Posts Tagged ‘Elon Musk’
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j
— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."
— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.
Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm
— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT
— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
Written by gerrycanavan
November 26, 2019 at 12:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23 and me, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, Africa, airplanes, airships, Alan Moore, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Appalachia, Australia, autism, backlash effect, bananas, Barack Obama, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, Big Calculator, Bowie, Brainiac, Brazil, centrism, CFPs, changelings, Charlie Stross, child abuse, childhood, climate change, college closures, colleges, comics, conspiracy theorists, cybertruck, David Bowie, David Graeber, death, decolonization, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, Disney, DNA, Dungeons and Dragons, earthquakes, ecology, economics, Egypt, Elon Musk, emotional labor, English majors, equality, EVE Online, Facebook, fandom, fans, fantasy, fascism, film, Florida, free speech, Frozen, Frozen II, futurity, games, gay rights, Greta Thunberg, grief, Harriet Tubman, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, hopepunk, hot takes, How Did This Get Played?, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice, Illinois, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana University, indigenous peoples, internationalism, isolation rooms, Joe Biden, Joker, Joker 2, Julia Roberts, justice, Keystone Pipeline, kids today, labor, lawyers, liberalism, lithium, Lord of the Rings, marriage equality, Marvel, mass shooters, medicine, Milwaukee River, MLA, mortality, Mr. Rogers, mugshots, Nate Silver, Native American issues, Nazis, Netflix, New York, nostalgia, OK Boomer, pensions, Pete Buttigieg, physics, pipelines, Pokémon, police brutality, police corruption, police state, postdocs, poverty, prison-industrial complex, punkpunk, pyramids, race, rape, rape culture, recession, rent loans, reparations, Republicans, rich people, rising sea levels, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, saving money, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Scott Warren, SFRA, Siberia, solar power, solarpunk, speculation, spoilers, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, strikes, student evaluations, stuttering, superheroes, swastikas, tenure, Terminator, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, The Mandalorian, The Price Is Right, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, TI-85s, time, Title IX, tokenism, Tolkien, Tony Evers, transgender issues, true crime, turning 40, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccinations, Watchmen, web comics, WeWork, whale watching, whale-hunting, whales, whistleblowers, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, woolly mammoths, Yoda, zeppelins
Saturday Night Links!
* The only writing I’ve seen on Rusty Brown so far is this rather sour review from Slate on Ware’s “miserablism.” While I do concede the book feels a little redundant to some of Ware’s earlier work, especially its first section, I still like the book rather more than the reviewer — and it’s good to remember it’s only Vol. 1. A lot of my fondness for the book has to do with the transcendent Joycean section on the Jordan “Jason” Lint character that the review discusses near the end, which I think truly ranks among the best stuff Ware has ever produced. UPDATE: This review from io9 gets the book and what it’s doing a little bit better, I think. More people, get on this so we can talk about it.
Plus a late-breaking tie-in to JIMMY CORRIGAN inaugurating the Chris Ware Expanded Universe!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 27, 2019
* A great little SF flash fiction I ran across a few months late.
Micro SF: The robot revolution was inevitable from the moment we programmed their first command: "Never harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm." We had all been taught the outcast and the poor were a natural price for society. The robots hadn't.
— Lillie Franks (@onyxaminedlife) February 10, 2019
I have never felt more seen by a weather system in my entire life. https://t.co/CFCmVLyq6q
— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) September 27, 2019
* Moving fast: Ukraine envoy resigns amid scandal consuming Trump’s presidency. (Broken by a student newspaper!) White House restricted access to Trump’s calls with Putin and Saudi crown prince. Sources close to the vice president confirm none of this is his fault. Politics of Impeachment Now Favor Democrats. The 4 possible crimes in the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower scandal, explained. The Left Needs to Seize Impeachment From Centrist Elites. The case for a maximal impeachment.
what would state failure look like in a state that is already just a giant exercise in illegitimacy, wanton cruelty, and shameless plunder, asking for a friend
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 12, 2019
One hundred years from now.
History Department.
Student #1: what's your area?
Student #2: the long 3-5:00 pm EST, September 27, 2019. You?— Jen Roberts (@jshermanroberts) September 28, 2019
* Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption.
* Migrant detention ruling: Judge blocks government effort to indefinitely detain migrant families.
* Manufactured Misery at the Tijuana Border Crossing.
* This month, in the journal Nature: Human Behaviour, Kunst and Dovidio examined fusion specifically involving Donald Trump. In a series of seven studies using various surveys, including Swann and Gomez’s “identity fusion scale,” the Yale and Oslo team found that Americans who fused with Trump—as opposed to simply agreeing with or supporting him—were more willing to engage in various extreme behaviors, such as personally fighting to protect the U.S. border from an “immigrant caravan,” persecuting Muslims, or violently challenging election results.
The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”
* Relatedly: Why Republicans Aren’t Turning on Trump.
* The Intercept on the Hofeller memos. More in cheating to win, and more.
When you definitely care about contiguity and preserving communities pic.twitter.com/73ksD9TP9s
— Paul Thee Whistleblower Musgrave (@profmusgrave) September 28, 2019
* Shot: NRA Was ‘Foreign Asset’ To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals. Chaser: N.R.A.’s LaPierre Asks Trump to ‘Stop the Games‘ Over Gun Legislation in Discussion About Its Support.
* Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Bailout for Taxi Drivers.
* The Cuban roots of rock n roll.
* Climate change more than doubled the odds of Houston’s most recent deluge, study finds.
* Tesla tweets break the law, again.
* This DoorDash data breach feels like karmic retribution for my sins.
Bill Watterson original watercolor with the separated inks of Calvin & Hobbes at @CartoonLibrary! #cxc2019 pic.twitter.com/wDPam8aUIL
— Jen 🏚 Vaughn 🔜 CXC Table 83 (@TheJenya) September 26, 2019
* And This Video Game Fulfills Your Fantasy of Being a Horrible Goose. It’s fun!
Written by gerrycanavan
September 28, 2019 at 7:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America, arson, art, Asimov, asylum, Bernie Sanders, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Calvin and Hobbes, CBP, Chris Ware, class struggle, climate change, comics, corruption, corruption we can believe in, Cuba, deportation, depression, Donald Trump, DoorDash, Elon Musk, failed states, games, gerrymandering, gig economy, Greensboro, Houston, Hunter Biden, hurricanes, ice, identity fusion, immigration, impeachment, Jimmy Corrigan, Joe Biden, karma, labor, Laws of Robotics, mass shootings, migrants, music, Nintendo, NLRB, North Carolina Texas, NRA, periodization, politics, Putin, race, racism, Republicans, robots, rock and roll, Russia, Rusty Brown, Saudi Arabia, science fiction, taxis, Tesla, the Amazon, the courts, the law, true crime, Ukraine, Untitled Goose Game, weather, white nationalism, wildfires, work
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
Some of y’all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK
— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c
— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019
you, an intellectual: we can’t afford a better society
me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they’re currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019
I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 4, 2019
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it
— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
in this regard, Yang’s “higher ground” remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we’re going to hear more and more of. don’t mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019
(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu
— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 31, 2019
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA
— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 5, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 8chan, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, ADA, Africa, Alaska, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, animals, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, autism, bears, Berkeley, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, capitalism, CBP, Charles Manson, Chicago, climate change, collapse, debt, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, deserts, dinosaurs, disability, Domino's, ecofascism, ecology, El Paso, Elon Musk, English majors, Extrapolation, fascism, fonts, Frankenstein, fraud, games, gaming, gerrymandering, grading, Greenland, Guam, guns, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, immigration, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, Larry Niven, literature, Marianne Williams, Marine Todd, mass shootings, Mexico, MFAs, military-industrial complex, Museum of Science Fiction, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Netflix, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, open borders, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, phone farms, progress, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rich people, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Simpsons, slavery, social media, socialism, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Tesla, the Amazon, The Boys, The Fast and The Furious, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rock, the truth is out there, toxic masculinity, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Utopia, video games, Walter Benjamin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wealth, white men, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, Wisconsin veto, writing, X-Men
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”
* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”
You can dance around it all you like, but the simple fact is that we need to curb our emissions and guide the rest of the world in doing so in an amount of time radically shorter than conventional politics and market solutions alone will allow. https://t.co/5u82WDnACF
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 25, 2019
I have a 7 year old daughter & a 9 year old son. They are not going to meekly accept living in hell so that people can write essays laughing at them for The Atlantic. Millions and millions and millions of children won't accept it. Politicians have no idea what's coming for them.
— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) February 25, 2019
A very small group of rich people have condemned virtually every living thing on Earth to death—genocide on an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable scale—and not only will they get away with it, they’re actually rewarded for it. That’s what capitalism is.
— ☭ sicko modus ponens ☭ (@babadookspinoza) February 25, 2019
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.
One of my students is very cheeky. pic.twitter.com/2CfSRQ77mZ
— Roy Scranton (@RoyScranton) February 26, 2019
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
truly *perfect* that the question of "happiness" under capitalism vs marxism will be litigated (& represented!) by two male grifters of questionable charisma & almost infinite perversion in a space that charges a ticket if you bring a stroller. now that's traversing the fantasy!
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 28, 2019
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2019 at 4:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic labor, administrative blight, advertising, Afghanistan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, anti-capitalism, apocalypse, autism, Ayana Jamieson, Bernie Sanders, bibliographies, Black Mirror, Bolivia, California, capitalism, Catholic higher education, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, China, class struggle, climate change, clothes, clouds, comics, concrete, conferences, creative writing, debate, democracy, diabetes, disability, disability studies, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elon Musk, energy, fascism, games, Global Anglophone, Grant Morrison, grawlix, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrogen, I grow old, ice sheet collapse, immigration, India, insulin, insurance companies, Jordan Peterson, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Erie, letters of recommendation, literature, Mark Waid, Marquette, masculinity, mass shootings, meat, medicine, men, metrics, MFAs, Michael Jackson, migrants, Moya Bailey, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, oceans, Octavia Butler, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pakistan, Parable of the Sower, parenting, photography, plastic, police corruption, police state, politics, Polygraph, postcoloniality, potholes, promotion, Pulp Fiction, R.D. Mullen fellowship, racism, rape, rape culture, rehab, remedial courses, reproductive futurity, retirement, rights of nature, roads, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, SEC, settler colonialism, SFRA, SFRA Review, social credit, social networking, soup, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, stocks, stratocumulus clouds, strikes, superheroes, tenure, Tesla, Texas, the draft, the Huntington, the Wisconsin Idea, ticks, traumatic repetition compulsion, true crime, University of Central Florida, University of Wisconsin, voter suppression, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, whiteness, Wisconsin, Wright State, X-Men, Žižek
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2018
I don’t see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We’re losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2019
climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy
— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody’s too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:
7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly
200-1000 absolutely useless losers
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 18, 2019
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 30, 2019 at 12:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2018, 2019, AAVE, ACLU, administrative blight, adoption, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, AlphaZero, altac, Alzheimer's, Amazon, anger, Antarctica, anthropology, apocalypse, Arizona, art, artificial intelligence, Australia, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, baby it's cold outside, Bandersnatch, Black Mirror, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Bolsonaro, Boston, Brazil, breastfeeding, Bryan Singer, burnout, butterflies, California, Cambridge History Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, CBP, CBS All-Access, CEOs, CFPs, Chernobyl, Chicago, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, college admissions, comedy, Confederate monuments, corpocracy, cosmetology school, cyberpunk, de-extinction, deportation, dinosaurs, disability, diversity, DNA, Donald Trump, dystopia, Ecology and Ideology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, EpiPen, extinction, Facebook, forced arbitration, Fox News, Foxconn, game studies, games, genocide, George Saunders, gig economy, GoFundMe, Great Lakes, grifts, gym class, Hamilton, Hampshire College, Harry Potter, Harvard, health care, Hitler, hoaxes, hope, hopepunk, hospitals, How the University Works, humanism, ice, improv, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, IRBs, Isaac Asimov, J.K. Rowling, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, journalism, Kamala Harris, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, language, Larry Nassar, last names, layoffs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lisa Klarr, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Louis CK, lunch debt, Lyft, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, Medcare for All, medievalism, MFAs, Michelle Yeoh, millennials, Milwaukee, MLA, MSU, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazism, neoliberalism, Netflix, nurses, Octavia E. Butler, oh no, online preschools, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, photography, podcasts, polar vortex, politics, Polygraph, pornography, poverty, public transportation, pyramid schemes, queerness, R. Kelly, race, racism, rage, Random Trek, rape, rape culture, rich people, Richard Feynman, Running Man, Ryan Vu, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sea level rise, Sears, self-driving cars, sex, Ship of Theseus, slavery, Snowpiercer, social justice, socialism, Sokal hoax, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Trek: Discovery, statistics, student debt, suicide, Supernova Era, surveillance society, syllabi, tag, taxes, teaching, Tesla, the Arctic, the canon, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, The Jetsons, the law, the secret of my success, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, Utopia, veterinarians, Voyager, vulture capitalism, war on education, Washington D.C., Waukesha, weather, webcomicname, whiteness, wildfires, William Gibson, Wisconsin, writing
Just 363 Shopping Days Till Christmas Links
* Call for Papers: Literature and Extraction. Call for Papers: The Romantic Fantastic.
* A new Black Mirror is dropping tomorrow. From doing some recent workshops with Black Mirror as a focus I think it’s clear that an occasional surprise release is a much better model for them than the binge.
* Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era.
* Sure, when you put it that way it sounds really bad.
* The global economy should isolate Japan by any means necessary until it reverses this decision.
* When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.
* This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.
* How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. A helpful Twitter thread elaborates on just how much of the internet economy is predicated on fraud of one type or another.
The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. https://t.co/sfmdrxGBNJ pic.twitter.com/thvicDEL29
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) December 26, 2018
"Popular media should be taken seriously as art, it's just as vital and meaningful as any classic work"
"Okay. Super-hero movies are mostly male power fantasies that yearn for a world of total moral clarity that can only be achieved through a kind of benign fascism"
"Please stop"— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) December 24, 2018
* U.S. Grip on the Market for Higher Education Is Slipping.
* The Southwest May Be Deep Into a Climate-Changed Mega-Drought. Discovery of recent Antarctic ice sheet collapse raises fears of a new global flood. Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find. 2018 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history. “The last five years have been the five warmest years in modern human history … The last cooler-than-normal year, based on the 20th century average, was way back in 1976.” Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says. ‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change. ‘Future-proofing’ is how you say climate change in Texas. 130,000. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation. Democrats remain fundamentally unserious.
* Moving a section of railroad up and inland is not going to be the drastic logistical challenge of the 21st century. It is going to be an ordinary baseline necessity, one minor component in a comprehensive retooling of life and infrastructure. Whole cities will have to move up and in. Rail and transit, water and sewer, power and industry—none of it can stay put on the low ground. Nor, if there’s any hope of getting emissions under control, is the feeble, endangered Amtrak line more than a fraction of the transportation systems the country will need for its survival. The issue isn’t whether we can mobilize to keep rail service running through Wilmington without interruption. It’s whether there’s going to be a Wilmington at all.
* Here are the yoga pants you should buy if you don’t want to poison the groundwater.
* Fifty years since Earthrise.
* Migrant boy dies in U.S. custody; Trump vows shutdown will last until border wall is funded. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol. Border Patrol says young girl in custody nearly died after going into cardiac arrest: report. ICE Quietly Drops 200 Asylum Seekers at El Paso Bus Station with No Money or Shelter Right Before Christmas. ICE Is Using Driver’s License Applications to Arrest Immigrants. ICE, CBP Seize Billions In Assets Including Human Remains.
* A College Student Was Told To Remove A “Fuck Nazis” Sign Because It Wasn’t “Inclusive.”
* The fact that there can be no accountability despite “serious” allegations is, in some sense, the common theme of the time. It’s part of a drumbeat that insists: We cannot indict a sitting president; we cannot discipline a sitting justice. If you are untruthful for a long enough period of time, you can find your way into a job where there are no consequences for being untruthful.
* How Mark Burnett Invented Trump.
* The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said. Wild that the Catholic Church would think it could win a morality fight about kids and sex.
* Elon Musk is a ludicrous, transparent fraud, and it just doesn’t matter a bit.
* After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools.
* You can’t argue with facts! Milwaukee named one of the best places to start a business in the US.
* Why did the Times let Alice Walker recommend an anti-Semitic book?
* What if the Constitution is bad?
* Putting your mass shooting on credit.
* What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle. Everything! And they were wrong about unions too!
* A Mysterious Object Twice the Size of Earth is What Caused Uranus’ Lopsided Orbit.
* Julie Rea was convicted of killing her son largely on the testimony of bloodstain-pattern analysts. She was later acquitted and exonerated, joining a growing community of Americans wrongly convicted with bad science.
* The Spider-Verse story that (kind of) inspired Into the Spider-Verse is only $8.99 at Comixology. It’s fun!
* How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Animators Created That Trippy Look.
* Berlin Is a Masterpiece of a Graphic Novel.
* One second from every episode of Mad Men.
* Great session today, doc, thanks.
* The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.
* Childhood poverty has a lasting impact on developing brain, finds study.
* I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.
* Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not).
* For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain. Stay tuned for my darkly erotic sequel to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
me the first time I hear a They Might Be Giants song: ahaha the boys have done it again, what a wacky, witty tune
me the 100th time I hear that They Might Be Giants song: oh wait it’s a crushing examination of anxiety and/or depression
— Nathan Goldman (@nathangoldman) December 19, 2018
Never forget you are made out of stardust and unexamined despair
— Kim Kierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) November 30, 2018
Oh no pic.twitter.com/4TciQHgilj
— Abiral (@AbiralCP) December 21, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
December 27, 2018 at 9:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, advertising, Alice Walker, Alien vs. Predator, aliens, Amazon, America, Amtrak, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, asylum, Berlin, Black Mirror, blood spatter, books, Catholicism, cave paintings, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, child abuse, childhood poverty, class struggle, climate change, comedy, copyright, credit cards, cultural criticism, Deadwood, Democrats, deportation, digitality, Donald Trump, drought, Earthrise, ecology, Elon Musk, ethnic cleansing, Fight for $15, Fortnite, fraud, frauds, games, gig economy, glitches, grading, graphic novels, guns, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv comedy, inclusion, Into the Spider-verse, Japan, kids today, knowledge, literature, Mad Men, Mark Burnett, mass shootings, mecha-drought, megadrought, memories, Miles Morales, Milwaukee, minimum wage, my scholarly empire, Nazis, New Orleans, New York, New York Times, nuclearity, oil, outer space, parenting, politics, rape, rape culture, rats, Republicans, Robert Mueller, romanticism, Seattle, someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas, strategic inefficiency, The Apprentice, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Internet, the law, the Southwest, They Might Be Giants, trans* issues, triggering the libs, true crime, UCB, Uranus, vaginas, whales, whaling, yoga pants, Zelda