Posts Tagged ‘Dragonlance’
Lost Semester Linkblogging!
For a variety of reasons, this was an extremely busy semester, and I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my open tabs (I had several hundred open at one point!). An irrecoverable browser crash killed any possibility of ever doing even an omnibus record of what I’ve been reading and thinking about — but I do have a tiny number of highlights from the semester that I will link here just to close the book on it. I’m hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, that I can get back to a more regular update schedule in the spring…
Apologies!
The podcast will also be coming back too for the end of the Achebe season! Stay tuned.
- New issues of Science Fiction Film and Television, Extrapolation, and SFRA Review.
- SFRA 2022 in Oslo!
- No Need for Cuts: Marquette University’s Own Audits Confirm the Results of AAUP’s Independent Analysis. Austerity Is Not a Jesuit Value. The Triumph of the Money Managers. The Failure of Financialized Higher Ed. The Ivy League’s Legitimacy Crisis. Uncovering $265M in Rutgers athletics debt. RCM budgeting, a failure hiding in plain sight.The Secret Lives of Adjunct Professors.
- So you want to go to graduate school in the humanities?
- The Mysterious Case of the Nonsense Papers.
- Marquette students create map showcasing Indigenous history of Milwaukee landmarks.
- White Utopia: How a Segregated Milwaukee Created the Arrogance of Suburbia.
- The Political Theology of Watchmen.
- Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: On Tom Roston’s ‘The Writer’s Crusade.’
- Kim Stanley Robinson: The Best-Case Scenario You Can Still Believe In. “You Need to Use Hope like a Club to Beat Your Opponent.” Kim Stanley Robinson on Climate Change and Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson on Science Fiction and Reclaiming Science for the Left. Possible Worlds. How We Put Out the Fire.
- The Second Coming of Octavia E. Butler
- The United States is now averaging a billion-dollar disaster every 20 days.
- Earth is getting a black box to record events that lead to the downfall of civilization.
- Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King needed one more ending: The case for the Scouring of the Shire.
- Why Are We Stuck Here: “Squid Game,” Trauma, and Repetition.
- 2021 Pinnacle Awards: The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Tallahassee.
- Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller.
- If you’ve been looking for the right moment to get into Gloomhaven, the digital version is great and on sale right now.
- Muppet corner: 1 2 3 4 5
- And they’re baaaaaack.
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21
- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Ye Old Link Roundup!
- I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.
- Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.
- Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
- Remember? Remember? We had fun, didn’t we?
- Panel: People over 75, essential workers next for vaccines. Some more details from the New York Times.
- New ‘worrying’ Covid strain found in South Africa is ‘more severe among young adults.’ Holiday Travel Breaks Pandemic Record Despite Dire Covid Warnings.
- At long, long last: gimme that stimmie.
- Congressional Deal Would Give Higher Ed $23B. Stimulus deal delivers billions in pandemic aid to colleges, but much more is needed, advocates say.
- Congress finally moves to stop surprise medical billing as part of spending deal.
- The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony.
- Unsanitized: Congress Again Taxes the Time of Benefit Recipients. 35% of Americans Could Lose Their Home in Next Two Months, Census Report Says.
- When do you think would be a good time?
- Dragonlance Writers End Lawsuit Against Dungeons & Dragons Maker. I was hoping for Dragons of Fifth Season Postnormality but someone on Twitter pitched prestige Dragonlance TV and now I’m all in on that.
- Kylo Ren Is the Real Hero of Star Wars, The Stand edition.
- The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.
- After 25 years, I’m retiring from ‘takes.’
- And they say love is dead: The Journalist and the Pharma Bro.
- Early humans had the right idea I think.
- Chinese Jesus goes hard.
- Discovery roundup. Architecture roundup. Genre theory roundup. Email etiquette roundup.
- I never promised you an LCD factory.
- Divorce as a tool of class struggle.
- 19 years.
- Star Wars, explained.
- And the flood is gonna get here any day.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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/
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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!
* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.
Christmas Eve Eve Links Links
* There’s a lovely review of my Butler book by Nisi Shawl in the new Women’s Review of Books. It’s not available online so you’ll have to take my word for it, unless your library subscribes…
* And I’m so happy to report that Extrapolation 58.2-3 is finally out, the special issue on “Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre” I edited with Benjamin Robertson. Check out the intro to see what it’s all about, and then check out articles on Dragonlance, the Star Wars and Star Trek expanded universes, Sweet Valley High, Blondie, The Hunger Games, and Game of Thrones and fantasy roleplaying games…
* CFP: Academic Track at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention, San José, California. CFP: Punking Speculative Fiction. CFP: Histories of the Future: Proto-Science Fiction from the Victorian Era to the Radium Age. CFP: Chapter Proposals for “Ecofeminist Science Fiction.” CFP: Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.
* An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried.
* Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Ted Chiang.
* Science fiction when the future is now. With appearances from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, and Lauren Beukes.
* The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen is Alyssa Rosenberg’s at the Washington Post. And the best pro-Last-Jedi piece from Dan Hassler-Forest at LARB. Somewhere in the middle is Abigail Nussbuam’s excellent piece at Asking the Wrong Questions.
* Lightsabers, by the numbers. Secret history of the porgs. Star Wars from below. Thank goodness somebody realized how terrible this would be. The Last Jedi and the necessary disappointment of epilogues. The films that inspired The Last Jedi. Behind the scenes. In defense of Canto Blight. Anti-nostalgia and anti-salvation. Star Wars without the Empire. How to Read Star Wars.
* Winter Is Coming: Climate Change in Westeros.
* How the Sesame Street Puppeteers Play Their Characters. It was only a year or three ago that I realized that on a basic level I’d still believed Big Bird was real; I had never thought or processed the fact that his lips were being moved by a puppeteer’s hands.
* So old I can remember when Sweet Briar was an inspiring story about a college being saved.
* On faculty and mental illness.
* Podcast alert: how does Samuel R. Delany work?
* Comedy writers name their most influential episodes: 1, 2.
* SHOCK REPORT: The tax bill is bad.
* This Congress’s clear priorities: corporations, not children.
* It’ll also tax large endowments. Meanwhile in the academy: We Will Not Be Your Disposable Labor: Graduate Student Workers’ Fight Goes Beyond the GOP Assault. ‘A Complete Culture of Sexualization’: 1,600 Stories of Harassment in Higher Ed.
* Defund every agency that had any part in this. Murder Convictions Overturned, Two Men Are Immediately Seized By ICE. What happens to children whose parents are deported? 92 Somali immigrants deported in “slave-ship” conditions. ICE is abusing immigrant detainees with strip searches and threats. Shock of shocks, it turns out legal immigration is bad too.
* Why Doug Jones’s narrow win is not enough to make me confident about American democracy.
* First #J20 defendants found not guilty.
* The media wealth of African Americans in Boston is $8.
* People are using Uber instead of ambulances.
* The Adult Bodies Playing Teens on TV.
* Monopolies are bad, no matter how much you like the brands involved. Avengers vs. monopoly.
* “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.
* The madness of prison gerrymanders.
* Desegregation never happened.
* Climate refugees in Louisiana. Disability and disaster response in the age of climate change. Losing the wilderness.
* The FoxConn boondoggle gets worse and worse.
* The Next Crisis for Puerto Rico: Foreclosures.
* Revising agricultural revisionism.
* Your Favorite Superhero Is Probably Killing the Planet.
* The Daily Stormer’s style guide.
* Opoids and homelessness. 3,000,000 pills to 3,000 patients in two years. The Opioid Crisis Is Getting Worse, Particularly for Black Americans. What happens after an American city gives a homeless person a one-way ticket out of town.
* The US gymnastics scandal somehow gets worse and worse.
* ‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread.’
* The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife.
* WHAT YEAR IS IT: How to prepare for a nuclear attack.
* Lumberjanes’ Noelle Stevenson is Rebooting She-Ra for Netflix. Sir Ian McKellen Would Totally Play Gandalf In Amazon’s TV Tolkien Adaptations. The Next Bechdel Test.
* “Paradox,” by Naomi Kritzer.
* The Journal of Prince Studies.
* 80% of workers think managers are unnecessary. The other 20% mistakingly think they are managers.
* It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one our Founders built: The Donald Trump droid is live at Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.
* ‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer. 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017. Fascism has already come to America. Life expectancy declines for the second straight year. On brand.
* Heartbreaking interview with Heather Heyer’s mother.
* Still, it does make you ponder all the ways this industry works in service of power, and by extension those who abuse it. So many of comedy’s institutions are, at their core, PR machines. Branded content is Funny Or Die’s bread and butter. Every week SNL promotes someone’s new movie or TV show or album. Late night talk shows, with few exceptions, use jokes to bookend celebrity press tours. Comedians host awards shows because otherwise we might see them for the rituals they are—the wealthy and famous celebrating their own wealth and fame. Comedy normalizes power; it’s so successful at normalizing power that it feels weird to even write that as a criticism. Well, what’s wrong with normalizing power? Lots of things, but to start it lets monsters play the straight man in comedy sketches. It makes them relatable, which makes them less threatening. But power is always a threat, even more so when it seems innocuous, even more so when it seems… funny.
* 2018 is already terrible: there’ll be no more Zelda DLC.
* And remembering the reason for the season: Behold the official policy for destroying the head of Chuck E Cheese.
First Week of School Links!
* Harvey. Hell and High Water. Houston has been hit with a 100-year flood — a rainstorm that, going by previous records, has a 1 percent chance of happening in one year — in 2015 and in 2016. Now in 2017 it’s enduring what will probably be the worst flood in the city’s history. Hurricane Harvey Probably Isn’t a 500-Year Event Anymore. The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained. 9 Trillion Tons. ProPublica’s report on how zoning made this even worse. “No one could have predicted.” Why Houston wasn’t ready for Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Harvey Could Also Be a Major Pollution Disaster. FIRST-UG 102: Critical Disaster Studies. Here’s how to help.
* CFP: “200 Years of the Fantastic: Celebrating Frankenstein and Mary Shelley,” ICFA 39, March 14-18, 2018.
* “Teaching first-years today? Here are some things my son, starting college today, was never taught.” And from the archives: Shadow Syllabus.
* Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.
* Announcing the Brittle Paper Literary Awards: The Shortlists.
* I hope someone is optioning “That 70s Suitcase” for a film trilogy. Here’s the creator’s answer. Via MeFi.
* William Gibson on living in the retrofuture.
* Gene Roddenberry, megalomaniac.
Alexander: Are there any subjects that you haven’t tackled on The Next Generation that you would like to?
Roddenberry: There are subjects, yes, but I will keep them secret, because you have to wait until a certain level of thinking permits these things to be thought about openly and in writing. I have many thoughts which, if I were to voice them now, would turn many people against me. People would think, “My God, behind this is such inequity!” [Laughter.]
Alexander: People would be surprised at how big a revolutionary you really are? [Laughter.]
* Fan fiction in the New Yorker.
* When you come at the young-adult-literature community, you best not miss.
* Because you demanded it: a Tolkien biopic.
* Try to imagine a society with no need for confinement, with no one being locked up after a brutal act, and it is difficult not to feel one has lapsed into utopianism. Yet, try to determine what socially useful purpose prisons have fulfilled, sift through the wreckage looking for a residual ‘good’ prison system, and it is hard not to feel you’re wasting your time on a pointless abstraction. For and against abolitionism.
* Well, this barely lasted a week: Why I’m glad the generals are in control in the Trump administration.
* It’s Time: Congress Needs to Open a Formal Impeachment Inquiry.
* We’ve been covering Joe Arpaio for more than 20 years. Here’s a couple of things you should know about him… Another Arpaio thread. The Joe Arpaio I knew. The year I spent in Joe Arpaio’s tent jail was hell. He should never walk free. Trump has realized that he can use his pardon power to bypass the lawyers and judges and investigators he so despises. Arpaio was a test run. Now he will know it works. Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is an Impeachable Offense. President Trump Should Be Impeached for Pardoning Joe Arpaio.
* Leaked Chats Show Charlottesville Marchers Were Planning for Violence. University officials say white supremacists are recruiting their students. Brandeis U. Is Closed After Receiving Email Threats. We’re Tracking Confederate Monuments. Tell Us What’s on Your Campus.
* Fearing Trump Administration Crackdown, Immigrants May Stay in Hurricane Harvey Zone. ICE Left 50 Immigrant Women And Kids Stranded At A Bus Station Before Hurricane Harvey Struck. ICE detains DACA-protected immigrant trying to post bail for someone else. ABQ woman jailed after ATF informant lured her into drug deals. Salvadoran asylum seeker with brain tumor seized from Texas hospital. After ICE arrests in Saratoga Springs, some migrant workers fear showing up for racing season. I’m a DACA Student and I’m Praying ICE Doesn’t Pick Up My Parents.
* After all this mere tax gimmicks seems almost innocent.
* The End of the Goldwater Rule.
* White House Sets Rules for Military Transgender Ban. All but promising to end DACA.
* Stories that already seem a thousand years ago and a million miles away: Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers. How are we ever going to find time to be angry about Mnuchin misusing public funds to get a better view of the eclipse? I’d forgotten this one even happened and it was last week.
* They’re not even pretending they think he’s competent.
* A whole lot of people with absolutely nothing to hide.
* Trump order could give immigration agents a foothold in US schools.
* An intimate history of antifa.
* Can Anyone Stop Trump From Launching Nuclear Weapons?
* In the richest country that has ever existed in human history: “She eats out of dumpsters so she can afford long-term care for her husband.”
* Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
* Fired for unexpected periods.
* The Upper Midwest is terrible for racial inequality, and Wisconsin tops the list.
* A solid B-. Not bad.
* Boomers are news-illiterate couch vegetables stuck in front of their yelling, ad-saturated TVs.
* There is no such thing as western civilisation.
* Given the enormous amount of data to support these findings, and given the field in question, one might think male scientists would use these outcomes to create a more level playing field. But a recent paper showed that in fact, male STEM faculty assessed the quality of real research that demonstrated bias against women in STEM as being low; instead the male faculty favored fake research, designed for the purposes of the study in question, which purported to demonstrate that no such bias exists.
* Stories like this one were why I thought supporters of Title IX (like myself) needed to get ahead of the problem and reform it while we still could. Almost certainly too late now.
* The water you just drank was filled with self-replicating nanobots. Understanding Noah’s Ark. Be careful what you wish for.
* We talk about broad-strokes when assessing the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but what if — alongside the racism and toxic nostalgia — there is a more intimate way people are hearing it: make my children love and respect me again, make my community a place where people don’t automatically want to leave and never come back again, make America a place where getting ahead in life isn’t synonymous with dissociating yourself from me. Right-wing media — and here I am thinking of Trump fundamentally as a media phenomenon, which is how our parents experience him — has exploited this situation in a despicable and probably unfixable way, but they didn’t create the underlying dynamic. In other words, ultimately Fox News isn’t what’s tearing families apart, but it’s profiting from the fact that they’re already being torn apart by the geographic concentration of wealth and opportunity.
* Why no one can say Trump lost the election. Democrats’ 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad.
* Nuclear missiles were once ready to launch from Milwaukee’s suburbs.
* Profiles in courage getting out ahead of the story.
* Your mandatory Game of Thrones wrap-ups: Why Game of Thrones has become so incoherent. Every city in the world is built on wildfire. 27 questions (about last week’s episode). Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story. Game of Rewrites. Maps and fantasy. I’d watch at least a few episodes of a George R.R. Martin-helmed Star Trek series. And sure to be squashed fan theories we can believe in: Is Bran Stark the Night King?
* In the wake of the Game of Thrones finale, indulge in the nostalgia of Dragonlance. Are you listening, TruTV?
I’ve Closed Every Tab I Had Open and I’m Not Sorry Links
* There are no links now. There is only the Orb.
* CFP: In Frankenstein’s Wake.
* Queer Artist Transforms Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ Into Opera.
* Great literature, by the numbers. The Bachelor/ette, by the numbers.
* But if you read Spencer’s three-pronged narrative as Sam Wilson’s story, it looks very different. It becomes the story of an impeccably qualified black hero whose time in the spotlight is abruptly cut off by the return of an old white man who once had his position and of a public so thirsty for the moral certainty of the Greatest Generation that it can’t see the nightmarish perversion of it that’s right in front of them until it’s too late.
* LARB on the unionization struggle at Yale. A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago. Crisis at Mizzou. Two sets of universities, two countries, two futures.
* The engine of irrationality inside the rationalists. Why the “Conceptual Penis” Hoax is Just a Big Cock Up. Some Work Is Hard.
* The Ethos of the Overinvolved Parent: Colleges are adjusting to increasing contact with adults who are more ingrained in their children’s lives than ever.
* A brief history of Esperanto.
* Science fiction’s new golden age in China.
* Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it influences it.
* The Secret History of William Gibson’s Never-Filmed Aliens Sequel.
* Feds use anti-terror tool to hunt the undocumented. Arrests of Undocumented Immigrants Without Criminal Records Spikes 150%.
* Felony charges against inauguration protesters represent ‘historic crossroads.’ The airport lawyers who fought Trump’s Muslim ban are facing a Justice Dept. crackdown.
* Horror in Manchester. Terror in Kansas.
* The Death of the Suburban Office Park and the Rise of the Suburban Poor.
* Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Centre.
* Sheriff Clarke leaving Milwaukee County for position with Department of Homeland Security. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s departure will be good for department and Milwaukee County. Plainly, indisputably unfit. But not so fast!
* Downward spiral: Special Prosecutor? Independent Counsel? Special Counsel? What’s the Difference? Meet Bob Mueller. A forgotten lesson of Watergate: conservatives may rally around Trump. Did Trump Commit a Crime in Sharing Intelligence With Moscow? Trump Gave Russians Secrets News Orgs Are Being Asked To Withhold. Trump’s disclosure endangered spy placed inside ISIS by Israel, officials say. Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign. Notes made by FBI Director Comey say Trump pressured him to end Flynn probe. Trump straight-up told the Russians he fired Comey to obstruct justice and it just. doesn’t. matter. ‘He Looks More and More Like a Complete Moron.’ Even while I was just trying to put this post together more bombshells dropped: Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case. And this one! Flynn stopped military plan Turkey opposed – after being paid as its agent. And this one! It sure seems like Michael Flynn lied to federal investigators about his Russia ties. Shot. Chaser. Donald Trump has committed the exact offense that forced Richard Nixon to resign. Have Trump’s Problems Hit a Breaking Point? Articles of Impeachment for Donald J. Trump. “Don’t See How Trump Isn’t Completely F*cked.” Presidential impeachments are about politics, not law. This is the exact situation impeachment was meant for. Let’s hurry up. Nate Silver runs the numbers. When Will Republicans Dump Trump? Oh honey. But why not him?
* Understanding the self-pardon.
* This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This one really does seem fine. This seems fine. This is definitely not fine.
* Here at the end of all norms.
* Trump Team Stands by Budget’s $2 Trillion Math Error.
* Any Half-Decent Hacker Could Break Into Mar-a-Lago.
* Can the Anti-Trump Resistance Take the Philadelphia DA Office?
* SNL and the profiteers. Trump and the Hall of Presidents.
* MSNBC replaying its Bush-era history note for note.
* I think maybe I want to trade with the Netherlands.
* At least we can still laugh.
* Star Trek: Discovery is definitely bad. This single photo proves it! Honestly, though, I thought that aside from the strong leads the new trailer looks cheap and bad, with terrible-looking secondary characters and a narrative I have very little interest in. I was very glad when The Incomparable explained to me that none of this had anything to do with the actual plot of the show.
* If The Last Jedi Really Has the Biggest Reveal in Star Wars History, What Could It Be? I’m hoping the poster is wrong, rather than (the only possibility) they’re making Luke bad.
* The Secret History of Dragonlance.
* Jordan Peele’s Next Project Is a Terrifying Lovecraftian Story About Race in 1950s America.
* Today in making fascism fun: 1Password’s new Travel Mode.
* Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts. The end of the penguins. Miles of ice collapsing into the sea. Scientists say the pace of sea level rise has nearly tripled since 1990. The Greening of Antarctica.
* Millennials and their damned avocados.
* Don’t Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats.
* It wasn’t just petty infighting that tanked Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the lack of any coherent program for the country. But don’t worry! There’s a plan.
* Laura Kipniss is apparently being sued for Unwanted Advances. The book seemed to be absolutely begging for a lawsuit; if the publisher wasn’t absolutely scrupulous it was extremely negligent.
* Maybe let’s not gene-sequence human intelligence.
* Can capitalism survive the rise of the machines?
* Statement of Teaching Philosophy. And on the pedestal these words appear. The circle of life. One fear. So you want to write a book. Why work so hard.
* Listen to what science teaches us, people!
* And the circus is (finally) closed.
Every Last Weekend Link
* Food for Marquette English’s Hamilton event later this month: A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems. And another: Hamilton, Inc.
Broadway can be a very poor investment, but when shows hit, they really hit. The most successful of them dwarf the revenues of even the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. “Hamilton” could easily run on Broadway for a decade or more. In September, the first road production will open in Chicago, and it will be a “sit down” show, meaning it is intended to stay there for a year or more. Ultimately, there may be as many as seven “Hamilton” companies, in addition to the one on Broadway, performing at the same time in multiple American and international cities. Ticket revenues, over time, could reach into the billions of dollars. If it hits sales of a mere $1 billion, which “Hamilton” could surpass in New York alone, the show will have generated roughly $300 million in profit on the $12.5 million put up by investors. (There are many eye-popping numbers to contemplate, but maybe the most striking one is this: The show is averaging more than $500,000 in profit every week.)
* Call for Papers: Faulkner and Hemingway conference at the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. I was just down there to give a talk and had a fantastic time.
* New digital journal, thresholds, co-edited by Fran McDonald and Whitney Trettian. Here’s the CFP for the debut issue:
The debut issue of thresholds will focus on the theme of the extraneous. We seek manuscripts that deal with the extra, the foreign, or the strange from any angle. We welcome contributions that combine the creative and critical in their approach, and are eager to consider work that is experimental in both content and form. Final submissions will be comprised of a short piece (a maximum of 7000 words) accompanied by a series of fragments. Please submit 400-word abstracts and a brief bio to thresholdsjournal@gmail.com no later than May 15, 2016. Final essays will be due July 31, 2016.
* Elsewhere on the Duke alum beat: Huge congrats to Ainehi Edoro and Brittle Paper, which is now part of the Guardian!
* Protest and Power at Duke. Duke Students End Sit-In in President’s Office. A Lawsuit, Unmet Demands, and Coloring Books: Inside Duke’s Sit-In. A Guide to the Allen Building Takeover Collection, 1969-2002.
* The point is to implement an authority structure that can control public universities under permanent austerity and in the absence of a growing and rising middle-class. Culture wars are good for discrediting particular sources of sociocultural knowledge like ethnic studies, feminist studies, or Middle Eastern Studies. Budget cuts are good for taking the whole public university sector down a few notches. But to reengineer a static enterprise, after decades in which their boards failed to maintain the state revenues on which the system was built, public university governors need the audit and assessment practices that Europeans have long called New Public Management (NPM).
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college coursework for recruits.
* Jacob Brogan reviews the first issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther. And here’s not the only one!
* If you’re not, you should really be reading The Vision.
* Can you imagine, just for a moment, being a Chancellor of a university—a position with an enormous amount of responsibility to an incredibly wide range of stakeholders—and have someone interrupt you with a ‘No Whining!’ sound effect while you are trying to describe how many staff members you’ve had to lay off and what programs you’ll be cutting, with no end in sight? Would you have an existential moment of crisis where your inner voice conceded, “Oh my god, I’m an adult”? Well, I guess the ‘flexibility’ everyone wants for Chancellors doesn’t apply to their actually speaking without permission and an approved message.
* Questions for the #4c16 crowd.
* To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
* Incredible narrative about a professor allowed to return to their job at UCLA after egregious sexual harassment. And it’s not even the most unbelievable story of an unrepentant predator allowed to walk free with no significant punishment I’ve read this week.
* Yes, apparently Zack Snyder has the same carte blanche to make Justice League, even after turning the first-ever movie starring three of the biggest, most popular superheroes in the world into a film that analysts believe won’t even make a billion dollars worldwide. Maybe that still sounds like a lot of money, but you know what actually made a billion bucks? Tim Burton’s needless 2010Alice in Wonderland film. If you put Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman together in a live-action movie for the first time ever, don’t you think that movie should probably outgross Iron Man 3?
* My sense is that militarized drones, those machines for remote seeing and killing known in military jargon as “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” should be understood to signify an end of empire in two senses. First, an end as in conclusion, or terminus. Hannah Arendt argued that proliferating death is not a sign of an emerging or persisting hegemony but its waning: “rule by sheer violence,” she notes, “comes into play where power is being lost.” This means that the assassinations proliferating in the name of the American phase of accumulation are the sign not of its strength but its incipient weakness; never mind autumn, we could say that drone war is a sign of the coming winter. Second, I mean an end in the Aristotelian sense of telos, or purpose. If we take seriously the fact that empire is best understood not as a culture or as a discourse but as the monopoly on putatively legitimate violence—the stretching of the state’s power over life and death past the boundaries of its “own” populace—then the power of sovereign decision crystallized in globally operated, remote assassination machines is the very essence of empire: its telos, or end. President Obama’s now-infamous “kill list meetings” sharpen to an obscene purity the American state’s power of judgment over life and death beyond its own citizenry and constitute the distillation of imperium as such.
* Never say never again: ‘Speedy Gonzales’ Eyed As Animated Feature At Warner Bros.
* New Jersey University Was Fake, but Visa Fraud Arrests Are Real. Fake New Jersey University Established by Cops to Catch Visa Fraud Has Pretty Good Job Placement. Fake, real, real, fake, let’s not quibble — are they hiring?
* The ideology of the future: Kiplinger’s presents 20 Amazing Ways Life Will Be Different in 2030.
* The Future Happened 56 Million Years Ago.
* Plants Taking Over New York City Is What Will Happen When the World Ends.
* At this Florida jail, the inmates are also zookeepers.
* How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare.
* Prestige TV is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake: Dexter return to television confirmed.
* My next screenplay: Radioactive boars are running wild and breeding uncontrollably in the northern region of Japan contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
* Bernie Sanders Is Even Less Competitive Than He Appears.
* Bruce Springsteen Cancels North Carolina Concert in Protest of Anti-LGBT Bathroom Bill.
* Our prayers answered, Paul F. Tompkins was finally on Harmontown. I’ve also really been loving the back catalogue of Hello, from the Magic Tavern and (at long last) Welcome to Night Vale after a sojourn through It’s That Episode. Non-podcast news after the link!
* Now more than ever, it’s time for Animaniacs.
* * So does this: The Warriors Are Now Long Shots To Win 73 Games.
* Saddest of all: The New Jersey Swamp Dragons? It almost happened.
* Not for me, but maybe for you: LARB has a Grantland-style sports spinoff.
* Grant Morrison was right! Science Says Superman Should Be Black.
* This seems pretty plausible, honestly.
* And I don’t need to tell you what’s coming. Every Cool Detail We Spotted in the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer.
Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links
* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.
* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!
* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.
* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.
* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.
* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.
* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.
* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.
* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.
Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.
* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.
* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.
* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.
As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.
It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).
* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.
* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.
* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.
* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.
* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.
* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.
* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.
* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).
* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.
* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.
* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.
* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.
* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.
* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”
* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.
* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.
* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.
* Every episode of Friends at the same time.
* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”
Wednesday Links!
* Great moments in CFPs: The Journal of Dracula Studies.
* There is nothing wrong with thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever.
* CNN’s Van Jones says Keystone pipeline only creates 35 permanent jobs.
* How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.
* Tracking PhD outcomes at Penn State.
* IRS Suggests ‘Reasonable’ Ways of Calculating Adjuncts’ Hours.
* Marvel Body Mass Index Study Reveals Nearly 1/3 of Female Characters Are Underweight.
* College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
* 80,000 March in North Carolina.
* NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games.
* When the CIA came to Iowa City.
* 3,863,484: The LEGO sublime.
* You don’t understand hipster post-irony, dad! But it’s true: I don’t understand what Fred Armisen is doing.
* Contact with the market can be hazardous to usability; nationalize Twitter.
* Adam Kotsko vs. the difference principle.
* NASA now accepting applications to mine the moon.
* “Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983,” proclaims the most depressing lede of all time.
* The sheep look up: The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. 105 Winter Olympians Call for Climate Action. Another water disaster in West Virginia. The Fossil Fuel Industry Just Had a Really, Really Bad Day.
* Change we can believe in: Why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy film franchise.
* Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas in the New York Times, tracking libraries looted by Nazis.
* And rest in peace, Shirley Temple and Stuart Hall.
Quick Sunday Links
* CFP: Edited collection: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. As someone who read more of these types of books than I can remember, from Dragonlance to Lone Wolf to tons of Star Trek and Star Wars novels, I’m in love with this proposal.
* We’re Not Loving It: Low-wage workers fight to make bad jobs better.
* It’s the Austerity, Stupid: How We Were Sold an Economy-Killing Lie. Even the idea that “we” were “sold” on this, or that economic policy has any coherent relationship with representality at all, misses the point.
* I have never read even a single thing about contemporary schooling practices that didn’t make me want to home-school my kid. Today’s entry: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me.
* Switzerland considers a basic income.
* And WIC, which serves an astonishing 53% of babies in the US, has funds to stay open until November.
Gerry Canavan 