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

• Grant Morrison’s annotations for Superman and the Authority have been fascinating.

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

👀 https://t.co/sXic17MUTM

— 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.

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

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022

• 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.

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

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2022

• 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

pic.twitter.com/1iZmNEOIWM

— 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

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
wired: popehunk

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 17, 2022

* 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.

I have a few major concerns about this.

1/

— Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) January 12, 2022

* 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)
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)

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 15, 2022

Star Wars in chronological order pic.twitter.com/WmD8j20wQm

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 15, 2022

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.

the personal and professional incentive structures that reward university presidents are linked to basically everything *but* the actual performance of the university they administer https://t.co/WBJbFwctZr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2021

• 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.

[the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mt. Doom, causing the armies of Mordor to scatter on the wind and the dread tower of Barad-dûr to collapse, with Sauron himself turning to dust, the final fate of all wicked things]

ARAGORN (Chris Pratt): well, THAT happened https://t.co/zJ5IztKflu

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 11, 2021

it’s the 2020s now pic.twitter.com/eWmWBvYdSg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 22, 2021

another world is possible pic.twitter.com/AioTP5zlwZ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 25, 2021

Just Another Monday Morning, Just Another Set of Monday Morning Links

• Grad School Achebe #5 is up! This one is on “Chike’s School Days,” “The Sacrificial Egg,” and “Akueke,” two stories in which singularly nothing happens (and also “Akueke”). Check it out!
• Coming to Marquette in 2022: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript! I’ll be teaching a course in relation to this exhibit.
• Fellowships at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) 2022-23.
• Fighting for the humanities at church-related colleges.
• We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade.
• Cixin Liu novels coming to comic books.
• A Dazzling Octavia E. Butler Biography Explores the Sci-Fi Legend’s Early Life.
• In games, the environmental crisis is just another bedtime story. SimCity wasn’t built for the climate crisis. These games are. Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames. Activists Call It A ‘False Solution.’ But UN Scientists Say We Need To Suck Up CO2. Rewriting the Ecological Imagination. Imagining the climate-proof home in the US: using the least energy possible from the cleanest sources. In a First, U.S. Declares Shortage on Colorado River, Forcing Water Cuts. The best books about the post-human Earth. And we talk a lot around here about ideology at its purest, but folks…

Kim Stanley Robinson: ”We are in terrible trouble, and not everyone agrees that we are; never will everyone agree on this, even though droughts and fires, storms and floods, are coming faster than ever.” https://t.co/I3Nrqm1wFK

— Jonatan Hildén (@jhilden) August 23, 2021

• Athens Is Only Getting Hotter. Its New ‘Chief Heat Officer’ Hopes to Cool It Down.
• Everything You Need to Know About What’s Happening in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Debacle: How Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Bamboozled the American Public. The War in Afghanistan Was a Scam. Cable News Military Experts Are On the Defense Industry Dole. What percentage of your life the U.S. has been at war, by birth year. Meanwhile. The long durée. Here we go again!
• UWM clears 5 million dollars in student debt using stimulus funds. College sports injected with millions in federal COVID funds.

Universities used COVID relief funds to subsidize athletic department lost revenue aka pay the salaries of people not actually doing athletic work.https://t.co/TPffiist9V pic.twitter.com/RtjXE35htx

— Nathan Kalman-Lamb (@nkalamb) August 20, 2021

• Inside Mississippi’s 4th Covid wave: Younger patients, crying nurses and 7 ICU beds left. Alabama Hospitals Have Run Out Of ICU Beds As COVID-19 Cases Surge. Children hospitalized with COVID-19 in U.S. hits record number. “We Are Running a Giant Experiment on Children”: Covid Deniers Put Kids at Risk. Study suggests young children most likely to spread COVID at home to family members. Why Is It Taking So Long to Get Kids the Vaccine? Go Ahead, Vaccinate the Kids. The Deeply Unfair Question Parents Must Answer. New School Year, Same Old Covid Chaos. Parents are not okay. Here we go again.

In seven states, hospitalizations from Covid-19 have passed their previous peaks because of the surge in cases this summer.

There are few signs that the rise in hospitalizations is slowing nationally. https://t.co/XrFm7pJTky pic.twitter.com/2UUmKXrU4C

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 17, 2021

• Your Pandemic Sadness Is Called ‘Ambiguous Loss’. The coronavirus is here forever.
• Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse.
• ‘No concept of how awful it was’: the forgotten world of pre-vaccine childhood in Australia.
• As evictions rise, people may have to give up their pets. Animal shelters are calling for help.
• ‘Like fire through dry grass’: Documenting the Cuomo administration’s cover-up of a nursing home nightmare.
• Superhuman workloads cannot become the new normal.

the blip remains a great metaphor for coronavirus and associated phenomena of denial and deliberate forgetting, and all completely by accident https://t.co/Z7M6MC6UAJ

— flglmn (@flglmn) August 21, 2021

• The reopening challenge. When to go remote. Where is the university? Public Education Is Set Up to Fail in the Pandemic.
• Feds Deliberately Targeted BLM Protesters To Disrupt The Movement, A Report Says.
• South Dakota DOE removed Indigenous topics from social studies standards before final draft.
• Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why.
• How David Foster Wallace Used Compromise Aesthetics to Sell Infinite Jest.
• The Board Game Pandemic: Cooperative Sociotechnical Imaginaries Obscuring Power Relations.
• The meaning of the Paris Commune.
• “A Smile With Sharp Teeth”: Mike Richards’s Rise to ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Sparks Questions About His Past. Critic’s Notebook: A ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Search So Blundered It Almost Feels Intentional. Before Jeopardy! Can Choose Its Next Host, It Needs to Decide Who Its Audience Is.
• A Chair Reviews The Chair.
• 7 Thrillers About the Dark Side of Academia.
• How to Fix the Jobs Crisis. The Groves of Academe Are Always on Fire.

It's critical to the future of U.S. higher education that we put it this plainly: (1) The typical college professor is an adjunct. (2) The typical adjunct doesn't make a living wage. https://t.co/Dl9FncWfN2

— Jonathan Wilson (@jnthnwwlsn) August 7, 2021

I mean if I’m being *real* the Paw Patrol movie’s depiction of traumatized children trying to bring to justice the malignant politicians who have brought climate disaster to their city might have more relevance to the 21st century than anything on THE CHAIR.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2021

• Teaching Classic Lit Helps Game Designers Make Better Stories. See? I’m HELPING.
• [98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty.

Say what you will about the discipline of English but my analysis of science fiction texts (they are about how socialism is good) is universally valid across all time and space

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 19, 2021

• Attack of the Superweeds.
• Tracing the Crisis of Desertification to Colonization.
• Why Transphobia Is at the Heart of the White Power Movement.
• Bill Aims To Change North Carolina’s Reputation As The Place For Adults To Marry Kids.
• The left eats itself, Current Affairs edition.

if it’s good enough for universities it should be good enough for journalists https://t.co/ywbDk4jJbg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 18, 2021

• Stanley Aronowitz Knew That Freedom Begins Where Work Ends.
• Why I’m Ditching Grades This Semester: Saying goodbye to a 120-year-old failed technology.
• The Bob Dylan sex abuse lawsuit. His tour schedule is now at the core of this.
• The Fierce Legal Battle at the Heart of the Fight Over Reclining Airline Seats.
• Berlant v Jameson: Dawn of Justice.
• OnlyFans to shut down in November.
• The most thrilling film I’ve seen in years.
• It’s a bop.

sources confirm it is a bop pic.twitter.com/8NkGuaG6DV

— sara david (@SaraQDavid) August 16, 2021

Monday Morning Links!

• The latest Grad School Achebe not-so-mini-episode is up! This one is about two of Achebe’s short stories, “Marriage Is A Private Affair” and “Dead Man’s Path.” It was one of our best conversations yet, on some of the slightest literary territory we’ve yet staked out…
• More good podcast news: the Ranged Touch Homestuck podcast is a reality.
• ICYMI: I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence @TheRosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…
• CFP: LGBTQIA+ Fantastika Graphics: A Digital Symposium November 20th, 2021.
• An assistant professor position in transgender studies at UC Davis.
• The results of Marquette AAUP’s financial analysis of the university is also out: Independent Analysis Reveals That Marquette University Finances Are Solid — Faculty Demand Greater Role in Financial Decisions and an End to Layoffs.
• A long-delayed interview with me for the Schmitt Fellowship “Leadership” project is up now with lengthy disclaimer indicating that I speak for no one but myself (which is true!).
• Cornell helpfully announces its intention to violate the ADA.

This is straight-up illegal and somebody in the office of the general counsel at Cornell should know it. https://t.co/M0D1PIWzmq

— Michael Bérubé (@MichaelBerube1) August 13, 2021

• Why Mass Effect is some of the best sci-fi ever made.
• Blood, gore and a healthy dose of catharsis: why horror can be good for us. The H Word: Post-Human Horror.
• John Carpenter Interview: “I’m not the biggest fan of talking about my films – but let’s do it.”
• Inside the Nichelle Nichols conservativorship battle.
• ‘Welcome To Cleveland’ rooftop still baffling Milwaukee passengers decades later.
• ‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families.
• Unnerving gender hypothetical corner.

this is *wild,* the sort of thing i would make up as an "unnerving gender hypothetical" that turns out to have once been routine medical practice: putting cis girls on hrt to keep them from getting "too tall"
https://t.co/Mn2f5uYKBC

— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) August 14, 2021

• Milwaukee took a big hit in the new census numbers. The question is whether they’re accurate.
• ‘Be Paranoid’: Professors Who Teach About Race Approach the Fall With Anxiety.
• Higher Ed Has a Credibility Problem.
• July was world’s hottest month ever recorded, US scientists confirm. It’s now or never. “How long can a fish hold its breath?”
• Andrew Cuomo: A Life. Time’s Up to re-evaluate conflict-of-interest policy in wake of Cuomo scandal.
• Why California is beating Florida and Texas on the Delta variant (so far). Inside America’s Covid-reporting breakdown. In the West, a Connection Between Covid and Wildfires. Delta Variant Raises Questions as Campuses Start Semester. Hey, Is Delta Bad for Kids? Yes and no. Why Parents Shouldn’t Hunker Down and Wait for a “Return to Normal”. COVID School Year Three. Covid Vaccines for Kids Can’t Wait.

Each day the question is how can this possibly get worse. Worster. Worstest. And it does.
New records set daily, cases >25,000, hospitalizations >16,000, 31.9% test positivity, increasing deaths pic.twitter.com/V70wrA0x9z

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 14, 2021

• I Can’t Stop Thinking About the First Chapter of This Climate Change Novel: A conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson about The Ministry for the Future and this summer’s extreme heat.
• How a Board Game About Birds Became a Surprise Blockbuster.
• And ladies and gentleman: the Graveyard of Empires.

A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

• Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.
• (There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter thread if you’re needing more.)
• I also have a harder-to-get piece in this handbook to comics and graphic narratives about why Jimmy Corrigan is (hear me out) just a really great comic. Cancel me if you must!
• The current issue of SFFTV, on sf and games, was really great — read the interview section for free!
• The current issue of Extrapolation is great too — but no freebies there.

this but for all of science fiction #SFRA21 https://t.co/lSf60ivJxP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2021

• I have a nice little cameo in this great Butler story at LARB: Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher. And I was interviewed for this piece on quantum mechanics and science fiction at The Quantum Daily.
• Hit me up Hollywood! Adaptations coming of Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Fledgling, joining Wild Seed and Dawn.
• In addition to having a ton of great stuff in it, SFRA Review 51.3 is a very important issue of SFRA Review, including candidate statements for the fall election and proposed revision of the bylaws.
• CFP – Strange Novel Worlds? Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture, 31 Aug 2021. Call for submissions: Just Utopias. CFP: Tabletop Teaching: Board Games and Social Justice. CFP: Dissenting Beliefs: Heresy and Heterodoxy in Fantasy. CFP: Religious Futurisms. CFP: Extrapolation: Special Issue on Speculative Fiction’s Intersections with Posthumanism and New Materialism. CFP: SFFTV, “Oversights.” New book series: Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture.
• A messy utopia is all we get. The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction. From the depths of the pandemic towards an ecosocialist utopia.
• Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. Dangerous Heat Wave Is Literally Melting Critical Infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest. 72% of the western US is currently in “severe” drought or worse. This is now the most extensive severe drought in recorded history. Six of California’s seven largest wildfires have erupted in the past year. Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle. Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse. The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. Drought deeps in Minnesota. By the mid-2030s even the moon won’t save us from regular floods as sea levels rise, says NASA. The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’. Joe Biden Is Already Failing on Climate Policy. There’s no going back, so what can be saved?

"Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year."https://t.co/C41QGnwWCi

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 29, 2021

"According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, tells the @latimes. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling." https://t.co/IbpzNgQrgB

— Michael Hawthorne (@scribeguy) July 12, 2021

Lots going on but for me the big story is the environment on which all human society depends is undergoing a collapse so staggeringly rapid there are now multiple climate disasters across the US every week and you still can’t get representative democracy to even pretend to care.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2021

do you ever think about how the proposition that the Earth should remain inhabitable is an absolutely fringe position in US politics, without representation in either political party and routinely mocked by essentially all mass media of any sort

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2021

"The Climate Change Review of Books" has a nice ring to it https://t.co/Ry4SkA8ElH

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2021

As meteorologist @EricHolthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 29, 2021

• The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
• I Am Supposed To Be Writing.
• DC11 becomes a site of acute thermodynamics, as server heat multiplies server heat. If anything, the true threat comes from within, not without, as unchecked servers would overheat themselves into oblivion. Put bluntly: the tech industry makes our planet hot in the service of keeping its computers cool. This, I suggest, is what makes DC11 a specifically atmospheric media object. DC11’s reliance on and manipulation of air contributes to the cloud’s formal tendencies toward displacement and (re)centralization. Air expedites the transformation of data centers into climate bunkers. Furthermore, the air’s perceived insubstantiability, compared with other subjects of environmental media study, such as rare earth metals or wastewater, makes its pollution that much more challenging to account. Faced with these atmospheric operations, media studies must develop analytical techniques that pierce through the data center’s security veil to reveal how the cloud now programs the atmosphere against itself.
• The humanities are shrinking, except at community colleges.
• IHE profiles my Greensboro pal Jillian Weise. And another Greensboro friend is hitting the big time with a great new memoir.
• Trees as more-than-human collectives.
• Let’s Rank Every Ted Chiang Story Ever Published.
• How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.
• A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.
• Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.
• You can now listen to “The Three Body Problem” as a serialized podcast.
• The Futuristic Stink of Amazon’s Science Fiction.
• 75 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi and Fantasy from African Authors.
• Doctor Who is Anglofuturism.
• The Anarres Project.
• Very cool things happening at ASU.

Time travel is always developed as society crumbles, prompting the rich to flee into the past. There they assume positions of power, which makes the timeline even worse, while also speeding up the development of time travel. Each loop is shorter and nastier than the one before.

— Micro Flash Fiction📖 (@MicroFlashFic) July 4, 2021

• Remembering Climate Change: A Message from the Year 2071.
• How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.
• Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents. Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings.

It’s very easy to imagine asking a room full of students “How is Frodo’s story like that of Beren?”, filling a white board with correspondences, asking, “Wait, if Frodo is like Beren, then who is his Luthien?” And then everyone’s eyes go wide as they realize the implications. 6/7

— Jason Tondro (@doctorcomics) July 1, 2021

• Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts.
• The Economic Recovery Is Here. It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Seen.
• Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear.
• The Clintons Had Slaves.
• California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter? How We’ll Know It’s Finally Time to Stop Masking.

Pretty damn impressive
Thanks Darren Lu @Reddit pic.twitter.com/ST6ueaaoY1

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Every piece of data from real-life shows the vaccines work very, very well— yes, even against Delta. Just checked US vaccine breakthrough hospitalizations. It's 6,587 people among the ~163,000,000 vaccinated: or 0.004%. Three fourths are elderly— as happens with other diseases. https://t.co/TmZkxRlETk pic.twitter.com/fUaTyXprey

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2021

• What this implies is that, while liberal democracy witnessed a struggle for recognition, neoliberalism converts this into a struggle for reputation. The cultural achievement of commercial society, according to Honneth, drawing on Hegel, was that it enabled individuals to confront one another on the principle of equality via exchange. The rise of criticism in the bourgeois public sphere saw artworks judged on a principle of aesthetic autonomy—that is, independent of status. The ideal critic resembled the ideal consumer in the spot market, determining the value of each product on its intrinsic merits. But if, as Feher argues, neoliberal capitalism reconfigures social relations around the template of financial investment, the public sphere becomes governed by a very different temporality. Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation. Every artefact, identity, moral action and political demand becomes viewed as an addition to an archive of prior behaviour, revealing a pattern to be projected into the future. The present is only ever a new data point. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media.
• Luxury Surveillance.
• Things of Beauty: The Politics of Postmillennial Nostalgia for Mid-century Design.
• Utopia of Quirk: Mystery Men (1999) and the Fate of the Nerd.
• Our World, Our People: Nationalism and Sovereign Power in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”
• Regulation as near-mystical abstraction.
• The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism. Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists.
• “Cat Person” and Me.
• Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn.’
• How Marvel conquered culture.
• WandaVision Not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen.
• The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk.”
• Time For The End Of The Teen Gymnast.

The decentring of the He-Man/Skeletor binary paves the way for the universalist ecological struggle to save Eternia’s magic; or the cultural logic of Mattel in the age of disaster capitalism… https://t.co/dht0sd9Wv6

— Historicizing Matt is Negating the Negation ⵄ ⭕️ (@MattFlisfeder) July 26, 2021

• Strange Plaque Piques Interest On North Farwell In Milwaukee.
• Still thinking about this tweet from Juneteeth.
• How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire. The Miseducation of White Children.
• Catholic colleges ignored faculty handbook provisions in layoffs, report alleges. Unlivable faculty wages put Catholic higher education in existential crisis.
• The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21. The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas.
• Academentia: the Organization Insanity of the Modern University. The Work of Culture: Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University.
• For College Finances, There’s No ‘Return to Normal.’
• The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did.
• What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money?
• Antiracism in the contemporary university.
• Betrayed by the Dream Factory. The Master’s Trap: What makes a graduate program predatory? ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.
• The end of the NCAA.
• The other freshman class.

Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet. pic.twitter.com/1lHiCfT8Vk

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) August 7, 2021

• So, most people are unaware that One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the novel, has a bonkers sequel called The Starlight Barking.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me.
• Amanda Knox: Who Owns My Name?
• The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick.
• The Green Imagination in Board Game Landscapes. Mother Lands is a tabletop role-playing game free of slavery and colonialism. Board games have a colonialism problem.
• One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets.
• 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
• Who will police Mars?

Every Gen Xer loves The Goonies, because we really wanted to believe there was some treasure or redemption or some kind of meaning in our abandonment

— The Actual, Real Cormac McCarthy (@_Shan_Martinez_) June 21, 2021

• Adjunct hell: the rise of the new campus novel.
• Generational politics is a socialism of fools.
• He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence.
• There will be blood: women on the shocking truth about periods and perimenopause.
• ​The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
• The beauty of Earth from orbit.
• Aliens could have spotted Earth cross the sun from more than 1,700 star systems. A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The new American religion of UFOs. What if the truth isn’t out there?
• With UFO report making headlines, Wisconsin has its own history with the paranormal.
• Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams.
• And don’t cry for me, I’m already dead.

pic.twitter.com/j2NWCkNdoy

— Against late capitalism ☭ Ⓐ (@Inhumansoflate1) June 26, 2021

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.
All are welcome!@baker_r_r @me1odiousone @gerrycanavan pic.twitter.com/7XJwiOmWom

— UCSB English (@UCSB_English) June 2, 2021

* 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.

* Gymnastics, fresh from its nightmarish decades-long rape scandal, wants to make it so being one of the greatest gymnasts of all time doesn’t get you any points.

* 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:
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

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) June 1, 2021

* The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive populism, not by the fascist right.

* Crisis at the AP.

* 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.

* After 150 years of technological innovation, the problems facing the United States Postal Service are only getting harder.

* ‘No One’s Ever Talked to Me About This Before’: Social media creators are helping women and people of color identify possible symptoms of A.D.H.D., a disorder most often diagnosed in white boys.

* 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.

* RIP, Eric Carle.

* 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

* Oh, you think?

* It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become.

* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.

* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.

* This Mommy Blogger Is Under Fire For Refusing To Stop Writing About Her 9-Year-Old After The Girl Begged Her To.

* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.

* ‘Greater Idaho’ took one step closer to being a real thing as 5 more counties voted to explore leaving liberal Oregon for conservative Idaho.

* 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.

* Spanish Civil War ends.

* 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

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

“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

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

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— 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

Friday Links!

• Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
• CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
• If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
• I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
• Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
• “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
• Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
• $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
• Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
• History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.

The "cone" is an absolutely insane shape. What if a triangle was a circle. A nightmarish vision from the deranged mind of H.P. Lovecraft

— stu (@rinbcage) March 5, 2021

• Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
• The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
• Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
• How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
• I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
• A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
• We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
• Curation is not cancellation.
• This is why we can’t have nice things.

This is why we can't have nice things. pic.twitter.com/8D8lkEij6k

— Amy is rightfully pissed off now ☭ (@Amysaysfuckalot) March 7, 2021

• The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
• Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
• Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
• “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
• Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
• Unions Are Cool Now.
• The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
• ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
• Life after vaccination.
• “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
• The Invention of murder.
• Inside the incel.
• ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
• The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
• We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
• Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
• The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
• Against WandaVision.
• Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
• What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.

Call me Space Ishmael. Some space years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no space money in my space purse, and nothing particular to interest me on space shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the spacey part of the world.

— Space Moby Dick (@space_moby_dick) March 7, 2021

March Links!

pic.twitter.com/rSVy8EDzeq

— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021

• SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
• Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
• My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
• I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
• My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
• Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
• And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.

• CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
• A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
• How to Build a World.
• How to Land on Mars.
• Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
• “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
• The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
• Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
• I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.

So my pitch for a retcon:
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

If the core of Wandavision were “everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn’t” I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

• An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
• From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
• The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
• The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’

So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.

It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx

— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021

• President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
• The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
• Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
• Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
• New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
• The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.

When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA

— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021

• ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
• When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
• English departments rethink what to call themselves.
• A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
• Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.

from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021

• Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
• What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
• Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
• More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
• The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
• ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
• Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
• Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
• Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.

NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021

I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021

• The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
• Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
• The Tyranny of Parents.
• Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
• A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
• Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
• Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
• The realest tweet.

kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century

— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021

1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021

the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances

— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021

• Chess is bad now. This is good.
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
• The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
• Finally, someone is making sense.
• Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
• Bring back the nervous breakdown!
• Is This the End of Tipping?
• The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
• I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
• All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
• And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.

During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7

— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021

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.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

• 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.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

• 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.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

• 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.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

• 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.

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.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

• 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

And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too

• ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
• How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.

One of the things I see people perpetually getting wrong about the aims of various genre categories: science fiction, whatever it’s pretensions, does not do well at predicting the future. Because that’s horror’s turf.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

If I had to speculate further, it’s because science fiction has to follow some sort of rules explicable to the readers of its time. Horror is under no such constraint, thus is better able to reflect or at least dimly mirror a future we cannot grasp + would drive us mad if we did.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

• Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
• Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.

“Liberals obsess over the polls while Republican judges throw votes in the trash” is a pretty solid explanation of how we got here and how even now two days before the end no one has learned anything

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

Trump, Biden Trade Barbs on Absentee Ballots https://t.co/N0LLGJTbq3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

• America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
• A Possible Majority.
• Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.

Marquette’s administration is now using the illegitimate, anti-demonstration policy it rammed through over student and faculty objections to punish students organizing against budget cuts. Just an outrageous abuse of their authority and complete abrogation of their duty of care.

— Our Marquette (@MarquetteUnited) October 31, 2020

This is really shameful. @PresLovell, please intervene and put a stop to this. https://t.co/7mMnIcvPHc

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2020

• Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
• Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
• U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
• KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
• Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
• White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.

A marker of how messed up American institutions are is that people are legitimately on pins and needles about the outcome of an election where one candidate is up by **12 points** https://t.co/fESg3xdi3q

— Maya Sen (@maya_sen) October 31, 2020

the ole “critical fail” https://t.co/L7ixI3eQQr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

hard to believe there’s just three days until I’m shot dead in the street during post-election civil unrest

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

there’s a HORSE loose in the HOSPITAL and tomorrow
WE
VOTE
THE
HORSE
OUT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

• Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
• Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
• Respectfully disagree.
• Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
• Dibs.
• How Long Can Gyms Survive?
• And I’m listening…

weirdly, trying to podcast about Vonnegut’s Dr. Kevorkian novelette in the midst of an impending fascist coup has put me in a somewhat dour mood

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?

This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:

• ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
• American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
• A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
• I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
• You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
• Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
• I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
• The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
• Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
• CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
• Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.

nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020

• A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
• Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
• Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
• Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
• 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.

Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020

have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t

— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020

Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020

• Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
• Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
• Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
• Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
• “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
• How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
• How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
• Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
• Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
• We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
• Glücky!
• RIP, Duke TIP.

The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020

• Miracles and wonders.
• The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
• Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
• Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
• Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
• He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
• DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
• Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
• idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
• AOC, streamer.
• Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
• Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
• Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
• Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
• Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
• Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
• What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
• “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
• The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
• The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
• The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
• Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
• How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
• Revisiting Nabokov.
• Always look on the bright side of life.
• How will 2020 end?
• And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
• Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!

the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020

pic.twitter.com/VcyJtdFq17

— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE Wants You!

I wrote a bit about Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel and ecoterrorism over at LARB:

If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? “If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,” Frank argues. “I don’t think they would countenance murder,” retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, “Of course they would!”

The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?