Posts Tagged ‘Fantastic Four’
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.
* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.
* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).
* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.
* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.
“what was called normalcy was a hyperviolent multi-generational ponzi scheme rendered inoperable by accelerating ecological crisis” https://t.co/IPUGLl9ArZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 14, 2019
* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.
* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.
* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.
* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?
Fantastic Four #1 established a lot of canon, but perhaps none so firmly as Reed Richards' inability to read a room. pic.twitter.com/FvZ0i8XgFp
— (((Jay Edidin))) (@NotLasers) September 15, 2019
* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.
* When a woman ran for president in 1872.
* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.
* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.
* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.
* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.
* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.
* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 16, 2019 at 8:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #The Resistance, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air pollution, Alaska, alcoholism, America, apocalypse, art, automation, Brazil, CFPs, chess, climate barbarism, climate change, climate fascism, corruption, democracy, depression, diets, Donald Trump, English majors, Fantastic Four, film, Fredric Jameson, general election 2020, grief, health insurance, ice sheet collapse, IRS, John Mulaney, liberation, Lord of the Rings, mass extinction, memory, mental health, Mike Pence, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mortality, mourning, movie trailers, MTV, music, neoliberalism, normalcy, obituary, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, post office, recession, robots, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, socialism, standup comedy, the 1980s, the 2000s, the Amazon, the archives, The Cars, the Midwest, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, UC Irvine, unions, voting, weird science, wellness
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Call for Papers: Series Books and Science Fiction (National PCA Conference). CFP: Contemporary American Fiction in the Age of Innovation. CFP: Indigenous lands, waters, and ways of knowing.
* The Labor Movement’s Newest Warriors: Grad Students.
* Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming.
* Appeals court consider whether youth can sue the government over climate change. A Levee Fails and an Illinois Town Is Thrown Back in Time. White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony saying human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it. The Democrats are climate deniers too. And some more good news: Industrial methane emissions are underreported, study finds. 130°F heat index in South Texas, 13 days from the start of summer.
Like I was saying the other day, denialism is the price of admission to public life: to be taken seriously as a commenter one must signal that they will not under any circumstances discuss what is actually going on.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2019
we demand a DNC debate on climate change highlighting all the positions the party currently holds on climate change, from “do nothing” to “do nothing and pretend to feel bad about it”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2019
* Border Patrol is confiscating migrant kids’ medicine, U.S. doctors say. Reports reveal ‘egregious’ conditions in US migrant detention facilities. US opens new mass facility in Texas for migrant children. Third undocumented migrant in 3 days dies after being apprehended at US-Mexico border. ICE is struggling to contain spread of mumps in its detention centers. “He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay…He did a bad thing.”
I keep coming back to the points made in this thread. There is simply no opposition in the US whatsoever, only an out party with a different sense of what good manners are. https://t.co/5J5DdUD0BX
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2019
* In 2014, China released sweeping plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Local trials covering about 6% of the population are already rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, with Beijing due to begin its program by 2021. There are also other ways the state keeps tabs on citizens that may become part of an integrated system. Since 2015, for instance, a network that collates local- and central- government information has been used to blacklist millions of people to prevent them from booking flights and high-speed train trips.
* From Whole Foods to Amazon, Invasive Technology Controlling Workers Is More Dystopian Than You Think.
* YouTube is a radicalization engine for fascists.
* Prez in 2019: Are These Teenagers Really Running a Presidential Campaign?
* The heroes are split on opposing sides, and among the key matchups was a Wolverine vs. Mr. Fantastic battle that ended with Reed Richards pinning Wolverine down, extending his hands until they’re one molecule wide, and using them as scissors to cut the mutant’s arms off. You know, for kids.
* When it comes to westerns, the difference matters. Especially in the streaming era, the words “television” and “movie” have gotten disconnected from their origins; no one watched the Deadwood “movie” in movie theaters (and the old “television” show lives in the same HBO app, on the same computer, as I watched the movie). But television Westerns are all about the gap between one event and the next — and the random vagaries of life that get lived in the interval — while it’s film Westerns that tell the Big Stories about History, epics about Beginnings and Endings and Grand Historical Transitions (with plenty of capital letters), with ordinary people getting swept by the tides of modernity and progress.
* John Wick as modern fairy tale. John Wick 3 Delivers the Justice We All Crave. I’m so out of touch I haven’t seen one of these.
* John Rieder reviews Nisi Shawl’s New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color.
* A more honest show, I think, would acknowledge that there isn’t that much of a difference between Serena and Commander Lawrence. They’re both smart people who created a hell on Earth to justify their own twisted notions of superiority, and they both realize that fact, on some level, and are tortured by it (though not nearly as much as their victims are and have been). I think episode 3 is trying to draw a distinction between them when it has Lawrence continue his mind games with June (and his casual acceptance of female fawning from the dependent members of his household) while Serena at least opens herself up to the idea of rebellion. It might be rooting that distinction in gender, in arrogance and humility, and even in religious faith. But I don’t buy it. A person who did the things Serena has done (notice how her orchestrating June’s rape has simply been memory-holed? Not just ignored for the sake of expediency, but completely forgotten) wouldn’t be as open to remorse as she is. You don’t just wake up one morning and think “you know, maybe creating a fascist, theocratic rape-dystopia was a bad idea.”
* The New Yorker remembers How To Read Donald Duck.
* The Importance of ‘Godzilla’ Cannot Be Overstated.
* A Joe Biden Nomination Would Solidify All Our Worst Fears About the Democrats. I mean really.
When Trump dies, Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Bush, both Clintons will all be at his funeral, praising an American original who, love him or hate him, always did it his way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2019
* Inside the Fight to Define Extreme Poverty in America.
* Pfizer had clues its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer’s. Why didn’t it tell the world? Give you one guess.
* Why aren’t states doing more to lower the cost of insulin ONE GUESS
* Reflections of an Incarcerated Worker.
* Star Trek’s characters, like all of us, live in a universe full of injustice, suffering, and struggle—not a utopian vision, but an optimistic one, because they also live as if that better world is possible. We have to do that. We have to. When someone tells us that they’re in distress, in pain, in danger, or in a time loop, we have to say “I believe you. I’ll help however I can.”
* Catholic Church spent $10 million on lobbyists in fight to stymie priest sex abuse suits.
* The new American religion of UFOs.
* Ultimate limit of human endurance found. Me at the end of spring semester, am I wrong folks.
* 108 Women’s World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything.
* Dodgeball is a tool of ‘oppression’ used to ‘dehumanize’ others, researchers argue. As an incredibly unauthentic and uncoordinated kid, I was unusually good at dodgeball — so I’ve got mixed feelings here to say the least.
* And it’s a cookbook! A cooooooookbooooooook!
DEFINITIVE X-MEN MOVIE RANKING
1. X-MEN THE ANIMATED SERIES
2. X-MEN stand up arcade game, four players, c. mid-1990s
3. LOGAN
4. Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast
5. dim memories of having liked X2 when I saw it
6. rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ
7. Deadpool?
8. field— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 7, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
June 10, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adminsitrative blight, Afrofuturism, Alzheimer's, America, apocalypse, Ariel Dorfman, asylum, Bernie Sanders, Big Pharma, biodiversity, bioethics, border patrol, capitalism, Catholic Church, CBP, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, climate trials, college presidents, comics, concentration camps, corpocracy, Dark Phoenix, Deadwood, Democratic primary 2020, denialism, deportation, diabetes, dodgeball, don't be evil, doomed to repeat it, ecology, endurance, ethics, fairy tales, Fantastic Four, fascism, films, free speech, futurity, general election 2020, gerrymandering, Godzilla, Google, graduate student movements, guns, Handmaid's Tale, history, How the University Works, How to Read Donald Duck, ice, immigration, indigenous peoples, indigenous studies, innovation, insulin, Joe Biden, John Rieder, John Wick, Jordan Peele, kids today, labor, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, mass extinction, mass shootings, methane, Mexico, misogyny, mumps, Nazis, New Suns, Nisi Shawl, North Carolina, now my story can be told, politics, poverty, prison-industrial complex, radicalization, rape culture, religion, rich people, Santa Cruz, schools, science fiction, science fiction studies, soccer, social media, Star Trek, superheroes, surveillance, surveillance society, television, Texas, the courts, the Democrats, the law, tragedy, UFOs, unions, Us, Utopia, war on education, Westerns, Wolverine, women's sports, work, World Cup, X-Men, YouTube, zunguzungu
All Your Weekend Links
the desire to get some writing done vs. my ongoing commitment to hedonism
— kelly link (@haszombiesinit) August 16, 2016
* Waywiser Press has two new MP3s of Jaimee reading from her first book, How to Avoid Speaking: “Derrida Eats a Dorito” and “On Beauty.”
* New SF from Cixin Liu: “The Weight of Memories.”
* Duke Lit is hiring. And Georgetown has a cluster hire in African American studies.
* Automatically preordered: Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, New York 2140. China Miéville’s October: A History of the Russian Revolution. The Miéville- and Le-Guin-fronted new edition of More’s Utopia. Box Brown’s graphic history of Tetris.
* I love this Oulipoesque writing game from Steve Shaviro, on writing like a pundit.
- Every sentence must be a cliche.
- There must be no logical or narrative connection among the sentences. Each one must be a complete non sequitur.
* Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom.
* Reevaluating Teaching Evaluations.
* Can grad students unionize? Academia awaits major labor board ruling.
* Univision buys Gawker for $135m, shuts Gawker itself down.
Hi I'm Peter Thiel. As a Libertarian, my main focus is on using the machinery of the state to crush entrepreneurs and free expression.
— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) May 25, 2016
* Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.
* Relatedly: Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons. Some immediate effects.
Most prisons aren't private.
Most private prisons aren't federal.
Most fed private prisons are run by DHS.
New memo affects 13 prisons.
— Dara Lind (@DLind) August 18, 2016
* The new Star Trek distribution model in a global context.
* 15 Technologies That Were Supposed to Change Education Forever.
* Foundation 124 is out, with a special focus on More’s Utopia.
* I feel this now about a lot of things I read: Why Scott Snyder Doesn’t Write Damian Wayne Much.
they largely do now). And 2 – I love reading Damian, some of my favorite stories are Damian ones, but I have trouble writing him for
— Scott Snyder (@Ssnyder1835) August 16, 2016
personal reasons. You put yourself into the books when you write, your fears, etc., and my son is about Damian's age, and him getting hurt
— Scott Snyder (@Ssnyder1835) August 16, 2016
or fighting people beside me – it's just something I have trouble with. It's too upsetting to me and it throws my Batman writing off.
— Scott Snyder (@Ssnyder1835) August 16, 2016
* Unfortunately, Landis — the director who co-wrote and executive produced Clue — and the studios were completely wrong about there being any box office appeal for a film with three endings. As Lynn explained, “The audience decided they didn’t know which ending to go to, so they didn’t go at all.”
* Meanwhile, from the death of culture.
* It was the deadliest massacre of disabled people since World War II. How do we honor the victims if we don’t even know their names? Remembering the Sagamihara 19.
* Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing.’
* Something unexpected I learned recently: the practice of giving presidential candidates classified intelligence briefings began in the 1950s with President Truman, who didn’t want his successors coming into office without knowing crucial information (the way he hadn’t known about the Manhattan Project).
* Donald Trump is assembling gathering the Legion of Doom. (The ubiquitous Twitter joke was calling it “the hospice stage.”) Trumpism: first as tragedy, then as farce. The Presidential Debates Will Almost Definitely Exclude Third Parties. Finding Someone Who Can Imitate Donald Trump. Battleground Texas? The short, unhappy life of the Naked Trump statue. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots.
Biff—great guy, good friend of mine—they ruin his life! Doc and Marty—total losers. Can't win without time machine. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots
— Alex Gookin (@_AlexGookin) August 18, 2016
Son disrespects great, VERY successful father. True loser. Kissed his sister. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots pic.twitter.com/X9KcNeyc7r
— Katethulhu (@katethulhu) August 18, 2016
* The GOP’s Chances Of Holding The Senate Are Following Trump Downhill.
* A digital exhibit from the Milwaukee Public Library on the history of race and class in Milwaukee. Milwaukee by the numbers.
* Frodo’s trip to Mordor as a Google Map. Via Boing Boing.
* Aetna to pull out of the Obamacare markets, apparently for revenge. EpiPen Price Hike Has Parents of Kids With Allergies Scrambling Ahead of School Year.
* Diagnoses of 9/11-linked cancers have tripled in less than 3 years.
* Why gifted kindergarten is 70 percent white. How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success.
* “Clickbait”-esque titles work for academic papers too.
* Why aren’t there more women in Congress?
* What crime is the robbing of a neighborhood, compared to policing it?
* These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk. In a panic, they try to pull the plug…
* The Original Plan for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four Sounds Completely Amazing.
In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great…well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.
By coincidence, we watched the actual Trank Fantastic Four tonight and I was utterly shocked to see that there was almost a decent movie lurking in there somewhere.
* Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered.
* The spectacle of mixed gender racing unravels fascistic models of sex/gender difference and sex/gender purity. Every woman runner competes with the lie that men are faster than women. That fiction can only be maintained by ensuring that men and women never run with each other — when men and women run with each other, they scale down each other’s understanding of their differences. The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion. Capturing Semenya.
* The Forgotten Tale of How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village Into a Prison.
* That time NASA accidentally sold a piece of irreplaceable Apollo history for less than $1,000.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Heidelberg Project is coming down.
* Allow me to recommend the Julia Louis-Dreyfus portion of this episode of the Katie Couric Podcast, where she talks Veep, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The Al Franken episode is pretty good too.
* This episode of Criminal, on the founder of The Leaky Cauldron’s experience of being cyber-stalked for eight years, is also a really fascinating listen.
* I’m sad about this, but it’s probably time: Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman Announces End of Long-Running Superhero Comic Invincible.
"Distance from center of diagram measures explanatory generality, comprehensive power, & potential banality"—McGurl pic.twitter.com/xCcDohbHiH
— Scott Selisker (@sselisker) August 17, 2016
* Perhaps, once at a summer barbecue, when both were still alive, Maude grabbed Marge’s hand under the table and held tight.
* Meritocracy and system dysfunction. Meritocracy and system dysfunction and free tuition at public colleges.
* One of the biggest crime waves in America isn’t what you think it is: wage theft.
* The race of the police officer doesn’t matter. The race of the mayorimplementing the policy doesn’t matter. What matters is who enjoys a “right to the city” — and who gets thrown up against a wall and patted down.
* New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
* Elsewhere at Jacobin: Jacobin vs. Scientology.
* Scenes From the Terrifying, Already Forgotten JFK Airport Shooting That Wasn’t.
* Stranger Things, Parallel Universes, and the State of String Theory. And an interesting proposition from Chuck Rybak: Is the ubiquity of cell phones driving the nostalgia craze in film and TV?
* Please don’t mess this up: Marvel And Hulu Announce Runaways TV Series.
* Or this one either: Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar return for animated Batman movie.
* What killed The Nightly Show?
* When Nixon almost implemented universal basic income.
* Understanding the Harambe meme. Understanding the bees are dying at an alarming rate meme.
* A list of 150+ SF Writers of Asian Descent.
* Terraforming Mars without Nukes.
* Gins often said that the reason she and Arakawa made art and architecture was to “construct optimism.” Their whole philosophy began there, in the desire to embrace being alive and to shift their focus away from the certainty of death. Gins made the choice to believe that art, and her work, were strong enough to do that. It was her version of faith, and her work made that faith solid, physical. Her life, like all our lives, was often filled with sadness and difficulty. There were periods of depression, anxiety, sick parents, financial problems, her husband’s illness and death. Through it all, she insisted not just on continuing to live, but on living forever. Trying to build a world where fewer people suffered made her own suffering bearable. A year and a half after Arakawa’s death, Gins recalled in a letter to a friend her struggle to move forward. “Despite my shattered state,” she wrote, “in spite of the gaping hole that had been punched into my optimism, I asserted that nothing is of more interest than to be alive.”
* J.K. Rowling announces new Harry Potter short story collections.
* Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In the 136 years scientists have been tracking global temperatures, there has never been a warmer month than this July, according a new NASA report.
* Arctic Cruises for the Wealthy Could Fuel a Climate Change ‘Feedback Loop’.
* RIP John McLaughlin, who I watched with my father every week for a decade. Bye-bye.
* Dune, as it was always meant to be experienced.
* Feet of clay: Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland vs. the unions.
* Exercise we can believe in: Watching horror films burns nearly 200 calories a time.
* And physicists may have discovered a fifth fundamental force of nature. This is the one that gives people superpowers, I know it.
Kyle MacLachlan just brilliantly retold the plot of Dune in emoji for a fan on Twitter: https://t.co/mG2oyHR4dS pic.twitter.com/67JrTsdLcn
— Slate (@Slate) August 17, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
August 19, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 9/11, academia, academic jobs, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Adam West, Aetna, African American Studies, Al Franken, allergies, America, animals, Apollo 11, Arctic Cruises, art, artificial intelligence, Back to the Future, Baltimore, banality of evil, Batman, Batman '66, beauty, bees, cancer, Caster Semenya, CBS All-Access, cell phones, China Miéville, Cixin Liu, class struggle, cliche, clickbait, climate change, Clue, comics, communism, Congress, crime, cultural preservation, Damian Wayne, death, Department of Justice Barack Obama, Derrida, Detroit, disability, Donald Trump, Doritos, Duke, Dune, education, elections, Elizabeth Warren, emojis, epipens, exercise, Fantastic Four, film, Foundation, games, Gawker, gender, general election 2016, Georgetown, gifted and talented, gifted kids, globalization, Goodhart's Law, Google Maps, grad student movements, graphic narrative, guns, Harambe, Harry Potter, Harry Truman, hedonism, Heidelberg Project, Hillary Clinton, Hogwarts, horror movies, How the University Works, How to Avoid Speaking, Hulu, I grow old, ice sheet collapse, immortality, Invincible, J.K. Rowling, Jaimee, JFK Airport, John Landis, John McLaughlin, Joseph Goebbels, Josh Trank, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Justin Roiland, Kelly Link, kids, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Wilmore, literature, Lord of the Rings, Manhattan Project, many worlds and alternate universes, Marge Simpson, Mark McGurl, Mars, Marvel, mass extinction, mass incarceration, mass shootings, Münchausen syndrome by proxy, memes, memory, meritocracy, Milwaukee, misogyny, murder, museums, NASA, Netflix, New York 2140, Nixon, Northwest Passage, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, October, Olympics, Oulipo, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, physics, podcasts, poetry, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, reboots, Reddit, Rick and Morty, Robert Kirkman, Runaways, Russia, science, science fiction, Scientology, sexism, Sir Thomas More, slavery, Soviet Union, sports, stalking, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Steve Shaviro, stock market, Stranger Things, string theory, sugar, suicide, superheroes, teaching, teaching evaluations, techno-Orientalism, terraforming, Tetris, Texas, the Anthropocene, the Holocaust, The Nightly Show, The Program Era, the right to the city, the Sagamihara 19, the Senate, The Simpsons, third parties, Tolkien, transgender issues, true crime, tuition, unintended consequences, unions, universal basic income, Utopia, Veep, wage theft, wealth, writing, zoos
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mellon Postdoctoral Program invites recent PhDs to apply for its three two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The theme for 2017-2019 applicants is Translation, Adaptation, Transplantation.
* A message from the Marquette administration: Milwaukee, our home. And a letter from MUPD. Decades of grievances come to a head in Milwaukee after police shooting. The “unrest” in this city began decades ago. The Racial Segregation And Economic Devastation That Made Milwaukee A ‘Powder Keg.’ Powder keg. Decades in the making. Decades in the making. Ongoing tensions. Not a surprise. No one can deny. Outsider agitators! The radicalism of Black Lives Matter. “What can I do to help Milwaukee?” What It’s Like To Experience Black Pain In Milwaukee. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails.
* Scientists say the US is facing the strongest hurricane season since Sandy hit the East Coast. California is in flames right now, with fires fueled by historic drought. A first-strike against climate change is the only solution.
* The 10 Most Overly-Specific Supervillains in Comics.
* The story no one asked for will finally become the series no one can watch. And when I made that joke on Facebook a friend reminded me of the goddamn forehead ridge thing that will be totally inescapable.
* I told you, Dad! New research from the Journal of Health Psychology seems to supports the theory that intelligent people spend more time being lazy than people who are more active.
* Racial Politics After Obama.
* Insurers say they’re losing money under the Affordable Care Act and are fighting for double-digit rate increases. This week Aetna announced it is pulling back from most exchanges.
for every problem there is a solution that is complex, market-based and far worse than the government just doing it https://t.co/lRJsJ72z5c
— sean. (@SeanMcElwee) August 16, 2016
* When the Hospital Is Covered but the Health Care Isn’t.
the hospital is in network, and the doctor is in network, ha ha very clever you caught that one! but that room is NOT part of the hospital
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) August 15, 2016
* Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans.
* Area Man’s Wife Achieves Lifelong Dream Through Dedicated, Drive, and Incredible Physical Prowess. It gets worse, my friends. (It gets better too.)
* Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed. Right wing ratfucking though it may be, the cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously honor contemporary norms about sexual consent and the 90s-era “none of our business” defense of Bill Clinton’s predatory behavior seems increasingly difficult to sustain.
* The amount of effort this took was the most alarming thing given his history,” the guy told the Post. Anthony Weiner’s Back at It Again With the Saucy Twitter DMs. I’m still saying it:
I’d really love to see a documentary called ABEDIN just with the footage of Huma they cut from WEINER. She’s the enigma.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 4, 2016
* This Andrew Cuomo fan fiction is now totally my head canon.
* Comedy Central Cancels Larry Wilmore’s Late-Night Show. Comedy Central’s decision this week to cancel “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” was a surprise. The reason it was a surprise is that Wilmore isn’t the real problem with the cable channel’s late-night offerings. Wilmore gone, but Comedy Central’s late-night problem is Noah.
* The Life Aquatic’s Seu Jorge Announces David Bowie Covers Tour. Chicago on (the day after) my birthday!
* NeverEnding Story Returns To Movie Theaters For Limited Run. I wish my kids were just a little bit older so we could do this.
* The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.
* How Cuba’s greatest cartoonist fled from Castro and created ‘Spy vs. Spy.’
* Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act.
* Hidden Figures really does look good.
* Suicide Squad and the bitter future of the DC Cinematic Universe.
* Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s.
* How to make your office gun-free. Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
in order to make my office a gun-free zone, i have to tell every person they can't bring a gun in, every time pic.twitter.com/muJ5KUmrxF
— Gavin (@gavinsaywhat) August 15, 2016
* “People think a computer could run index funds—and they’re so wrong,” says Brian Bruce, a former index fund manager who’s now chief executive officer of Hillcrest Asset Management in Plano, Texas, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Index Investing. Five years, tops.
* The rise of neuroprosthetics.
* Augmented reality games and ethics. And just for instance: Mich. couple suing Pokémon Go for ruining their quality of life.
* It is easier to imagine the end of dads than the end of capitalism.
* How legroom on major airlines compare to one another.
* “People don’t realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics.” Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
* Don’t Bring Your Dog to Work.
* Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on “Trump: The Game.” Trump Could Sweep Toss Up States And Still Lose The Election. Right now polls show Donald Trump losing every single swing state. The kids are all right. Hell, even their parents are all right. The Great GOP Divide.
The good news is
1) Trump is unpopular
2) His positions are unpopular
3) He's a nutcase
4) His party hates him
5) He has no infrastructure— HR-Compliant Freddie (@freddiedeboer) August 15, 2016
* Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction.
* Taken in cumulative, these data suggest two unusual possibilities:
A. Karl Marx is the single most important, influential, and far-reaching thinker who ever lived, and his empirically attested syllabus presence accurately reflects this extreme degree of influence that he has over virtually all aspects of human knowledge.
-or-
B. Karl Marx enjoys a grossly outsized presence on college syllabi relative to his importance as a thinker, owing to a similarly disproportionate affinity for his thought among university faculty and particularly those faculty outside of the economics profession.
I really think you could make a halfway legitimate case for some version of (A) — bracketing religious figures like Christ or the Buddha, and limiting the scope of influence to the mid- and post-20C milieu — but the later observations about the Manifesto as a kindergarten lesson probably poison that possibility.
* A genetic mutation that has been found to cause people to act outrageously when they’re drunk also appears to lower the risk of certain metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity. Peculiarly, the mutation has so far only been found in Finnish people, and is thought to affect around 100,000 people in the Nordic country.
* You’ll Get to See the Documentary About Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four This Fall. And keep your eye out for For the Love of Spock.
* Why I’m loving No Man’s Sky.
* Weird futurism watch: in the future, should everyone be a twin?
* And this is basically just a panel from The Flash.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 16, 2016 at 9:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #dads, academia, adaptation, Aetna, Affordable Care Act, air travel, airplanes, alcohol, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Anthony Weiner, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Big Shampoo, Bill Clinton, black box voting, books, California, class struggle, classics, climate change, cognitive dissonance, Comedy Central, comics, computing, consent, cosmetics, Cuba, David Bowie, DC Comics, decolonizing the mind, democracy, diabetes, dogs, Donald Trump, elections, fan fiction, Fantastic Four, FDA, feminism, film, Finland, France, futurism, futurity, games, general election 2016, genetics, guns, hacking, head canons, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, hoaxes, How the University Works, Huma Abedin, hurricanes, index funds, insurance, intellectual history, intelligence, Juanita Broderick, Karl Marx, Klingons, Larry Wilmore, laziness, legroom, Leonard Nimoy, literature, Madison, maps, Marquette, Marx, Marxism, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mutants, NASA, neoliberalism, neuroprosthetics, New York, nostalgia, Olympics, outer space, outside agitators, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, photographs, Pokémon Go, police violence, politics, polls, postdocs, pranks, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, regulation, Republicans, riots, Roger Corman, RPGs, running, Seu Jorge, sexism, sociology, Spock, sports, Spy vs. Spy, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, stock market, strength, student debt, students fans, Suicide Squad, superheroes, supervillains, syllabi, teaching, television, the Beatles, the courts, The Daily Show, the Flash, the kids are all right, the law, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Neverending Story, The Nightly Show, the suburbs, the wisdom of markets, time travel, translation, Trevor Noah, twins, University of Wisconsin, Usain Bolt, Utopia, wildfires
Wednesday Links!
* Call for Papers, UWM/Marquette Graduate Student Humanities Conference: “Conflict and Liberation.”
* Call for Papers: Posthuman Futures.
* Your SF short film of the week: “Stealing Time.”
Fail safe systems in the weapons mostly worked
Uh, mostly?
and none of the four bombs experienced a nuclear reaction upon impact, sparing the region and its hundreds of inhabitants from multiple nuclear blasts that would’ve dwarfed the explosion over Hiroshima. “Only a fortunate stroke of luck saved the Spanish population of the area from catastrophe,” a Soviet official said at the time.
well that’s good
But the conventional high explosives on two of the bombs did detonate, essentially turning those weapons into dirty bombs that blasted plutonium radiation across the countryside.
oh
* Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis.
Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”
* Detroit’s Teachers Want You to See These Disturbing Photos of Their Toxic Schools.
* The Color of Surveillance: What an infamous abuse of power teaches us about the modern spy era.
* This is the exam from a class that MLK taught at Morehouse in the early 1960s.
* So you want to read Infinite Jest.
* These 11 laws are what keep space from becoming the wild west.
* America’s Other Original Sin.
* The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.
* Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds. ‘I Am Drowning.’ The Voices of People With Medical Debt.
* The Nation: Bernie Sanders for President.
* And in anti-endorsements: Sanders and Reparations. Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism.
* Jay Edidin on his recent top surgery.
* HBO to air the rarely seen Godfather Epic cutting Parts I and II together.
* Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed.
* “Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.
“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’”
* “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Weird! Kooky! Zany!
* “In Oklahoma, now the country’s earthquake capital…”
* Steven Moffat reveals the BBC almost canceled Doctor Who in 2009.
* Young People Used These Absurd Little Cards to Get Laid in the 19th Century.
* A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam.
* Former Nazi Medical Orderly to Stand Trial for Deaths of 3,681 People at Auschwitz.
* Writing is hard: “Shut up, Wesley!” did irreparable damage to Wesley Crusher’s role in TNG.
* Unbreakable! They alive, damnit!
* Why Is Sperm So Damn Expensive?
* A 120,000-Piece Lego Model of the Titanic Breaking in Half.
* The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne.
Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.
* I don’t know why I’ll watch basically anything involving Pee Wee Herman, but.
* ‘Man flu’ is real. I’m taking the month off.
* Synergy killed the Fantastic Four.
* The Weird Way That Standing (Not Walking) on Escalators Helps Move People More Quickly.
* Race and gifted and talented programs.
* News you can use from the Financial Post: Here’s how to crush student activists once they become your employee.
* The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained.
* Is it still possible to get away with a heist?
Written by gerrycanavan
January 20, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, aliens, America, Aragorn, architecture, Auschwitz, austerity, authoritarianism, Bernie Sanders, books, CFPs, conferences, corporate synergy, CRISPR, debt, Democratic primary 2016, Detroit, dirty bombs, disability, Donald Trump, drugs, earthquakes, escalators, Fantastic Four, FBI, female circumcision, feminism, film, final frontier, Flint, Florida, gambling, gas prices, genetics, gifted and talented, grading, health insurance, Hillary Clinton, history, How did we survive the Cold War?, Huntington's disease, hydrofracking, Infinite Jest, Infinite Winter, kids today, Kimmy Schmidt, lead, lead poisoning, LEGO, Lord of the Rings, man flu, Marquette, Marvel, megastructures, Michigan, misogyny, MLK, monarchy, mortality, mortgage crisis, Native American issues, Nazi, neoliberalism, Netflix, nineteenth century, nonviolence, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, O.J. Simpson, oil, Oklahoma, outer space, Pee Wee Herman, physics, posthumanism, protest, race, racism, reparations, science fiction, sex, sexism, short film, sick woman theory, slavery, Spain, sperm, Star Trek, surveillance society, teaching, television, tennis, the courts, the draft, the flu, The Godfather, the law, the Titanic, the truth is out there, time travel, TNG, Tolkien, transgender issues, true crime, Utopia, UWM, Vietnam, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, water, what year is it, Won't somebody think of the children?
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.
"We named ourselves after a gurgle, clothed ourselves in primary colors and cartoons, and have now graduated to the alphabet."
— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015
Actually, there's probably something to be written about Google's mobilization of signifiers of infancy, hopefully by @tylerbickford.
— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015
Google: “Don’t be evil” Alphabet: “Evil is just one of our businesses”
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) August 10, 2015
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 11, 2015 at 10:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 3%, academia, academic freedom, adjuncts, administrative blight, aesthetics, Africa, Afrofuturism, Age of Ultron, alphabet, always already, Amazon, anime, Ant-Man, anti-cinema, anti-narrative, Avengers 2, übermensch, baseball, Bernie Sanders, betrayal, blurbs, books, branding, Brazil, Buffy, California, cars, Catholicism, charter schools, childhood, cities, class struggle, comic books, comics, computers, corporate directives, Croatoan, David Foster Wallace, David Gerrold, DC Comics, death penalty, Democratic primary 2016, Diplomacy, disability, disease, Disney, disruptive innovation, Duquesne University, email, fandom, Fantastic Four, Ferguson, film, Foot Orgasm syndrome, games, general election 2016, gentrification, Google, Hillary Clinton, hotels, How the University Works, Hugos, ice machines, Japan, Joss Whedon, kids today, Lagoon, Lawrence Lessig, lesser Whedonia, literature, manga, marijuana, marriage, Marvel, masculinity, mass shootings, math, Max Landis, men's studies, MFAs, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Lion, Milwaukee polar bear, misogyny, modernism, narrative, Natalia Cecire, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nietzsche, Nnedi Okorafor, NSA, nuclearity, pensions, Peter Thiel, police state, police unions, police violence, politics, prequelism, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, pro wrestling, protest, public universities, race, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, rape, rape culture, religion, Roanoke, robot marriage, robots, science, science fiction, Sea World, self-driving cars, sequelism, sequels, sex, sex work, sexism, Shakespeare, Steven Salaita, sugar daddies, superheroes, Superman, surveillance society, tenure, The Avengers, The Avengers 2, the courts, the law, The New Inquiry, The New Mutants, The Story of Kullervo, the sublime, Title IX, Tolkien, tuition, UIUC, underpants gnomes, unions, University of Wisconsin, war on education, Werner Herzog, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, WWE, X-Men, zoos
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
Thursday Links!
* 2015 CFP for the MRG: “Enthusiasm for Revolution.”
* Reminder: Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: Alternative Futurisms.
* The Long, Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz You Have to Read. By the great Taryne Taylor! From the same issue of Paradoxa that has my essay on Snowpiercer in it.
* Ellen Craft, the Slave Who Posed as a Master and Made Herself Free.
* Having paddled so hard to avoid the Scylla of hyperprofessionalization in English studies, some promoters of alternative careers may not notice that they are in the grip of Charybdis’s hyperprofessionalization of everything else. The harder they paddle, the harder the whirlpool pulls us all down. Great piece from Marc Bousquet addressing a number of key issues in academic labor.
* Universities without Austerity.
* A History of the MLA Job List.
* The headline reads, “UMass Ends Use of Student Informants.”
* Loved Your Nanny Campus? Start-Up Pledges Similar Services for Grads.
* These Two States Will Revoke Your License If You Can’t Pay Back Your Student Loans.
* These World Leaders Are a Worse Threat to Free Press Than Terrorism.
* Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Newspaper Edits Female World Leaders Out of Charlie Hebdo March.
* What’s Missing From the Debate on Obama’s Free Community-College Plan.
* The end of the university in Louisiana.
* Malcolm Harris: The Small Miracle You Haven’t Heard About Amid the Carnage in Syria.
* Report: Duke Ignored Warnings on Research Fraud.
* 53 Historians Weigh In on Barack Obama’s Legacy.
* Back to the Future, Time Travel, and the Secret History of the 1980s.
* To be clear, late-night votes might be a bit of a problem for Joseph Morrissey, the newly sworn-in Virginia House delegate who must report to his jail cell about 7:30 each evening.
* Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of military attacks on civilians, compared with members of other major religious groups Gallup has studied in the United States. Seventy-eight percent of Muslim Americans say military attacks on civilians are never justified.
* $1 Million Prize for Scientists Who Can Cure Human Aging. Sure, I’ll go in for a few bucks on that.
* Too real: Woman’s Parents Accepting Of Mixed-Attractiveness Relationship.
* What If We Could Live In A World Without War But Way More Famine?
* Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor.
* A Cybernetic Implant That Allows Paralyzed Rats To Walk Again.
* In 2014, Florida recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system, an all-time high for the state in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years. Hundreds of these deaths from 2014 and from previous years are now under investigation by the DOJ because of the almost unimaginable role law enforcement officers are playing in them.
* Last week: The City Is Reportedly Losing $10 Million a Week Because the NYPD Isn’t Writing Enough Tickets. This week: NYPD Slowdown Turns Into “Broken Windows” Crackdown.
* The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down.
* Albuquerque cop mistakenly guns down undercover narcotics officer during bungled $60 meth bust. Elsewhere in Albuquerque.
* 1 In 3 College Men In Survey Said They Would Rape A Woman If They Could Get Away With It.
* Danny Boyle Having “Serious” Conversations About 28 Months Later. I’m in as long as it’s the first step towards Years.
* Radically unnecessary Avatar sequels reportedly having script problems. What could explain it?
* Frozen in everything, forever and ever amen.
* Seems legit: NASCAR driver says his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin.
* This Computer Program Is ‘Incapable Of Losing’ At Poker.
* Scholar and activist Glen Coulthard on the connection between indigenous and anticapitalist struggles.
* This seems like glorified Avengers fan fiction but I’m on board. Meanwhile, in Fantastic Four news.
* Ah, there’s my problem: iPhone Separation Anxiety Makes You Dumber, Study Finds.
* I’m you, from the future! At the 16th most popular webcomic.
* They say time is the fire in which we burn.
* The Marquette Tribune is following the ongoing McAdams suspension at the university.
* Study says we prefer singers who look like big babies during good times. This research must be stopped. Some things mankind was never meant to know.
* Community get a premiere date.
* whothefuckismydndcharacter.com.
* And Cookie-Based Research Suggests Powerful People Are Sloppier Eaters. Of course the sloppy among us have always known this.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 15, 2015 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 1985, 28 Months Later, 28 Years Later, academia, academic freedom, academic labor, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Adnan Syed, Afrofuturism, aging, Albuquerque, altac, assassins, austerity, Avatar, Avengers, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, Big Data, blue eyes, broken windows, cancer, CFPs, Charlie Hebdo, civilians, class struggle, community, computers, Cookie Monster, cookies, cultural preservation, Danny Boyle, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, Ebola, Ellen Craft, Elvis, famine, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, flashbangs, Florida, free range parenting, free speech, Frozen, gambling, games, genetics, grenades, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, informants, interviews, iPhones, Islam, Islamophobia, James Cameron, jokes, Judaism, Junot Díaz, kids today, Kojave, labor, longevity, looksism, Louisiana, love, LSU, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, medicine, misogyny, MLA, moral panics, murder, music, Muslims, my media empire, NASCAR, Nixon, Nnedi Okorafor, NYPD, orgasms, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pandemic, paralysis, parenting, peace, platinum-coin seigniorage, poker, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politicians, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, rape, rape culture, research, revolution, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, Scooby Doo, Serial, sexism, slavery, socks, Sofia Samatar, Spider-Man, startups, strikes, student debt, teaching pedagogy, tenure, the rich are different, the sublime, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, This American Life, time travel, true crime, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Texas, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, Won't somebody think of the children?, zombies, zunguzungu
Wednesday Links!
* Cura personalis: Whereas Arnold hoped culture would replace religion, Deresiewicz, though not religious himself, wonders if religion might rescue culture: Students are no longer “equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose … that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.”
* Catholic Colleges Greet an Unchurched Generation.
* Alien vs. Predator: Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices.
Harvard could put out every academic journal in the country for free and wouldn’t notice the money was missing.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
“If we don’t work to cut costs now, in 200,000 years Harvard might be forced to make some cuts.” -Harvard trustee
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
It is the year 3,000,000. All life on Earth is extinct. The only monument left to Homo sapiens is Harvard’s endowment, currently valued at
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
* Video Gamers Are Having A Bizarre Debate Over Whether Sending Death Threats To Women Is A Serious Issue Or Not. #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group. The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate. Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a planned talk at Utah State University after university officials refused to secure the venue following a mass shooting threat. In which gamers yell at a dumb chat bot from 1966 that someone wired up to twitter, because they think it’s a woman.
* Another Obama triumph: Since 2008, the District’s homeless population has increased 73%.
* The Americas in 1491. 9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel. The Real Christopher Columbus. And it gets worse: The Sopranos only ever made one bad episode and it was all Christopher Columbus’s fault.
* It’s Columbus Day. Let’s talk about geography (and Ebola).
* Ebola threatens world chocolate supply.
* White People Are Unironically Talking About the White Experience in New PBS Documentary.
* For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.
* Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants?
* Quick, everybody switch positions about civility and academic freedom.
* The Gates Foundation has a plan to save higher education through creating artificial enrollment crises exciting new efficiency metrics!
* The For-Profit College That’s Too Big to Fail.
* George Mason Grad Students Release Adjunct Study.
* The National Science Foundation has awarded grants of $4.8 million to several prominent research universities to advance the use of Big Data in the schools. Your dystopian term of art is “LearnSphere.”
* Uber Calls Woman’s 20-Mile Nightmare Abduction an “Inefficient Route.”
* What Do We Do With All These Empty Prisons? Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.
* Cops Charge 10-Year-Old Boy as Adult in Slaying of 90-Year-Old Woman. Accused of Stealing a Backpack, High School Student Jailed for Nearly Three Years Without Trial. South Carolina Prosecutors Say Stand Your Ground Doesn’t Apply To Victims Of Domestic Violence. Why Are Police Using Military-Grade Weapons in High Schools?
* There’s always money for murder and torture, but we need to crowdfund Ebola research.
* Jimmy John’s has noncompete clauses. Jimmy John’s.
* Comic Books Are Still Made By Men, For Men And About Men.
* SF short of the night: Forever War.
* The Kids These Days Know More Than You Probably Think. The meat of the post is about a bogus “declining vocabulary” test that is used to fuel critics of schools.
* The nation’s largest union of flight attendants took the Federal Aviation Administration to court on Friday, arguing that the agency should have upheld a ban on the use of smartphones and tablets during takeoff and landing. Lawyers for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA argued that the devices distracted passengers from safety instructions and could fly out of their hands, becoming dangerous projectiles, the Wall Street Journal reports.
* Freddie de Boer against carceral feminism: The burden of expanding the police state’s power to prosecute sex crimes will fall on the poor and the black.
* Meanwhile, in utterly inexplicable results that will probably always be a mystery: Income is more predictive than race for early college success.
* We don’t even know which way solar panels should be facing.
* Naughty Marvel: It’s Tragic and Disappointing That Marvel Is Canceling Fantastic Four.
* Nice Marvel: And with Robert Downey Jr. signing on it sounds like Captain America 3 will be Civil War. I’d never have guessed that the Captain America movies would be the ones that really connected with me, but here we go…
* Milwaukee’s incredible shrinking art scene.
* Karen Russell on the greatness of The Martian Chronicles.
[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?
KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.
SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.
KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.
* And being the indispensable shining city on the hill is confusing. If you ask me we should just let the biker gangs handle this.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 15, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic publishing, achievement gap, adjunctification, adjuncts, Africa, air travel, Alien vs. Predator, America, American exceptionalism, art, austerity, Barack Obama, biker gangs, capitalism, Captain America 3, carceral feminism, Catholicism, chocolate, Christopher Columbus, Civil War, civility, class struggle, colonialism, comics, crowdfunding, cura personalis, David Lynch, death threats, documentary, domestic violence, Don't mention the war, drones, Ebola, economics, efficiency, endowments, epidemics, Fantastic Four, feminism, film, flight attendants, for-profit schools, forever war, Gamergate, games, Gates Foundation, genocide, George Mason, Green Day, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, Harvard, history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, homelessness, How the University Works, imperialism, income inequality, indigenous peoples, Iraq, Iron Man, ISIS, Israel, Jesuits, Jimmy John's, kidnapping, kids today, LearnSphere, Los Angeles, maps, Marquette, Mars, Martian Chronicles, Marvel, Milwaukee, misogyny, neoliberalism, noncompete clauses, now we see the violence inherent in the system, NSF, Palestine, PBS, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, racism, rape culture, Ray Bradbury, religion, religious colleges, rock 'n' roll, science fiction, sexism, shining city on a hill, solar power, Sopranos, stand your ground, superheroes, Syria, the humanities, trolls, Uber, unions, Utah State University, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Washington D.C., white people, whiteness
Sunday Links!
* Did you notice my post last night? Isiah Lavender’s Black and Brown Planets is out! My essay in the book is on Samuel Delany.
I know there are ideas circulating for Yellow Planets, Blue Planets, and Steel Planets, so pick your color quickly and get to work.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
Rainbow seems a lock for LGBTQ SF, someone just needs to get around to it. Pink for Feminist SF.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
Orange Planets – food Grey Planets – old people Purple Planets – fan fiction about Grimace
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
“I thought it was about snow!” RT @epiktistes: @gerrycanavan gonna circulate a CFP for White Planets as a trap
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
* Sketching out a table of contents for Pink Planets: highlights from the history of feminist SF.
* The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism. The war is all too real. But it’s also fake. There is no clash of civilizations, no ideological battle, no grand effort on the part of the United States to defeat terrorism. As long as terrorism doesn’t threaten core US interests, American elites are content to allow it — and help it — flourish. They don’t want to win this war. It will go on forever, unless we make them end it.
* The United States and the “moderate Muslim.”
In each of these, I merely concede the Maher and Harris definition of moderation as a rhetorical act. That definition is of course loaded with assumptions and petty prejudice, and bends always in the direction of American interests. But I accept their definition here merely to demonstrate: even according to their own definition, American actions have undermined “moderation” at every turn.
* Fox News, asking the real questions. “What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?”
* The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever.
* “Social Justice Warriors” and the New Culture War.
* As selective colleges try to increase economic diversity among their undergraduates, the University of Chicago announced Wednesday that it’s embarking on an unusual effort to enroll more low-income students, including the elimination of loans in its aid packages.
* In search of an academic wife.
* “Yes Means Yes” at campuses in California and New York.
* A model state law for banning revenge porn.
* Let the children play: Homework isn’t linked to education outcomes before age 12, and not really after age 12, either.
* Enslaved Ants Regularly Rise In Rebellion, Kill Their Slavers’ Children.
* Ebola Vaccine Delay May Be Due To An Intellectual Property Dispute. This was a bit in Kim Stanle Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series: one company has the cure for cancer and the other company has the delivery mechanism, so both go out of business.
* Elsewhere in the famous efficiency of markets: Marvel will apparently cancel one of its longest-running series out of spite for Fox Studios.
* This Is The First High-Frequency Trader To Be Criminally Charged With Rigging The Market.
* Prison bankers cash in on captive customers.
* The time Larry Niven suggested spreading rumors within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs in order to lower health care costs.
* Suicide, Unemployment Increasingly Linked, Paper Suggests.
* Perfectionism: Could There Be a Downside?
* I’d be really interested to see if this use of eminent domain would survive a legal challenge.
* Data centers are wasting electricity so excessively that only “critical action” can prevent the pollution and rate hikes that some U.S. regions could eventually suffer as a result of power plant construction intended to ensure that the ravenous facilities are well-fed, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis warns.
* From the archives: Lili Loofbourow on the incredible misogyny of The Social Network.
* Moral panic watch: ‘Back-up husbands,’ ‘emotional affairs’ and the rise of digital infidelity.
* Look, a shooting star! Make a wish! Also at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Superman, why are you lying about your X-ray vision?
* Fantasy sports and the coming gambling boom.
* And this looks great for parents and kids: B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 5, 2014 at 9:36 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, altac, America, animals, ants, B.J. Novak, banking, bioterrorism, Black and Brown Planets, California, capitalism, children's literature, comics, culture war, digital economy, Ebola, ecology, education, eminent domain, energy, environmentalism, Facebook, Fantastic Four, fantasy sports, feminism, forever war, Fox News, gambling, games, genies, health care, high-frequency trading, homework, How the University Works, immigration, infidelity, intellectual property, Isiah Lavender, Islam, Islamophobia, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Niven, let the children play, male privilege, Marvel, misogyny, MLA, monkeys' paws, moral panics, morally odious monsters, mortgage crisis, my media empire, New York, parenting, patents, pedagogy, perfectionism, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, revenge porn, Samuel Delany, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, slavery, student debt, suicide, Superman, The Social Network, unemployment, University of Chicago, vaccines, war on terror, what it is I think I'm doing, wishes, yes means yes
All the Monday Links!
* Look alive, Octavia Butler scholars! 2015-16 Fellowships at the Huntington.
* Exciting crowdfunding project on disability and science fiction: Accessing the Future.
* If what we were fighting against in World War II were not just enemy nations but fascism and militarism, then did the atomic bombs that massacred the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — coming as a grand climax to our “strategic bombing” of European and Asian cities — help bring us victory? Or defeat?
* The Sheep Look Up: 7 Things You Need To Know About The Toxin That’s Poisoned Ohio’s Drinking Water. Farming practices and climate change at root of Toledo water pollution.
* Newborns laugh in their sleep, say Japanese researchers.
* Common sense solutions to alt-pop song problems.
Problem: We all want something beautiful, man I wish I was beautiful.
Solution: Diet, exercise, and plastic surgery.
* Op-ed: Adjuncts should unionize.
* What colleges can learn from journalism schools. English departments seem particularly well-positioned to apply some of these lessons.
* Meet The Sexual Assault Adviser Top U.S. Colleges Have On Speed Dial.
* Understanding college discounting.
* The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”
* Emirates becomes first major international airline to suspend all flights to virus-affected region. Why you’re not going to get Ebola in the U.S.
* When Moral Panics Collide! GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination.
* The Golden Age of Comics Is Now.
* Just another weekend in Milwaukee.
* IRS Agrees To Monitor Religious Groups For Political Campaigning.
* How an honors student became a hired killer.
* A Thai surrogate mother said Sunday that she was not angry with the Australian biological parents who left behind a baby boy born with Down syndrome, and hoped that the family would take care of the boy’s twin sister they took with them. Honestly, I think I’m pretty mad at them.
* Is Howard the Duck Really Marvel’s Next Franchise? A Close Look at the Evidence.
* They say Western civilization’s best days are behind it, but Bill Murray will star as Baloo in Disney’s live-action The Jungle Book.
* Ever tried. Ever meowed. No matter. Try Again. Meow again. Meow better. Beckittens.
* Filming is apparently wrapping on Fantastic Four, but they didn’t even have a teaser trailer for Comic-Con. This film must be a complete disaster. Can’t wait!
* Why are we impeaching Obama today?
* The third Lev Grossman Magicians book ships tomorrow. Soon to be a TV show, maybe!
* Presenting the all-new, all-different Ghostbustrixes.
* Always remember: The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.
* And it took its sweet time, but the Singularity is finally here.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 4, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, assassination, babies, Barack Obama, Bill Murray, class struggle, climate change, comics, cosmonauts, Counting Crows, disability, disasters, dissertations, Down Syndrome, ecology, English departments, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Fantastic Four, fellowships, film, First Amendment, genocide, Ghostbusters, Google, guns, Hiroshima, How the University Works, Howard the Duck, human rights, Huntington Library, immigration, impeachment, industrial agriculture, IRS, Jungle Book, kittens, Lev Grossman, Marvel, McSweeney's, Milwaukee, moral panics, motivational posters, music, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Ohio, outer space, pedagogy, poison, politics, pollution, rape, rape culture, religion, Samuel Beckett, satire, science fiction, surrogate parents, taxes, the archives, The Magicians, The Sheep Look Up, the Singularity, theses, Title IX, Toledo, true crime, tuition, unions, vaccination, virtual reality, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, water, World War II, writing, xkcd, zunguzungu
Sunday Links!
* With the newborn and the consequent sleep deprivation I’ve been in sort of a weird place mentally, but if you find yourself in a similar state of consciousness I can recommend Andy Weir’s The Martian, April Richardson’s Go Bayside! podcast, and Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men as just the thing. I’ve also been going through the Comedy Bang! Bang! DVD Season 1 and 2 extras, which are truly prodigious — essentially a few bonus weeks of the podcast hidden as episode commentaries. The Martian will be a movie in 2016 and I suspect it’ll be a good one.
* Marquette team heads to RoboCup — the World Cup for robots.
* Kacy Catanzaro winning American Ninja Warrior is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.
* The Sawyer Seminar at UCR: “Alternative Futurisms,” which will launch in September 2015, will bring together African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American scholars, artists and writers to examine the colonial roots and legacies of science fiction and the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.
* Cli-Fi watch: Mother Jones reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.
* Superpower as disability: Fantastic Four could be either really great or really, really awful.
* …a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?
* Black Internationalism as a Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy.
* Today in police brutality: Man Dies After Being Put In Choke-Hold By NYPD.
* Federal Judge Blasts ATF For Luring Man With No Criminal Record Into Trafficking Cocaine.
* The tanks, which serve as the heart of the assault force, received an order to open fire at anything that moved. “Self-genocide” is not a thing. Unanimous consent. What if Iron Dome is a bluff?
* Twenty-five years ago today, a plane went down in Sioux City. Nobody was expected to survive. Somehow, 184 people did.
* Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.
* “People need to understand,” he says, “that there’s tons of money in nonprofits, first of all. Second, nonprofits can kind of become containers for for-profit organizations . . . and a lot of that is tax money going into rich people’s pockets.” Pushed into the marketplace, higher education managers pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the UK’s few globally respected sectors.
* Terminator: An Oral History.
* Results from a study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science suggest that 5- and 6-year-old kids from religious backgrounds judge fact from fiction differently than those with non-religious upbringings.
* And is it possible that man was not meant to ingest infinite quantities of mozzarella sticks? Of course, Andy Daly was there first.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 20, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Afrofuturism, air travel, airplanes, all you can eat, America, American Ninja Warrior, Andy Daly, Andy Weir, apocalypse, austerity, baby brain, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, black superheroes, books, Captain America, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, Cthulhu, culture, digital currencies, disability, drill baby drill, dystopia, ecology, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, free fire zones, futurity, Gaza, genocide, H.P. Lovecraft, Hollywood, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Iron Dome, Israel, Kacy Catanzaro, kids today, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, mental illness, military-industrial complex, misogyny, money, neoliberalism, NYPD, oil, Palestine, pancakes, parenting, plane crashes, podcasts, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, psychology, religion, Review, robots, Russia, Saved by the Bell, schizophrenia, science fiction, self-genocide, sexism, Sioux City, superheroes, Terminator, terrorism, TGI Friday's, The Martian, the Senate, UC Riverside, Ukraine, unanimous consent, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, war on terror, X-Men
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fear of Stigma Lingers About Use of Family-Friendly Policies. Should You Have a Baby in Grad School?
* Don’t Drink Starbucks Free College PR Stunt, Full of Bees. Some details.
* Sun Ra: jazz’s interstellar voyager.
The remaining 5 percent are my greatest concern. These trustees can cause real damage to the institutions they serve by acting in dysfunctional ways. They play petty politics with almost everything; try to micromanage the institution; attempt to go around the president and lead from the shadows; they tend to be critical of faculty but not knowledgeable or curious about faculty life and offer simple solutions to complex and sticky challenges.
Over the past several years, I have talked with many presidents who believe this small group of toxic boards is growing in size and impact and migrating north towards 10 percent of all boards. We simply cannot afford this.
* In my defense, though, anyone following the humanities death watch for the last 600 years would be struck both by its recurring characters and its disconnect from objective fact. Burton wrote in the age of Shakespeare, when the remarkable growth of literacy drove the first golden age of vernacular literature. Whittemore wrote while English as an academic discipline was in the midst of a meteoric rise, climbing from 17,240 BA degrees granted in 1950 to 64,342 in 1971. After a steep drop in the 1980s, English is now back to a robust 53,767 degrees granted per year, and 295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degrees—more than any field except business.
* NLRB revises Columbia College Chicago decision to the benefit of administration, by a factor of about 30X.
* Austin and segregation. Milwaukee and Scott Walker.
Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind.
* In Milwaukee and U.S., hospitals follow money to suburbs.
* World Cup minute! Crunching the US’s chances of advancing out of its group. Meanwhile: Ghana has to ration electricity just so everyone can watch the World Cup.
* Louie, creep. Game of Thrones and the female gaze. HBO Explains Why They Failed To Make An American Gods TV Show. Read George R. R. Martin’s 1963 Letter To Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
* How Marquette brought in its first lay president.
* Totally outrageous: Indiana Punished Inmate With More Time Behind Bars For Doing What Prison Staff Told Him To Do.
* California Prison’s ‘Pay-To-Stay’ Option Offers ‘Quieter’ Rooms For $155 A Day. Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose.
* Father Of The Bride sequel about gay marriage reportedly in the works.
* A team of Harvard scientists believe the remnants of an ancient Earth, dating to the time another planet collided with ours to produce the moon, may still be lodged deep within the Earth’s mantle. Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface. Dibs on the screenplay.
* Circles within circles, rings within rings: I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. As some of our operatives have been compromised, my commander has given me permission to make some of their conversations on twitter public. We want to let the PoOs know that we have infiltrated them so that they begin to accuse each other of being Lollipop operatives.
* Our long national nightmare &c: Duke will rename Aycock.
* Gasp! Missile defense still a giant boondoggle!
* The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth, warns New York Times. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning has an op-ed.
* Understanding commencement speakers at SMBC.
* American meritocracy, Chelsea Clinton edition.
* The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
* The Grand Budapest Hotel, as it was always meant to be seen.
* We’re never going to get to Mars.
* A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 17, 2014 at 9:18 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, America, American Gods, animals, Arizona State University, Austin, Barack Obama, Brooklyn, Bush, California, Chelsea Clinton, Chelsea Manning, children, class struggle, COINTELPRO, comics, commencement speakers, currency, Duke, Earth, English departments, Fantastic Four, Father of the Bride, female gaze, film, flexible online education, gambling, Games of Thrones, Ghana, Goldsboro, graduate student life, Greenpeace, hashtag activism, HBO, hollow Earth, How the University Works, Indiana, Jack Kirby, Jesuits, juries, labor, language, LEGO, Louie, Louis C.K., Marquette, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, maternity leave, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, missile defense, music, NASA, Neil Gaiman, New York, NLRB, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, paternity leave, politics, prison, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, race, ratings, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Scott Walker, segregation, soccer, sports, Stan Lee, Starbucks, suburbia, Sun Ra, television, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the humanities, the law, trustees, tuition, Twitter, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Wes Anderson, whales, white supremacy, Wikileaks, Wisconsin, World Cup
Late Night Monday Links
* Government shutting down because everything is terrible that’s why. Federal workers who check their e-mail during a shutdown will be breaking the law.
* Shock at Berkeley: Campus officials declare emergency following explosion around California Hall.
* What kind of society emerges when it is governed by the market-driven assumption that the only value that matters is exchange value, when the common good is denigrated to the status of a mall, and the social order is composed only of individuals free to pursue their own interests?
* Towards a History of the Professional: On the Class Composition of the Research University.
* Vince Gilligan talks Breaking Bad alternate endings. This Is What Everyone Is Writing About Breaking Bad Today. And even more links.
* Adjuncts Should Do As Little Work As Possible.
* Memo: CUNY is Moving David Petraeus Seminar to Avoid Protestors.
* Before the Muppets, Jim Henson Tried to Build a Futuristic Nightclub.
* Color, Chromophobia, and Colonialism: Some Historical Thoughts.
* The Fantastic Four (1961-88) was The Great American Novel. (via)
* NASA’s abandoned plan for a re-usable, nuclear powered moon shuttle. (also via)
* And it turns out 2-to-1 of the people in this city are totally insane. Oh man.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 30, 2013 at 10:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, America, Bard, Berkeley, Breaking Bad, California, cars, class struggle, colonialism, color, comics, CUNY, double-decker highways, emails, Fantastic Four, government shutdowns, How the University Works, Jim Henson, Marvel, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Muppets, NASA, neoliberalism, pedagogy, Petraeus, politics, Republicans, roads, SATs, Soviet Union, superheroes, teaching, television, the law, the Moon, traffic, Vince Gilligan
Sunday Night Lights
* The Wrong Side of the Heart: this weekend’s dose of vintage movie poster greatness.
* AskMetaFilter has all the huge-nerd podcasts I crave.
* Dr. Metzinger first proposes his thesis: there is no such thing as the self. The subjective sense of being a conscious person – the sense of being a self that is distinct from the body and present in a single, unified reality – is not a separate, coherent brain function but rather the result of many different systems running at the same time. I was telling you people this years ago!
* Four lesser-known members of the Fantastic Four. I’d never even heard of She-Thing.
* Pension war update: “…public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.”
* Marco Roth vs. the “neuronovel.”
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.
Via MeFi, which also links to the Jonah Lehrer’s response.
* And what Harlan Ellison makes, the world takes. Also via MeFi.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 2, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with brains, comics, Cormac McCarthy, Fantastic Four, good news for nerds, Harlan Ellison, movie posters, neuroscience, novels, pensions, plagiarism, podcasts, politics, science fiction, She-Thing, Terminator, the illusion of self, The Road, you don't exist