that a “buttload” is an actual measue of volume dating back to middle English, equal to two “hogsheads,” or about 126 gallons.
— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) August 20, 2020
* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season to introduce franchise’s first transgender, non-binary characters.
* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive ‘jumping’ earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.
* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!
* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.
* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2020 at 4:19 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #RaceFail, 1918, 2021, academia, academic jobs, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, All My Children, Amazon, America, anti-racism, anxiety, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Batman, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Panther, Black Student Council, black studies, books, Call of Duty, CFPs, Chadwick Boseman, Charles R. Saunders, China, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CWRU, David Graeber, Deadeye Dick, debt, Deep Space Nine, depression, Disney, District 9, divorce, domestic terrorism, domestic violence, doomscrolling, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, earthworms, ecology, epidemic, Eugene V. Debs, evictions, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fan culture, fantasy, fascism, Florida, football, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Gloomhaven, Go, government shutdowns, Grad School Vonnegut, Great Recession, grief, GWU, herd immunity, How the University Works, Hurricane Laura, hydrochloroquine, Iain M. Banks, Incredible Hulk, Jailbird, James Madison University, Jed Rubenfeld, Jessica A. Krug, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kenosha, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kyle Rittenhouse, Legionnaire's disease, liberalism, literature, Louisiana, manifestos, Mario, Marquette, Marquette English, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miami, Milwaukee, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NBA, NC State, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Jersey, New Mutants, NFL, Nintendo, NYPD, Octavia Butler, Pacific Edge, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, pirates, podcasts, police, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, QAnon, Quakers, quarantine, race, racism, Sci-Hub, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, Scots, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA Review, social media, Spanish flu, sports, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, strikes, Super Mario, surveillance society, teaching, teenagers, tenure, terrorism, The Culture, the kids aren't all right, Three-Body Problem, TikTok, Twitter, Uber, UNC, unemployment, unions, University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, Vonnegut, Wakanda Forever, Watchmen, whiteness, wildcat strikes, Willy Wonka, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, X-Men, xkcd, Yale, zombies
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
This is a good rule that I’ve tried to informally follow for the past few years. “Student-athlete” is a term of art, created so the NCAA and its member institutions could dodge worker’s compensation claims. Sportswriters don’t have to use it. https://t.co/stZKzAjLIB
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) August 10, 2020
University of Pittsburgh withholding graduate student access to email until agreeing to assume risk of catching COVID pic.twitter.com/fHbH60iDoT
— Rachel C (@RCoombsScience) August 6, 2020
My [67m] unpaid college athletes [20m, 21m, 19m, 21m, 21m, 18m, 19m, 22m, 20m, 21m, 22m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 18m, 21m, 21m, 20m, 19m, 20m, 18m, 21m, 20m, 22m, 23m, 20m, 19m, 21m, 19m, 23m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 19m, 21m, 20m] are unionizing
— Trevin Flickinger (@trevin_flick) August 10, 2020
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
NEW: @jacobbogage got USPS data showing at least 671 USPS mail sorting machines have been removed across the country since June. Represents a reduction in national mail sorting capacity of 21.4 million pieces of mail per hour. https://t.co/6lOGfByZBC pic.twitter.com/FGV1nto0kn
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) August 14, 2020
Photo taken in Wisconsin. This is happening right before our eyes. They are sabotaging USPS to sabotage vote by mail. This is massive voter suppression and part of their plan to steal the election. pic.twitter.com/QXLWGIHTrz
— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 15, 2020
It has been conceded by everyone of all parties that the majority of Americans who will attempt to vote in November will vote for Joe Biden, and our election is now some sort of mass game show where we will see if the majority of Americans complete the physical challenges or not
— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) August 10, 2020
This is all going to get worse before it gets even worse
— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) August 15, 2020
The Wisconsin State Assembly gerrymander is arguably the most effective partisan gerrymander in the country. Nothing, and I mean nothing, not even if Biden wins by double of what he's polling at now, will break that Republican majority. https://t.co/p9iZTfh7Fp pic.twitter.com/QeyXnjDesC
— Chaz Nuttycombe (@ChazNuttycombe) August 2, 2020
This is the worst gerrymander the country, change my mind. pic.twitter.com/HVS7rYB4sO
— Kiran 🗳 (@MichiganKiran) August 10, 2020
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
… this is the “hägar the horrible” comic strip framed on biden’s desk. pic.twitter.com/fqNcuW8ceC
— fake nick ramsey @ 🏡 (@nick_ramsey) August 11, 2020
The next time someone runs for president who wasn’t personally selected by Joe Biden for the job could be as far away as 2036. So a single bad decision by Barack Obama in 2008 screwed up the next 20-30 years. https://t.co/JdTKPChPen
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020
it’s awesome how Joe Biden gets to set the direction of the leftmost party in the world’s imperial hyperpower for what could be the most important decade in human history and no one can really explain why he’s the nominee or even how he won exactly
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020
* some conditions may apply https://t.co/yJ8yxSsSZI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
tag yourself I’m pretty sure I’m Tanis and I don’t like it https://t.co/DIHNkx7S9M
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2020
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
This is such a perfect example of modern innovation in action — wireless charging, which saves us like 0.001 seconds every time we plug in our phones, uses up to *50% more energy*.
Nearly imperceptible convenience, at massive social costhttps://t.co/epfFenCJku
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 5, 2020
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
Gotta feel for this kid. His 66 person American town is only accessible by road to the Canadian side where most people live, so now he's the only kid his age and because of what's happening in the unconnected rest of the country he's forced to stay on his side indefinitely. https://t.co/OqJjY0xJMA
— Evan Hadfield (@Evan_Hadfield) August 8, 2020
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
Funny how it's always "The Simpsons predicted the future" and never "We created ourselves a nightmare world beyond parody".
— Kung Fu Monster D (@Duerer95) August 4, 2020
zizek on sesame street talking to the puppets “no i cannot say, as you do, ‘i love you’ so casually, i believe this is obscene, love is deeply private, so particular it is really almost evil”
— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) August 15, 2020
someone check the simulation heat sinks, reality generation is clearly being throttled by high temps pic.twitter.com/W3NlLzSGOx
— lvl 45 chaos chatterton potus (@thetomzone) August 6, 2020
All these tweets about "2020 please end already" remind me of an old communist joke:
Two friends meet in the middle of Bucharest:
– How are you doing these days?
– Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.— Orel Beilinson (@BeilinsonOrel) August 11, 2020
Uber exists entirely through its wild abuse of existing laws and even then it loses money hand over fist https://t.co/peeHu0EvJy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2020 at 1:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, actually existing media bias, Alex Morse, America, ants, Are we living in a simulation?, Arizona State University, Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, Beirut, birthers, Black Lives Matter, Black Student Council, blackface, Bond, Candyland, capitalism, Captain Planet, CEOs, CFPs, child care, China, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, clothes, college, college football, comics, cop shit, coronavirus, corpocracy, COVID-19, cruises, decolonize everything, democracy, depression, derecho, diabetes, dibs on the screenplay, Disney, Disney World, dogs, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, ecology, energy, epidemic, essential workers, eviction, explosions, Extinction Rebellion, Facebook, family, fantasy, fascism, FiveThirtyEight, Flannery O'Connor, Florida, flu season, fMRIs, fraud, futurity, games, general election 2020, genocide, gerrymandering, Grad School Vonnegut, grading, grift, Hagar the Horrible, Hamilton, Hitler, hoaxes, homelessness, hospitals, How the University Works, hurricanes, ice sheet collapse, immunology, indigenous futurism, Iowa, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, Kamala Harris, kids today, labor, lame duck session, LAPD, layoffs, Lebanon, Legionnaire's disease, lithium, Louisiana, Lower Decks, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marquette English, masks, McDonald's, mental health, Millard Fillmore, Mt. Rushmore, my media empire, Nate Silver, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, Notre Dame, NRA, nuclearity, nursing homes, NYPD, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, pandemic, Paradoxa, parody, pedagogy, podcasts, poetry, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, Ponzi schemes, post-truth, power, protest, QAnon, race, racial slurs, racism, radiators, remote learning, Rent, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, sex, sitcoms, Slaughterhouse Five, social media, Star Trek, strikes, suicide, syllabi, teachers, teaching, Ted Chiang, terraforming, the Anthropocene, the Census, the economy, The Last Airbender, the Left, The Legend of Korra, The Legend of Zelda, The Matrix, the Midwest, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the suburbs, TikTok, tourism, true crime, Twilight Struggle, Twitter, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, unions, useful idiots, USPS, USSR, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, Wachowskis, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, Who's the Boss?, wildfire, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, zombies, Žižek
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK
— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020
This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2020 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, a man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life, ADA, after America, air travel, Airbnb, Amazon, America, Animal Crossing, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, billionaires, Black Mirror, Bong Joon-ho, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Captain Pike, captalism, carbon, CFPs, Charlie Brooker, child abuse, class struggle, Cleveleand, climate change, coal, comics, commuting, coronavirus, COVID-19, cruises, democracy, disability, disease, Disney, Donald Trump, DoorDash, eating meat, education, Elizabeth Warren, environmentalism racism, essential workers, evil, Extrapolation, family, floods, games, Gargoyles, general strike, Georgia, grief, Hemingway, Huntington's disease, ice sheet collapse, Iron Man, Jaimee Hills, Joe Biden, John Brown, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Mother Nature, Muppets, murder hornets, my misspent youth, Nancy Pelosi, NASA, neural nets, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, organ donation, pandemic, Pentagon, Plain Dealer, podcasts, poetry, police dogs, politics, pollution, private prisons, psychology, quarantine, race, racism, remote learning, Republicans, resilience, restaurants, rich people, Rube Goldberg, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, seagulls, Seattle, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, SimRefinery, six-word stories, soccer, Sopranos, Spanish flu, sports, Star Trek, STEM, Strange New Worlds, strikes, submarines, the Arctic, the Constitution, the economy, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, The Onion, therapy, Uber, unemployment, unions, USPS, vaccines, Wall Street, war on education, wealth, wildfires, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, X-Men, Zoom
Thursday Links!
* 15 scenarios for the fall semester. The COVID Caveat. Why We’re Exhausted By Zoom. Better Late Than Zoom. Here’s a thread of all the statements I’ve seen from colleges about what they’re planning for the pandemic’d fall semester. How College Leaders Are Planning for the Fall. Fullerton goes online. A message from President Daniels regarding fall semester: ‘If They Die, They Die.’ Universities are expecting 230,000 fewer students – that’s serious financial pain. Coronavirus pushes colleges and universities to the brink. New report on adjuncts says many make less than $3,500 per course and live in poverty. More College Students May Need Remedial Help This Fall. Can They Get It Online? Admin 101: Our Shift to Remote Fund Raising. For Would-Be Academics, Now Is the Time to Get Serious About Plan B. If you want my advice. And some rare good news: Vermont State Colleges Chancellor Withdraws Plan To Close Three Campuses.
part of my grand unified theory of why colleges are run so terribly is that their leaders are pathetically desperate to signal to the other members of the multi-multi-millionaire class that they are still in the club https://t.co/NNi7IPwo4Y
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020
If it *were* true that Harvard, an institution with both nearly infinite resources and a nearly infinite ability to generate new resources in an emergency, can’t weather an economic downturn without drastic cuts, that would be a massive scandal of truly epic mismanagement!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020
* The NCAA saved money in case of a canceled March Madness. Then it spent it. This is a wild story that gets at the heart of the NCAA: they built a rainy-day slush fund out of fear of the workers they refuse to pay, then dissolved it out of fear that the slush fund might someday find its way into the hands of the workers anyway…
* The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act recognizes that the nonprofit humanities sector is an essential component of America’s economic and civic life. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has received supplemental funding to provide emergency relief to institutions and organizations working in the humanities that have been affected by the coronavirus.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet.
* After the election, Wisconsin reports largest jump in coronavirus cases in at least two weeks. Medical College of Wisconsin model shows hospitals would fill in a month if all social distancing ended May 26. Always an angle. ‘Open the Economy’ Is the New ‘White Lives Matter.’ When working towards the führer goes wrong. Fortress Wisconsin. Republicans ask Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn extension of ‘safer at home’ order; Court could rule to block Wisconsin’s ‘Safer at Home’ order as early as April 30. Milwaukee Common Council votes to mail absentee ballot applications to city’s registered voters.
* Power Up: President Trump wants to return to ‘normal.’ That will be harder than he thinks, say scientists, doctors and Americans. Ex-FDA chief says U.S. not likely to have broad-based coronavirus testing until September. Barr Threatens Legal Action Against States Over Lockdowns. Singapore Seemed to Have Coronavirus Under Control, Until Cases Doubled.
* Very cool: A doctor says he was removed from his federal post after pressing for rigorous vetting of treatments embraced by Trump. CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating. A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity helped spread the coronavirus. Fox News falls out of love with hydroxychloroquine. Why WHO Failed. The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. We Need a New Social Contract for the Coronavirus. We Are Living in a Failed State.
seem to be hitting another instance of that limit where when you simply report what Republicans are doing people won’t accept it’s true because it’s so outrageous and reprehensible https://t.co/Og0fOiUyXH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 19, 2020
* During wartime, both financial and material capital is demolished: infrastructures, factories, bridges, ports, stations, airports, buildings. But once the war is over a period of reconstruction begins, and it is this reconstruction that triggers an economic rebound. However, the current epidemic looks more like a neutrino bomb, which kills humans and leaves buildings, roads and factories intact (if empty). So, when the epidemic is over, there will be nothing to rebuild—and no consequent recovery.
absolutely, also in the short term it is an excuse for not doing anything right now to prevent job losses or support people who've lost their jobs https://t.co/FtEnx9m6ep
— flglmn (@flglmn) April 20, 2020
They are not trying to reopen the economy to save it. They know it can't be saved. They want to reopen the economy to save capitalism, because if this government was forced to distribute resources in a way that ensured our survival, they know we would never go back.
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 23, 2020
* Poll: 43 percent of Americans have lost jobs or wages due to coronavirus outbreak. Second- and third-wave layoffs coming from COVID-19.
* Americans too scared to go to work risk losing unemployment aid, experts say.
* White House, GOP face heat after hotel and restaurant chains helped run small business program dry. The astroturf begins. Opening up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.
* The media is already pushing austerity so hard I finally think Biden might actually win.
* Coronavirus Is Hammering the News Industry. Here’s How to Save It. Twilight of the Subway. Now there’s a silver lining.
* By A 10-to-1 Margin, Americans Support Orders To Stay At Home. Something Big Is Getting Lost In The Debate Over Stay-At-Home Orders. Social distancing as act of love. And whether that can last.
Social distancing without social (communal, preferably) support is hugely miserable for people and unsustainable. /2
— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020
The way social distancing has been done in the US has put the entirety of the burden for managing the epidemic on the people who have the least resources. /5
— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020
* Facing the Coronavirus in Queens. Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus.
* 28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis. In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it. A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients. “Human challenge trials,” where healthy volunteers would be exposed to Covid-19, explained. The vaccine realism no one wants.
* Disney may stay closed until 2021.
* And why not: Trump Plans to Suspend Immigration to U.S.
* Let’s see what else is in the news: Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner. After the Flood: Chicago and Climate Change.
* Stay woke, liberals! You have to vote for Joe Biden no matter what Meghan McCain says. By the way, has anyone actually seen the Democrats? Seems like the stuff going on is the sort of thing they might have something to say about…
This is a real ad 100% cannot make this up pic.twitter.com/eBrvJCVXdK
— Wimstom (@KhakiJorts) April 22, 2020
* Trump’s support for right-wing protests just got more ugly and dangerous.
* Don’t put words in my mouth!
* Grandmother Paradox: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler by Nisi Shawl.
* Five Things COVID-19 has taught me about life by Nnedi Okorafor.
* Shaviro reads the Interdependency trilogy.
* The comics industry is in danger. Who can save it?
* Another think piece for my fall Watchmen class, which currently has a waitlist so long I could run a second section: Nothing Ever Ends.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 23, 2020 at 11:12 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, America, apocalypse, austerity, bigamy, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, college basketball, comics, coronavirus, COVID-19, CSU Fullerton, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, ecology, fascism, general election 2020, graduate student nightmares, How the University Works, immigration, Interdependency trilogy, Joe Biden, John Scalzi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kindred, Las Vegas, love, March Madness, medicine, memoir, models, money printer go brrrr, NCAA, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia E. Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, Porcupine Racetrack, Purdue, race, racism, recovery, Republicans, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Second Great Depression?, silver linings, social distancing, Steve Shaviro, the courts, the economy, the law, The State, the university in ruins, time travel, trolley problems, unemployment, unions, vaccines, Vermont, Watchmen, White Foods, whiteness, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
Wednesday News Brief, This Is All the News Today
* The US is now on track to have the worst outbreak anywhere. In the end we will have handled this worse than any nation on earth, because our leaders lied to us, said it was under control, said it wasn’t a big deal, said we were doing great, privately sold their stocks, told us to *buy* stock, ignored science, ignored experts, lied.
* Vox has some details on the coronavirus bailout, including how UI will be extended to freelancers and the self-employed and when you’ll get your check. Here’s another read from Forbes. This thread on Twitter seems to have more information on how the UI expansion will work for the self-employed.
* Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Reclaim our homes. Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression. European countries are writing blank checks to save their economies from coronavirus.
I've been thinking about something Ted Chiang said: A conservative narrative = there's a disaster/problem/war. It's resolved, and everything returns to normal. A progressive narrative = there's a disaster, it's resolved, and nothing is the same. We are in a progressive narrative.
— Halimah Marcus (@HalimahMarcus) March 24, 2020
Just started crying thinking about the end of Vonnegut’s Timequake. World enters a long period of isolating illness, afterwards no one knows how to live anymore. Saved by person-to-person transmission of a creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
* “Herd Immunity” Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism.
one thing that's happening very clearly RN IMO is a vivid, dramatic tightening of longstanding continuums of exploitation and disposability
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 19, 2020
basically, then, in a moment when the *inevitable* *best case scenario* is spacing out deaths manageably, the *bandaid* is a rolling distribution of preventable death and illness throughout the most vulnerable people in the workforce. ok.
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 22, 2020
Coronavirus proves the socialists were right about everything all along, but
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 25, 2020
* On Monday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
* Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2. From the list let me recommend Four Futures by Peter Frase, which I thought was great.
* We are in a time of wild magical thinking: miracle cures, coronavirus parties, Disney reopening next week, return to work by Easter, life without fear. Meanwhile, as a direct result of Trump administration policy: Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies.
Laundered thru masculinism (don’t be afraid), xenophobia (don’t be like China), reactionary liberalism (don’t be like Trump) and not-even-being-wrong (it *is* unsustainable), but in the end he reaches point you knew he would: we simply have to let them die https://t.co/xY5Zsbeoyt pic.twitter.com/w8HTf5degX
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
just such a good example for how the civility debate breaks brains: you can call for the preventable, near-term deaths of millions of Americans and millions more globally as long as you politely say “refuse to countenance trade-offs between public health and economic survival” https://t.co/mUsJFkrKH4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 21, 2020
Wall Street doesn’t seem to think so. As far as they’re concerned, things are getting back to normal. Really shows you the kind of magical thinking that undergirds all of it.
— guantanamo bey (@pennhb) March 25, 2020
faced with two equally destructive paths, health system collapse or economic freefall, America has boldly chosen both https://t.co/YkgiWFUDhr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 22, 2020
We need to be thinking creatively about new forms of collective aid and vast governmental expenditure to protect the vulnerable when it turns out that of course we can’t simply social distance until a vaccine is found.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 23, 2020
So we're doing The Trolley Problem but the most important thing is to save the trolley
— Mark Agee (@MarkAgee) March 24, 2020
* New York has 5% of Covid-19 cases worldwide as city becomes battlefront. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. “We have 11,000. We need 30,000.”
* Trump Shrugged Off Repeated Intelligence Warnings About Coronavirus Pandemic. DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck. U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak. Coronavirus and Fox News.
* How the virus got out. How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It). What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus.
* A Day in the Life of an ER Doc. A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients. Nursing Home Worker: “Everything About This Is Designed for Disaster.”
* Higher Education in the Age of COVID-19. How Is Covid-19 Changing Prospective Students’ Plans? Here’s an Early Look. Central Washington University Board of Trustees declares exigency. “To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.” Embrace the Canavan plan for pass/fail.
* Amidst a global health crisis, porn finds a way.
* The Very Specific Reason We Shouldn’t Bail Out the Cruise Industry.
* We Need a Hard Pause, Followed by a Soft Start.
* That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Really Scares Me.
* It will only get worse: ICE Detainees Are Being Quarantined. DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency. ‘Terrified’ Package Delivery Employees Are Going to Work Sick. Coronavirus hits rural Kansas, Missouri towns. Many don’t have a single hospital bed. U.S. Hospitals Prepare Guidelines For Who Gets Care Amid Coronavirus Surge. White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up.’ Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus. Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals. “This week, it’s going to get bad.”
* Science you can use: the Great Depression and death rates.
* DoE won’t let this crisis go to waste.
* Africa’s mountain gorillas also at risk for coronavirus.
* In some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline.
in some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline https://t.co/4LazYaBrdV
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) March 23, 2020
* The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
* Comrade Britney Spears shares post calling for general strike and redistribution of wealth.
* Chess in the time of coronavirus.
* Joe Biden Pivots to Video. ‘There’s no playbook for this’: Biden trapped in campaign limbo. You know it’s bad when the political cartoons start agreeing with you.
if you have a problem
and no one else can help
and if you can find him
maybe you can hire
the B team https://t.co/scJ3S45ice— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 23, 2020
You know it's bad when political cartoons start agreeing with you pic.twitter.com/dvUOdmesDF
— Sassy Comrade ❤🖤☭♀️ (@SassyOlli) March 21, 2020
* A really exciting new book series: Palgrave SFF: A New Canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 25, 2020 at 12:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1099s, academia, admissions, America, anti-capitalism, Bernie Sanders, books, Britney Spears, Central Washington University, charts, chess, China, class struggle, comics, communism, coronavirus, cruises, Dark Forest, Department of Education, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, FDA, financial exigency, funerals, gorillas, grading, Great Depression, grief, health care, herd immunity, homelessness, How the University Works, ICFA, isolation, Joe Biden, know when to fold 'em, magical thinking, medicine, Mitt Romney, mortality, neoliberalism, New York, Olympics, podcasts, politics, pornography, recession, rural hospitals, science fiction, science fiction studies, socialism, stimulus, Ted Chiang, the Constitution, the economy, The Onion, Timequake, trolley problem, Trumpbucks, UBI, unemployment, Vonnegut, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II
CoronaFRI!vus
* Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful. No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing. Without Urgent Action, Coronavirus Could Overwhelm U.S., Estimates Say. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed.
* David Harvey: Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. The Politics of the Pandemic. You and Your Boss Have the Same Interests Right Now. That Is a Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity. Sara Nelson Says People Are Ready for Solidarity. COVID-19 Emergency Tenant Protections. Homeless families occupy vacant homes in LA. Dealing With Coronavirus Requires Bold Action. The Democratic Leadership Won’t Take It.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) March 19, 2020
* 9% of Working Americans (14 Million) So Far Have Been Laid Off As Result of Coronavirus; 1 in 4 Workers Have Had Their Hours Reduced; 2% Have Been Fired; 20% Have Postponed a Business Trip; Shock Waves Just Now Beginning to Ripple Through Once-Roaring US Economy. U.S. Jobless Claims Jump to Two-Year High Amid Closures. 2700% increase in unemployment claims in Ohio — midweek. [Calfornia] averages 2,000 unemployment applications a day. Two or three days ago, it received 40,000. On Tuesday, 80,000 applications were filed. JP Morgan is forecasting -14% RGDP growth in Q2. That’s so bad it isn’t even on the historical axis.
History is dialectical but the likelihood that the US will be operating under some version of the USSR’s command economy in a year is just next level
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020
The persistent fantasy of a serious crisis that forces even the worst politicians to do the right thing
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 20, 2020
* So, It’s Bad. Free, Widespread Testing Is The Only Way America Goes Back to Normal. This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus. Coronavirus will radically alter the U.S. US sales of guns and ammunition soar amid coronavirus panic buying. The Stimulus Plan That We Need Now.
* Curb Your Enthusiasm: “The Virus.”
* I’m reminded somehow of the way you end a SimCity game by unleashing every disaster on your city as once. The Midwest Is Preparing To Get Hit With Major Floods During The Coronavirus Outbreak. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Locust crisis poses a danger to millions, forecasters warn. Earthquake in Utah. A Huge Chunk of Yellowstone Is Pulsing.
* Weeks Before Virus Panic, Intelligence Chairman Privately Raised Alarm, Sold Stocks. Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness.
weren’t you in the same meeting https://t.co/Zf4xBfAeYO
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020
* Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet. Amazon Workers Shut Down Warehouse After Employee Is Infected With Coronavirus. The tech execs who don’t agree with ‘soul-stealing’ coronavirus safety measures.
This really hammers home the way in which the Uber model (like that of all “gig economy” employers) is to extract money from workers while making those workers bear all of the risk. https://t.co/2jCKfrfdNn
— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) March 19, 2020
Bellamy imagined a universal monopoly ushering in more or less communism; our version is giving control of the planet to a guy who thinks rich people need to move to outer space to escape environmental collapse https://t.co/36hkp1Ex9W
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020
* Mitt Romney’s $1,000 Isn’t Our Universal Basic Income. Americans may see first round of checks from US government by April 6. I really should have known.
The UK announced it will guarantee everyone’s wages until this thing is over, and Congress is still haggling over like, whats the income cutoff to make someone eligible for the one-time $1200 check
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) March 20, 2020
Not processing yet that we got through this week without Congress finalizing massive action on behalf of tens of millions of unemployed and desperate Americans, whose bills are piling up as we speak
— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 20, 2020
As the proposed amount of the checks vary wildly we get a fun natural experiment in how much has to be on the table before a liberal doesn’t start their analysis with “of course *I* don’t need the money.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020
* Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded. In Coronavirus Testing Ramp-Up, U.S. Called Private Sector in Late. How the CDC Botched Basic Science in Its Attempt to Make a Coronavirus Test. Don’t Let Trump Off the Hook.
* I had a lot of question about this, so perhaps it will be useful to you too: No, The World Health Organization Is Not Recommending Against Ibuprofen For Coronavirus Symptoms.
* The world’s fastest supercomputer identified chemicals that could stop coronavirus from spreading, a crucial step toward a treatment. Japanese flu drug ‘clearly effective’ in treating coronavirus, says China. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID‐19: results of an open‐label non‐randomized clinical trial.
* “I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…”: The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers. This is certainly a problem but I became attuned to the reality of coronavirus precisely through these sorts of non-experts while Trump and the CDC were still lying to everyone. I haven’t seen anything better for learning true information about this crisis than Reddit’s upvote/downvote system.
* Today in the trolley problem. Today in the simulation argument. Today in career goals. Today in Star Trek Studies. Today in Watchmen fan fiction. Weird time.
* Rikers Island inmate has contracted coronavirus: officials. How coronavirus could explode at Riker’s Island. Reducing prison population protects us all from coronavirus.
* You Need Me to Have a Mask. ‘It Feels Like a War Zone’: Doctors and Nurses Plead for Masks on Social Media. A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling. Simple math offers alarming answers.
* Rural America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic.
* This picture tells a story about America.
* As Cities Around the World Go on Lockdown, Victims of Domestic Violence Look for a Way Out.
* The COVID-19 Crisis and International Students. Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases. A Brief Letter to an Institution that Believes Extensions are the Accommodations We Need Right Now.
* ‘Panic-gogy’: Teaching Online Classes During The Coronavirus Pandemic. As Schools Look for Guidance, Educators Are Left Asking, ‘What?’ New Coronavirus Package Could Unravel Protections For Students With Disabilities. Is online school illegal? With schools closing from coronavirus, special education concerns give districts pause.
All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is, like, *really* unhappy now, shit.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020
* GameStop claims it is ‘essential retail’ to remain open amid coronavirus shutdowns. It didn’t work.
* Minnesota and Vermont Just Classified Grocery Clerks as Emergency Workers.
* The Quiet Emptiness of a World under Coronavirus.
* The desire for public sex is, of course, nothing new. In his book Tell Me What You Want, sex researcher and Kinsey Institute fellow Justin Lehmiller found it was one of the seven most common fantasies, but the way people are having it in a coronavirus-ridden world definitely is. Now, instead of treating it as nothing more than a novel thrill to “spice things up,” some people are using it as an act of resistance against the virus-induced lockdowns that have squashed so many of the liberties we hold dear. Sex etiquette during the coronavirus.
* Kim Stanley Robinson releases a chapter from his latest novel, though weirdly it’s listed as “news.”
* I’m beginning to think you just can’t trust billionaires: When he joined the race last year, the billionaire said he would employ his campaign staff through the November election, even if he weren’t the nominee. But Bloomberg dropped out after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, and he has since fired staffers in multiple waves. His campaign had announced earlier in March that it would launch an independent expenditure group to take on Trump that would employ former campaign staffers in swing states.
* The Sanders worldview wins even as Bernie loses.
we're in a national pandemic with a looming Depression and I believe this is the last we saw of the leading Democratic candidate, over 60 hours agopic.twitter.com/fHoD8UB5TS
— jack allison (@jackallisonLOL) March 20, 2020
Biden beating Bernie and then immediately giving up is an even worse scenario than I expected
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020
* You know it’s bad when politicians are leaving elected office to join the priesthood.
* A false accusation nightmare in the Times.
* Moffat leaving Doctor Who seemed like a good exit ramp for me, so I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — but wow, this latest retcon looks like a mess, as well as a pretty clear “find some way to tie this off and wrap it up” directive from the BBC.
* Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto.
* Octavia Butler gave us a few rules for predicting the future.
* An “Extinction Event” for the Comic Shop or “Too Stupid to Quit, Too Dumb to Die”?
* The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Revisited.
* Star Wars in ruins: The Most Problematic ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ Plot Twist Ruined Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy. Disney has embarrassed itself issuing Episode 9 retcons but it really ought to explain why it’s being so elliptical about this one issue for no apparent reason.
* And Star Wars resurgent: The Mandalorian Casts Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano.
* Because you demanded it: A new Disney Princess historical fiction series finds Belle in the French Revolution.
* And they were nearly almost done, too! I swear!
* Hey, it’s me, the first sign of civilization in a culture.
* Coming soon: The Collapsing Empire, Book 3. A Cixin Liu story collection. And some free coronavirus reading: Short Changes, a story collection by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 20, 2020 at 8:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Avatar, Avatar 2, Beauty and the Beast, Bernie Sanders, billionaires, broken legs, capitalism, catastrophe, chart, civilization, Cixin Liu, class struggle, college, comics, command economy, communism, contagion, coronavirus, Curb Your Enthusiasm, David Harvey, Democrats, disability, disaster, Disney, Disney World, Doctor Who, domestic violence, Donald Trump, education, epidemic, food, futurity, games, homelessness, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, international students, Jeff Bezos, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Larry David, liberals, lockdown, Looking Backward, Mars, Marxism, means testing, medicine, Minnesota, Mitt Romney, Octavia Butler, pandemic, parenting, photography, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, racism, rape culture, Richard Burr, Ron Johnson, rural America, science, science fiction, Second Great Depression?, sex, simulation argument, Soviet Union, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Collapsing Empire, The Mandalorian, the Midwest, the rent is too damn high, trolley problem, Trumpbucks, unemployment, unhappiness, universal basic income, universities, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Watchmen, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
perhaps the real message of The Lord of the Rings was that only people who are well-rested, enjoy plenty of leisure time and have a healthy work/life balance are capable of accomplishing what needs to be done
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) February 22, 2020
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”
* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
why must i "earn" a graduate degree? is it not enough to lie in bed reading octavia butler short stories, unhinged?
— ren / josh / crow (@ymirjotunn) February 18, 2020
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
Because of "Watchmen." Decades of historians have been trying to let the world know about this massacre, and it took an alternate history comic book drama to break the wall of racism. IDK whether to laugh or cry, but let no one say fiction has no power in the real world. https://t.co/l7ixJN5JlQ
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 20, 2020
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* Actually existing media bias.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
he’s most famous for his racist policing, endorsed Bush in 2004, was a Republican until his 60s and the 2010, AND was the mayor of a famously corrupt city who used his personal wealth to purchase favorable political outcomes! the NDAs barely crack the top five https://t.co/4KMFiK6bSR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2020
The central argument for a Bloomberg campaign is that we could have all the fascism and ethnic cleansing of a Trump presidency without being embarrassed about it when we summer in Paris.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2020
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.
* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
2HAM2TON
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: TOKYO DRIFT
H4MILTON
HAM FIVE
HAM & TON 6
TON 7
THE HAM OF THE ILTON
HAMILTON PRESENTS: JEFFERSON AND BURR https://t.co/hXQtjYzNeA— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2020
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
A whatchamacallit in different languages:
7. Thingamajig (English)
6. Chingadera (Spanish)
5. Himstergims (Danish)
4. Naninani (Japanese)
3. Zamazingo (Turkish)
2. Dingsbums (German)
1. Huppeldepup (Dutch)— Adam Sharp (@AdamCSharp) February 17, 2020
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.
just realized wes anderson essentially makes whitesploitation movies and i'm into it
— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) April 16, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2020 at 4:04 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, Adderall, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, apartheid, apps, art, artificial wombs, autism, basketball, Bernie Sanders, Biden, billionaires, blindness, Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, carbon, CBP, CFPs, Chevron, Choose Your Own Adventure, class struggle, climate change, college closures, comics, coronavirus, cults, CVs, David Foster Wallace, Democratic primary 2020, denaturalization, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, e-sports, eating meat, ecology, English departments, English majors, environmental racism, Europe, falling short of expectations, farts, film, fire, Florida, food, free speech, futurity, games, Gamestop, Generation Z, Get Out, graduate student life, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, Grubhub, Hamilton, health insurance, Heaven's Gate, history, How the University Works, ice, Infinite Jest, insects, irony, Joanna Russ, Kickstarter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Konami code, labor, landmines, Last and First Men, libel, Locus, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, manuscripts, maps, mass shootings, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Mr. Peanut, music, my media empire, Nelson Mandela, New York, New York Times, Nintendo, North Korea, Octavia Butler, Olaf Stapledon, opioids, orcs, organ transplants, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parasite, peace in our time, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, pharmacies, photography, podcasts, politics, polls, pollution, Ponzi schemes, PornHub, post-liberalism, postdocs, Proletarocene, Punic War, QAnon, race, Republicans, Rome, Rotten Tomatoes, Sarah Lawrence, scams, schizophrenia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, SFRA, South Africa, spicy memory, Star Wars, strikes, Target, taxes, teaching, television, Tesla, the Constitution, the courts, The French Dispatch, The Good Place, The High Republic, the humanities, the Internet, the law, the Left, The Scream, theme parks, therapy, they paved paradise, tigers, Toba catastrophe, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Tulsa massacre, twins, Uber, UC Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, Utopia, waste, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, whitesploitation, Wikipedia, Wisconsin, words, work, workers, YouTube
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
the full corporate takeover of fan culture has turned fans from a subculture whose creativity stems from overidentification with commodities into guardians of IP, enabling the transition of ‘their’ franchises into a series of expensive but low-risk technical updates
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
& to shift the political horizon of fan ‘resistance’ away from from IP theft & toward minor gains in representation
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
repeating to my self in the mirror "Star wars is for adults" before seeing the final one & having a violent reaction like ingesting a poison
— wint (@dril) December 22, 2019
still the best star wars story produced in any medium cc @mattthomas pic.twitter.com/cfllpuBDzT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2019
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
The greatest work of science fiction I’ve ever been involved with – my Men in Black profit statement – arrived for the holidays. Sadly it lost 6x what it lost last period. Impressive for a movie that hasn’t been out in 22 years. Unless it’s been *sneaking* out. Yeah, that’s it. https://t.co/fE3bFMRJvb
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) December 27, 2019
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
Not to be all Everything Is Connected, but an inability/unwillingness to think hard and carefully about Society–and an insistence on individuals as the only thing that's real–is why Star Wars, Watchmen, and Bret Stephens are obsessed with genetics
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) December 28, 2019
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
terms like 'financial crisis' and 'bad economy' are propaganda obfuscating the fact that the point of capitalism is to bleed working people
for the vast majority of humanity there's no such thing as a good economy, and there's no such thing as a crisis for the ultra rich
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 27, 2019
You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years
— Raging Dull (@InternetHippo) December 27, 2019
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
In a somewhat healthy polity the fact that the president is pardoning, championing, and hanging out with this monstrous war criminal would be treated as a massive scandal and have serious consequences. But America is not healthy, and its political and civic elites are failing. https://t.co/vJdnrU69bT
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 23, 2019
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
more seriously tho it's striking what these two franchises, which are immense cultural productions and supposed testimonies to the limitlessness of imagination and possibility, implicitly posit as immutable – war, class stratification, various ideologies of gender and sex, etc
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 19, 2019
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
SANDERS: I was the only senator in 1999 who opposed Fat Bastard wanting to eat a baby, whereas my colleague Joe Biden was in favor of it
BIDEN: Look I’ve been friends with Fat Bastard for a long time, and I told him Fat, you gotta stop this talk about eating a baby, its not right— cj (@currentvictim) December 20, 2019
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 29, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, ACME, Amazon, America, American Studies, antibiotics, art, artificial intelligence, asylum, Australia, autobiography, automation, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Blank Check, books, C.S. Lewis, campus novels, capitalism, CBP, Chewbacca, Christmas, class struggle, college, comics, comics studies, corporations, crisis, Cthulhu, deafness, demographics, deportation, disability, Disney, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Dril, enchantment, Episode 9, escapism, ethics, fake news, fantasy, fantasy studies, fascism, film, Finland, franchise fiction, Freaks and Geeks, games, geoengineering, gravity, Hallmark movies, Harry Potter, holidays, Home Alone, How the University Works, ice, immigration, India, J.K. Rowling, Joe Biden, Judith Butler, Kamala Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindness, lists, literature, Little Women, loneliness, Looney Tunes, masculinity, Matt Shea, memes, memory, Men in Black, migrants, Monopoly, neoliberalism, Netflix, nostalgia, optimism, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, PAW Patrol, Pete Buttigieg, politics, pretty people, prison abolition, race, racism, radicalism, retirement, rich people, romance novels, Romance Writers of America, Salvador Dali, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, secularity, secularization, settler colonialism, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, streaming, television, TERFs, the 1960s, the 2010s, the deaf, the humanities, The Outer Worlds, The Rise of Skywalker, The Royal Tenenbaums, the university in ruins, Tolkien, trade wars, Utopia, vacations, Vietnam, voting, Wakanda, war crimes, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, white nationalism, white supremacy, Wile E. Coyote, writing, Y2K
Submitted for Your Approval, A Spoiler-Free Star Wars Hot Take Accidentally Composed on Twitter
With Episode 9 Star Wars is finally unveiled as a multigenerational, nearly century-long saga of every major character trying to kill themselves with one grand gesture that solves all their problems. There are so many characters trying to kill themselves in the final third of The Rise of Skywalker it’s actually hard to keep track of which are the good suicides and which are the bad ones. (This might seem like a joke, but it’s truly a description of the last two acts of the film.) Just like Infinity War/Endgame was about there being too many Marvel movies now, TROS is very much about Star Wars as a franchise wanting to, but being unable to, die.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 20, 2019 at 10:06 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Avengers, Disney, Endgame, Episode 9, franchise fiction, franchises, Infinity War, MCU, Star Wars, suicide, The Rise of Skywalker