Posts Tagged ‘email’
Saturday Morning Links!
So intelligent species burn out too quickly to make intergalactic headway—I have to ask, do you think that’s what will happen to us?
I don’t know. We used to think that the biggest threat we faced as a species was nuclear war. Now it looks like it’s global warming. If we survive that, it’d be tempting to think that it’ll smooth sailing afterwards, but any consideration of this question is primarily a reminder of how much we don’t know.
* A math equation that predicts the end of humanity.
* The struggling US media industry is facing its worst year for job layoffs in a decade as news organizations continue to cut staff and close shop, according to a new survey. And this is before the coming recession hits.
* University Of Alaska Readies For Budget Slash: ‘We May Likely Never Recover.’ Alaska Isn’t a Bellwether. It’s a Swan Song.
* Remembering the strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead.
* Defeated in the courts, Trump may issue an executive order to try to rig the Census. There are no laws in America, only power.
* The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator – though he had plenty – but an inevitable byproduct of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become. He was just a kid.
* These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 Border Security Expo—essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.”
* Former ICE Chief Counsel Gets 4 Years In Prison For Stealing Immigrants’ Identities.
* Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border.
* DHS watchdog details dangerous conditions for migrants at border centers. What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse. The Treatment of Migrants Likely ‘Meets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity.’ “The Whole Facility’s Culture Is Rotted From the Core”: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saw Inside the El Paso Camps. The department is seeking 20-year leases for most of the sites, signaling they don’t expect challenges to fade.
* Trump administration ending in-person interpreters at immigrants’ first hearings.
* The Exceptional Cruelty of a No-Hugging Policy.
* Drawings by migrant children in detention show them in cages.
* ICE Threatens Immigrant in Sanctuary in Chapel Hill With $314,000 Fine.
* “Seth Donnelly was one of the many inmates Texas prison officials use as prey for dog hunts. He died from heatstroke after collapsing on the job in Abilene.” I’m gonna need you to start from the top.
* Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy.
* Happy 4th! Here are some readings on concentration camps.
* What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
* Europe’s Bold Plan for a Moon Base Is Coming Together. How will we deal with squatters on the Moon?
* World’s most full of shit people nearly terminally full of shit.
* Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.
* If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* “Plan to ban seagulls from the sea suspended.”
* Deep-sea mining to turn oceans into ‘new industrial frontier’.
* Heatstroke warnings in Anchorage.
* How Washington’s Elite Learned to Love Policy Wonks.
* When your email spies on you.
* The arc of history is long, but.
This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.
* Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.
* Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option.
* Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isn’t a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddler’s building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, “We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.” Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.
* The Impact of a World Without The Walking Dead.
* The Harry Potter franchise is going to take another crack at a prequel.
* What’s missing in Spider-Man: Far from Home.
* Another take: Far from Home as metafiction.
* And nothing gold can stay: The end of MAD.
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Dragons Are for White Kids with Money: On the Friction of Geekdom and Race. Posted in a Facebook thread about this snippet of a review I finished today (which references this immortal Pictures for Sad Children comic).
* Hemingway, or My Mother’s Email?
* If We Live Another Billion Years, a Lot of Crazy Shit Is Going to Happen.
* Like this! Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador. “It’s far worse than what has already been reported.” White House Staff ‘Hiding’ as Russia Chaos Engulfs West Wing.
* Trump to fire everyone? A special prosecutor or an independent commission? Enter the ACLU. 29%. Trump’s Premium on Loyalty Poses Hurdle in Search for FBI Chief. How Trump Gets His Fake News. Republicans who are complicit in Trump’s abuse of power will soon have a big problem. Oh, honey, no. You know, economic anxiety. An all-time great “experts say.” And here’s a bananas story that doesn’t even make the list this week.
* Suddenly relevant: Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies.
* If Trump can stop this, though, he deserves a second term.
* Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in: Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-My Hometown) ratted a woman out to her boss after she spoke out against him.
* Profiles in courage: Richard Burr.
On at least one occasion, he climbed out of an office window to avoid reporters, while carrying his dry cleaning, according to a senior Republican aide who has spoken to him about the episode.
* Racist North Carolina Voting Law Now Permanently Dead.
* There is a fear, among some at MSNBC, that Lack is making programming decisions in an effort to appease the Trump administration (an accusation that has been made of CNN and Fox News), which may lead to more access to the White House and in turn, conservative viewers. O’Donnell was #1 in his timeslot just a few days ago.
* You didn’t think free speech was free, did you?
* How Noncompete Clauses Keep Workers Locked In.
* Doxing the hero who stopped WannaCry was irresponsible and dumb.
* Stolen bees recovered in California sting operation.
* A Remote Paradise Island Is Now a Plastic Junkyard. Farmers Scramble to Adapt to Volatile Weather. Monumental Hands Rise from the Water in Venice to Highlight Climate Change.
* Hearing on UW protest bill shows conflicting views on state of campus speech.
* Klan cosplay in Charlottesville. Disgusting.
* Even as the Trump administration prepares to loosen oversight over immigrant detention facilities, medical care already can be so substandard that cancer is treated with ibuprofen, schizophrenia with Benadryl and serious mental illness with solitary confinement, two new reports found. And if you’re not mad yet: Federal Immigration Agent Allegedly Inquired About 4th Grader At Queens Public School.
* The end of department stores.
* Where is North Korea? Here are guesses from 1,746 adults.
* The project, called Your Brain Manufacturing, was an extension of Bekking’s Brain Manufacturing project, which explored whether designers can use brain analysis to determine what people really like, rather than what their social conditioning leads them to believe they like. The answer may surprise you!
* Really, DC’s coming desecration of Watchmen just looks so unbelievably terrible. I can hardly stand it.
* What is dead may never die. What is dead may never die.
* Star Trek: Mirror Broken looks good though.
* ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ live tour coming to Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater.
* If it isn’t set on Purge Day, it’s just a documentary.
* An A.I. Dreamed Up a Bunch of Dungeons & Dragons Spells. They’re Surprisingly Perfect.
* The arc of history is long, but Nintendo might be making a Legend Of Zelda mobile game. This has my attention, too: Paradox Publishing A “Hardcore” Strategy Game About Mars.
* Science has proved you’re not drunk, you’re just an asshole.
* Also.
* And in a time without heroes, there was @WeRateDogs.
Friday Morning!
* Trump White House finding a new bottom, day after day after… whoa. Turning Point? They’re not even pretending. The Biggest Political Story in Decades. In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry. Inside Trump’s anger and impatience. Another inside story. Time to shut everything down. And then on the third day he threatened to blackmail Comey with secret White House tapes. Only the Rock can save us now.
* The primary takeaway of the last 18 months is that no one should ever use email for any reason.
* Huge relief after only 11 million people vote for a fascist.
* Trump’s attacking the Census.
* Journalist arrested for trying to ask HHS Secretary Tom Price a question.
* What if populism is not the problem, but the solution?
* By refusing to negotiate with recently unionized graduate workers, Yale president Peter Salovey has announced in writing that the university will defy US labor law.
* Meanwhile, at the greatest public university in the world: Also included in the itemized spending was a dinner tab worth more than a year of tuition.
* Locked Up for Being Poor. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county. All the money’s gone, nowhere to go.
* Kristen Gillibrand, for and against. All this for someone who already ruled it out!
* Despite the confidence that the backlash to the healthcare bill will benefit Democrats, this doesn’t seem like good politics to be gleefully cheering on something you think is going to literally kill people. Especially, when you’re just singing over the supposed political benefits.
*History Will Remember These 217 House Republicans for Their Inhumanity.
* The Democratic Party Is a Ghost. Losing West Virginia. Priorities in Delaware. The Resistance, but not just as a joke. Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.
* Trumpism is coming from the suburbs. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.
* A study at Demos says voter suppression flipped Wisconsin. Some Words of Caution.
* I’m sure no one could find this objectionable: A top government official overseeing detentions and deportations is heading to a private prison company at the end of the month, according to a source with firsthand knowledge.
* The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.
* Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused.
* How a Utah county silenced Native American voters — and how Navajos are fighting back.
* The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis.
* How Marquette Is Becoming More Diverse.
* Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong.
* This is how SETI plans to find alien life by 2037.
* Chicago Approves Plan To Block Trump’s Name on His Tower With Giant, Flying Pigs.
* A Defense of the Tuvel Open Letter, at the Chronicle. And on the other side.
* How many Death Row prisoners are disabled? All of them.
* The length schools will go to cover up for bullies never ceases to amaze me.
* District: The Game of Gerrymandering for the Whole Family.
* Secret military space shuttle rattles Florida.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.
* HIV life expectancy ‘near normal’ thanks to new drugs.
* Another neurological disease unexpectedly linked to gut bacteria.
* U.S. to Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe, Officials Say.
* Stephen Fry is being investigated for blasphemy. Amazing.
* That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox.
* The Girls’ Soccer Team That Joined a Boys’ League, and Won It.
* Winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.
* Write the book you needed to read when you were a child. Troubled Wisconsin man goes on 50 state killing spree. Guns and Roses tones it down. Our future in space. They fucking killed him. Top ten book rebrands, all-time. I hacked into Mike Pence’s email. Maybe I should give the Yankees another look. A new favorite metaphor. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
* And I don’t care how pretty or enigmatic it is, nothing will ever make Blade Runner 2049 a good idea.
Closing Every Tab Because My Computer Will Barely Work Right Now Links
Sorry I’ve been so quiet! Between summer teaching and wrapping up a few big projects it’s been a very busy couple of weeks. Here’s every tab I had open!
* CFP: Hamilton: A Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre.
* 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalists and Shirley Jackson Award Winners.
* Graduate students in literary studies may often feel despair, even deadness and meanness, but an excess of cool seems like an especially implausible explanation. Far more damaging are bad mentoring, crippling overwork, social and geographic isolation, and the absence of opportunities to join the profession after spending a decade training. For too many graduate students, whether critical or postcritical, earning a PhD is the end — not the beginning — of a promising academic career. The skepticism that threatens graduate students and young faculty members results, therefore, not from the skepticism of academic theorists but from the skepticism of legislatures, administrators, donors, austerity-loving think tanks, and taxpayers. The Hangman of Critique.
* Jeff Vandermeer: Hauntings in the Anthropocene.
* The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF.
* The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Have Been Determined.
* The Best of Science Fiction (1946) and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016).
* Cleveland Police Are Gearing Up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention. Case Western in the News: Changes to campus operations during RNC. What’s a University For? Meet the Student Fighting Case Western U. for Shutting Down Campus to House 1,900 Police Officers.
* At least the convention went great.
* “Secretary Clinton Is A Different Person Than Donald Trump,” Says Bernie Sanders in Ringing Endorsement. GOP Establishment Relieved After Conventionally Abhorrent Beliefs Make Way Onto Presidential Ticket.
* Clinton has 945 Ways to Win. Trump Has 72.
* A Brief History of Turkey and Military Coups. The view from inside the bunker. Turkey ‘suspends 15,000 state education employees’ after attempted coup, including 1,577 deans at all universities.
* US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters.’
* Bleeding the poor with fees and fines, Virginia edition.
* The end of Roger Ailes. The Drudge Era.
* Now, Baton Rouge. A 538 Special on Gun Deaths in America. The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear. “One group is responsible for America’s culture of violence, and it isn’t cops, black Americans, Muslims or rednecks.” No lives matter. And from the archives: A Manifesto from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.
* Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth. Donald Trump Heads Into The Convention With Barely Any Campaign At All: Many of the numbers listed for his state offices don’t even work. Did you ever have to make up your mind? Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets. “Trump’s campaign logo mocked on Twitter.” He’s Really Pretty Bad at This. Being Honest about Trump. Jeb! We Play the Trump Board Game So You Don’t Have To. Republicans Keeping Their Dignity. Teach the controversy: Is Trump Working for Russia? Understanding Trump Supporters: The Machine of Morbius. Back to the Future in Cleveland. The Last GOP President?
* Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? Confessions of Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter.
* Donald Trump Said Hillary Clinton Would ‘Make a Good President’ in 2008. Donald Trump should talk about Hillary Clinton’s email all the time. Here’s why. Pollster Frank Luntz: GOP has ‘lost’ the millennial generation.
* There are about 20 households where she now lives. Like Susie, most of the residents in Snowflake have what they call “environmental illness”, a controversial diagnosis that attributes otherwise unexplained symptoms to pollution.
* Newborn Ducklings Judge Shape and Color.
* Small Arms, Long Reach: America’s Rifle Abroad.
* Education Department’s proposed rule for student debt forgiveness could threaten traditional colleges as well as for-profits, particularly over its broad view of what counts as misrepresentation. College and the Class Divide. Wicked Liberalism.
* As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis.
*Dying in America, Without Insurance.
* When Not to Get Married: Some 19th Century Advice.
* The Ontology of Calvin and Hobbes.
* The Fight Between Berkeley’s Academics And Its Football Team Is Getting Ugly.
* A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.
* Black Dishwasher at Yale University Loses Job After Shattering “Racist, Very Degrading” Stained-Glass Panel. Yale Rehires. Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor.
* Ghostbusters (2016) and The Fan. Fake Controversy, Terrible Comedy. Ghostbusters‘ nostalgia problem. And from the archives!
Ghostbusters more than any other film highlights the growing devaluation of public-sector jobs at the hands of privatized for-profit entities operating for mercenary reasons. The protagonists of this movie spend their time removing unwanted, unpaying residents from spaces they occupied their whole lives (and longer) and placing them into a form of prison at the behest of the current owners who can get more rent from more affluent persons and don’t like the neighborhood being ‘brought down’ by those now-undesirable who lived there first. Not only that, but budget cuts have forced the New York Public Library to retain the dead as current employees, cutting into what should have been their final retirement, and the entire crux of the film comes from belittling and mocking elected officials’ uselessness in the face of corporations who can solve the city’s problems for cash and without all the useless regulation tying up the mayor, firefighters and police. Ghostbusters is essentially Blackwater for the dead, cleaning up the town of its unwanted past, making life safe for the corporate oligarchies.
* A Zero Star Review of The Secret Life of Pets.
* ‘Pokémon Go’ and the Persistent Myth of Stranger Danger. If Pokémon Go could resemble the best of childhood, it might have some value. What it actually does is very different.
* Did Wes Anderson Design North Korea?
* How Sexual Harassment Halts Science.
* Why rich parents are terrified their kids will fall into the “middle class.”
* Prepare to cry: Appleton teen makes heartbreaking decision to die.
* To recap, the idea behind the Reverse Turing Test is that instead of thinking about the ways in which machines can be human-like we should also think about the ways in which humans can be machine-like.
* “He noted that further research is needed”: Women Wearing Low-Cut Tops In Application Photos Are 19 Times More Likely to Land a Job Interview.
* Penn State Football really should have gotten the NCAA death penalty.
* Am I a man, dreaming he is a Pokémon, or am I a Pokémon dreaming he is a man? Here’s All the Data Pokémon (Was) Leeching From Your Phone. Resist Pokémon Go. And as Adorno said: To catch Pokémon after Auschwitz is barbaric.
* OK, just take my money: Nintendo’s next assault on nostalgia is a mini-NES with 30 built-in games.
* Canon Police: Sulu’s Sexuality. But, you know, let’s not lose our heads. J.J. Abrams Won’t Re-Cast Anton Yelchin’s Role in ‘Star Trek’ Movies. For Some Baffling Reason, This Star Trek Beyond TV Spot Spoils the Big Twist. But the next one will be good, we swear.
* That piece I’m writing on Star Wars and canonicity will just never, ever be finished: Grand Admiral Thrawn Joins Rebels and the New Star Wars Canon.
* The headline reads, “Gonorrhea may soon be unbeatable.”
* Cancer, or, death by immortality.
* Hacking the brain in Silicon Valley.
* This blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22.
* Comic Books Are More Popular Now Than They’ve Been in 20 Years.
* Presenting the Apollo 11 Code.
* 67 Years of LEGO — by the numbers.
* Darwin’s Kids Doodled All Over His “Origin of Species” Manuscript.
* Neanderthals Ate Each Other and Used Their Bones as Tools.
* The Films Rian Johnson had the Episode 8 Cast Watch.
* This sizzle reel from Rogue One is the best.
* Treaty loophole might let someone claim ownership of the Moon.
* Should You Quit Your Job To Go Make Video Games?
* A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories of consciousness.
* And Mightygodking pitches the dark, gritty Sesame Street reinterpretation you didn’t know you needed.
Sunday Night Links!
* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.
* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.
* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.
* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.
* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
* Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.
* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.
* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.
* Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.
* “Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
* We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.
* Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.
* We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed. In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.
* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.
* America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’
* It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.
* Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.
* The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.
* Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.
* six months tops
* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.
* What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
* “Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.
* Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.
* A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.
* The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.
* Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.
* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.
* Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.
* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.
* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.
* Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.
* The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.
* How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.
* 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.
* Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.
* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.
* Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.
* Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.
* The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.
* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.
* “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.
* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.
* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.
* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.
* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.
* New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.
* Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.
* Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.
* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?
* I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.
* Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.
* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.
* The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.
* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.
* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.
* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.
Easter Monday (Hardly Knew ‘Er)
* Marquette suspends McAdams through the fall 2016 semester. Marquette’s statement. McAdams has some interesting comments specifically with regard to the the apology requirement on his blog. What a mess.
* Alien vs. Predator: Connecticut Politicians Want to Tax Yale Endowment.
* Husband and wife HMS students seek treatment for her fatal disease. It isn’t Huntington’s, though it’s very similar, and Huntington’s research does play a minor role in the story.
* Good Friday in Middle-earth.
* Batman v. Superman: you know, for kids. But, honestly, at this point I almost feel bad.
* For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it’s at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It’s the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been 15 years in the making. We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.
* Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. The Long March of Bernie’s Army.
* For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.
* These Are The Phrases That Sanders And Clinton Repeat Most.
* Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat. The links keep coming after the picture.
* The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors: The most unusual colors from Harvard’s storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.
* The woman who can see 100 times more colors than you can.
* Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience.
* The emergency managers Snyder imposed on Detroit and Flint had no chance of restoring those cities to solvency. Forced austerity can’t solve financial problems caused by a low tax base and a lack of revenue sharing. Meanwhile, in Illinois: How to destroy a state.
* Civic leaders in Portland, Oregon, want to start busing homeless people out of town. The city council there quietly set aside $30,000 to buy one-way tickets for certain homeless individuals last week, the Portland Mercury reports.
* Fighting over my vote: Who’s the Most UFO-Friendly Presidential Candidate? Related: Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs. And in local news: Aaron Rogers Describes Seeing a UFO in New Jersey in 2005.
* Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam.
* N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry. Jerry Jones: Absurd to Link Football to CTE. Absurd!
* The True Story Behind the Legendary “Lost Ending” of The Shining.
* How 4chan and 8chan turned that chatbot racist. How Not to Make a Racist Bot.
* 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life.
* Happily ever after? Advice for mid-career academics.
* About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
* Somehow I’d forgotten Netflix is actually doing Voltron, and that wasn’t just a joke about the creative bankruptcy of our times.
* This, however, I’m 100% in favor of.
* Mr. Speaker, this is not a perfect bill. I never said it was. I saw Hamilton, so now I’m going to orphan my son.
* With The Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling Shows Us Harry Potter’s Future Isn’t What You Expected.
* Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026.
* Harrowing tales of true crime.
* Secret history of the Clinton email scandal.
* They stole Shakespeare’s skull!
* To Boldly Go Provides a Rare Look Behind the Scenes of Star Trek.
* Bedrock City in Ruins: The rise and fall of the Flintstone empire.
* Just the thought every parent wants in their mind on the happy occasion of their daughter’s fourth birthday: I had a baby in my 40s. Part of my job is preparing my daughter for life without me.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Red Mars TV Series Now On Hold After Showrunner Suddenly Departs.
Weekendin’!
* Posted earlier this morning: The Lives of Animals, Part Two and My Upcoming Courses at Marquette. And apropos of that second link, and today’s start of Infinite Winter: Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20.
* CFP for the the second issue of the Museum of Science Fiction’s new journal. Special Issue on Online Misogyny: Call for Papers.
* Your Dissertation Begins in Your First Seminar.
* Chicago State U Declares Financial Exigency.
* Study shows Wisconsin suffered second highest decrease in higher education in nation.
* UC Berkeley faculty members are buzzing over news that University of California President Janet Napolitano ordered the installation of computer hardware capable of monitoring all e-mails going in and out of the UC system. More from Remaking the University.
* J.K. Rowling announces four new wizarding schools you’ll never get to attend. On Uagadou, the African Wizarding School.
* The President says he’s talking about opportunities, but he’s also talking about outcomes. It’s one thing to want all kids to have access to advanced classes, music instruction, sports teams and volunteer work. It’s another to expect them to take advantage of all of them at the same time. President Obama described Antonio as “doing his part” with his full load of curricular and extracurricular activities, but every student can’t be prepared for college: There just aren’t enough seats. Because admission is limited and competitive, only the top two-thirds or so can be, by definition, prepared for higher education. No matter how hard they work, how brilliant they are, the lowest-scoring cohort will be labeled unprepared and accused of not “doing their part.”
* The university in ruins: The number of job postings the AHA received in 2014-15 was down 8 percent from the prior year. This is the third straight year for which the association is reporting a decline. Job listings are down 45 percent from the 1,064 that the association reported in 2011-12.
* How impossible is it for Democrats to win back the House? This impossible.
* Disabled people need not apply.
* Good News! China Miéville Has Written a Bad Book. Either way I’m still really looking forward to The Last Days of New Paris.
* How Long Could the U.S. Go Without Electricity?
* We’ll never know for sure exactly what The Owl In Daylight would have looked like had Philip lived to put the story to paper, but it sounds like it would have been a rare happy ending in the Dick canon. “He considered this a sort of capstone to his career,” Tessa says. “The first novel that ends on a note of hope and love.”
* The 27th Amendment Was Ratified Primarily for Revenge.
* Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed.
* Matt Yglesias is Making Sense: This is a party that has no viable plan for winning the House of Representatives, that’s been pushed to a historic low point in terms of state legislative seats, and that somehow lost the governor’s mansions in New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois.
It’s a party, in other words, that was clearly in need of some dialogue, debate, and contestation over what went wrong and how to fix it. But instead of encouraging such a dialogue, the party tried to cut it off.
* Fan theory of the week: “Leia was sent to Tatooine not only to recruit Obi-Wan but also to be trained as a Jedi.”
* Game of the week: From the makers of the fantastic rymdkapsel, Twofold, Inc.
* The MLArcade: Ten Multimedia Projects on the Rhetoric of Pinball.
* Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation.
* English is Surprisingly Devoid of Emotionally Positive Words.
* ‘Hundreds’ of masked men beat refugee children in Stockholm.
* Uriel, the Universe’s Best-Dressed Spiritual Leader.
* An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him.
* ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations.
* We Shall Overcome: An Oral History of the Bernie Sanders Folk Album.
* MIT Dean Takes Leave to Start New University Without Lectures or Classrooms. Or professors…
* Earth is actually two planets, scientists conclude. BUT FOR HOW LONG.
* Equation shows that large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves.
* “Homicides soar in Milwaukee, along with many theories on cause.”
* The next Flint, Michigan, could be a suburb.
* How the original Star Wars trilogy fooled everyone with matte paintings.
* New horizons in cycling cheating.
* Unemployed, Myanmar’s Elephants Grow Antsy, and Heavier.
* $8 Billion Ponzi Scheme in China.
* And I truly find every aspect of this just totally mind-boggling: At Simon Fraser U, professors were stunned by video university posted on its website that suggested female faculty members could be viewed as sex objects — in the name of saving energy.
Tuesday Links!
* The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism interviews my friend Ramzi Fawaz about his exciting new book on the X-Men in the 1970s: The New Mutants.
* David Foster Wallace’s blurbspeak.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo Will Be Published In October.
* Scientist studies Diplomacy game to reveal early signs of betrayal.
* US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence.
* Whatever happened to Gary Cooper: You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”
* The fire next time: The Pension Crisis at Public Universities.
* The Clinton plan for college. This summary leaves out all the awful disruptivation and neoliberalization stuff that will be part of any actual plan, so it sounds great.
* Widespread use of private email revealed a day after Wise resigns. The Revelations in Phyllis Wise’s Emails. Legal experts react. It’s so bad the board is going to vote on whether to pull her $400,000 golden parachute.
* More on Duquesne’s proposition that adjunct unions would interfere with its Catholic mission.
* SeaWorld sees profits plunge 84% as customers desert controversial park.
* The Making of the American Police State.
* The Socrates of the National Security Agency.
* Police Union In Missouri Declares ‘Darren Wilson Day’ On Shooting Anniversary. Yankees’ Minor League Affiliate Holds ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Event On Anniversary Of Michael Brown’s Death.
* One Holdout Juror Was Likely Why James Holmes Avoided Death Penalty.
* Comic book movies and the forgotten art of the ending. You heard it here first!
* The big Superman reveal (from the pre-52 DC Universe) that DC never got around to revealing.
* Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics.
* No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games.
* Netflix’s Dystopian Show 3% To Be Developed Entirely In Brazil.
3% takes place in a world where most of the population lives in “Hither”: a decadent, miserable, corrupt place. When people reach 20 years of age, they go through the “Process”, the only chance to get to “Thither” – the better place, with opportunities and promises of a dignified life. Only three percent of the applicants are approved by the Process that will take the applicants to their limit, putting them in terrifying, dangerous situations and testing their convictions through moral dilemmas.
* More incredibly bad behavior in SF fandom. A little more context here.
* Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct. Colleges Under Investigation for Sexual Assault Wonder What Getting It Right Looks Like.
* Here come the automated trucks. Kids today don’t even want to drive anymore (or their helicopter parents won’t let them)!
* The Amazonization of Everything.
* Point: Please don’t have sex with robots. Counterpoint: Humans should be able to marry robots.
* Point: They clearly should have let Max Landis write Fantastic Four. Counterpoint: The Fantastic Four Are Jerks.
* Two interesting essays on sex work and sugar daddies from TNI’s “Daddy” issue: “Letter to a Young Baby” and “You Deserve It, Sweetie.”
* Atlas Shrugs Google Rebrands.
Natalia’s tweet became a whole great blog post on modernism, childhood, and tech.
* Why do hotels have ice machines?
* Why do pro wrestlers die so young?
* Prison-industrial-wildfire complex: Nearly half the people fighting wildfires wreaking havoc across California are prison inmates.
* Sandernistas would do well to reflect on one thing. In a few months’ time, Sanders’s campaign will be gone. He will not win. … But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away. And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. A useful corrective, I think, though my intuition remains that this is one brand of underpantsgnomism competing with another for underpants-gnome supremacy.
* Diseases of the twenty-first century: Foot Orgasm Syndrome.
* This could actually be interesting: Harvard Professor Larry Lessig To Explore Democratic Presidential Run.
* Because you demanded it: Werner Herzog’s Ant-Man.
* Science has discovered a new pentagon.
* And while the lion still remains at large, Milwaukee remembers its polar bear.
Higher Ed Briefs
* The U.S. Army announced Friday that it will freeze all new applications for service members’ tuition assistance, temporarily eliminating a much relied-on program for soldiers and sending universities scrambling to identify alternative sources of funding for their students.
* How much does it cost to do an academic job search? This one seems to be behind a paywall, alas.
Ms. Finn first went on the market in 2009, a year before defending her dissertation, which she published as a book with Palgrave Macmillan last year. She has now been looking for a tenure-track job for four years. In that time she has applied for a total of 75 academic positions and spent more than $2,000. She has paid for postage, transcripts, several years of graduate-student membership in the Modern Language Association, and costs associated with attending the group’s conferences four times. Her tab also includes $39.90 to set up a three-year account with Interfolio, a popular online dossier-management service. To date, she has spent $365 for the service to transmit her application materials to scores of institutions.
There has been no payoff in terms of offers of a tenure-track job, visiting-professor position, or postdoctoral fellowship. Instead, Ms. Finn, who has taught as an adjunct at three universities, is unemployed, still on the job market, and trying to keep up with her research.
“I feel exhausted,” she says, “and as though I am throwing money into a gigantic hole.” She doesn’t regret graduate school, she adds, but “my wallet and credit score regret it.”
* Pop goes the law school bubble.
* Who’s Assessing the Assessors’ Assessors?
Yet the mavens of outcomes assessment do exactly the wrong thing—they pretend to have some other method that is the royal road to truth when, prey to the same doubts, it is no more than the path to ignorance.
* By sophomore year Evan was sleeping on a blowup mattress in an empty house off campus. He had no bed. No furniture. No posters or mini-fridge or shelf fraught with textbooks. He had no friends. He had sold the former, severed ties with latter, and now spent his hours curled up on an Aerobed until his dealer came through. The Existential Pain of Being Young, White, and Affluent.
* Harvard Search of E-Mail Stuns Its Faculty Members. Every aspect of this Harvard cheating scandal is so bizarre. Is there any reason to think such a high percentage of students—much less high-achieving Ivy Leaguers—would have cheated on a well-designed assignment with clear rules? Just call it even and be done with it.
* And UW admits by the numbers. Interesting to see how much has changed since 2000.
Monday Links
* Financialize this: ‘Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade.’ If only there were some other policy option…
* The headline reads, “Turkey wants universal email surveillance from birth.”
* Ezra Klein on the House of Representatives and the intent of the Founders.
* In 1969, Chairman Mao commanded the construction of a second Beijing beneath the surface of the original city… Via MeFi.
* Fredrick Engels’s Tiger-Beat-style questionnaire. Via Greenberg.
* Moustache Sexiness Timeline.
* Have I done this one before? T.S. Eliot reads “Prufrock.”
Wednesday Night Links
Wednesday night links.
* Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers was on Colbert last night. The reporting Jaimee and I did for the Indy‘s green issue this year sadly convinced me that Rogers’s “responsible CEO” schtick is 90% PR, and this clean-coal-centric interview didn’t sway that opinion a bit.
* Meanwhile, health-insurance CEOs agree: they totally have the right to screw you out of coverage you paid for once you actually need it.
* A reality check on Twitter and the protests in Iran.
* A good sign for 2010: Richard Burr trails Generic Democrat by 3 points.
* Who could have predicted that the NSA’s domestic surveillance program would be abused?
* Alice and Kev, homeless Sims. Via Kotaku.
Gerry Canavan 