Posts Tagged ‘Far from Home’
Wednesday Lunchtime Links!
* Sean Guynes has your deep dive into Fall 2019 university press catalogues. Kim Stanley Robinson and Joanna Russ both coming from Modern Masters of Science Fiction, which couldn’t make me happier.
* Strike at Uber and Lyft today. Call a cab instead!
* A 9-Year Quest for Carbon Neutrality Took Middlebury to Forests and a Dairy Farm.
* The psychology of inequality.
* But one thing that struck me while reading the valiant efforts of journalists attempting to convey the gravity of the scale of the U.N. report (a 1,500-page document that its authors distilled into a 40-page summary, which reporters had to distill into a normal-size news story), is the sheer impossibility of that task. “Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded,” Brad Plumer’s Times story begins. Where do you even go from there?
* Superheroes Starring in Children’s Books.
* Johns Hopkins Calls in the Police to Arrest Protesters, Ending Student Occupation.
* Facial recognition wrongly identifies public as potential criminals 96% of time, figures reveal.
* CBS Censors a ‘Good Fight’ Segment. Its Topic Was Chinese Censorship.
* In the Era of Teen$ploitation.
It’s worth remembering that young people online are supposed to be shielded by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which puts limits on what can be done with the data of kids aged twelve and under. Websites directed at children, and websites that are popular with children, are required to take special precautions with children’s data—in fact, parental permission is required before that data can be collected at all. Corporations like YouTube and Facebook, however, knowingly evade these regulations by claiming that their products are meant for users aged thirteen and over.
* One imagines that, with time, the intricate web linking the movies will get more frayed and insubstantial, and the new films will seem increasingly inessential. And yet, after a certain point, following a story for a long time becomes a story in itself. After watching nearly thirty hours of Marvel adventures, Alex McLevy, the A.V. Club writer, concluded that “the experience overtakes the nature of the content.” This is true of the M.C.U. more generally. When watching any individual movie, a kind of pattern recognition—an intellectual interest in how each new story evokes or departs from the others—replaces narrative pleasure. The narrative worth caring about becomes the story of one’s own interaction with the M.C.U. Just as people ask, about historical events, “Where were you when it happened?,” so fans ask where they were when “Iron Man” came out, when the Avengers first assembled, when heroes and villains battled in Wakanda. This is the story that’s truly limitless.
* Impossibly, Far from Home really is going to try to get into the minutiae of the post-Snap MCU.
That was one of the most fun things — just talking through what the most mundane implications would be. Like, your birthday on your driver’s license or passport would say that you are five years older than you technically are. Those sorts of questions are just so fascinating to me, and I really wanted to get into the minutiae of it and really explore that.
* Could it be true? The Real Monster in “Game of Thrones” Is Its Hidden Reactionary Ideology.
* In its final episodes, the series has resorted to making excuses for its own bad choices.
* Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses. 5 Takeaways From 10 Years of Trump Tax Figures.
* The muddled message from Pelosi—Trump is obstructing justice every day, but we’ll show him by not impeaching—is a byproduct of the corner she’s occupying: Impeach the president and risk a catastrophic backfire that secures him another term, or don’t impeach him, and allow Donald Trump to operate in a space where the credible threat of impeachment is off the table. The 2020 Election’s Approach Is No Reason to Avoid Impeachment.
* Meanwhile, Trump continues to use his pardons to send the message that if you kill for him there will be no consequences.
* Today in the richest country in the human history.
* Walt Disney and the Space Race.
* Milwaukee Noir. Read the introduction!
Above all, podcasts make us feel less lonely. We tell ourselves offer codes in order to live. They simulate intimacy just enough to make us feel like we’re in a room with other people, or at least near the room . . . definitely in the same city as the room. But these people with podcasts are so much sharper than us, so at home in their corners of the world, with easy command of their respective bodies of pop-culture knowledge. The appropriate response is fandom. Coughing up $5 on Patreon feels like paying the cover at a dive for our local band, and we’re pleased to be part of something. Some podcasts even do live appearances, for which we might buy tickets. Listening to our heroes’ once intimate voices on a booming sound system, though, surrounded by a thousand fanboys, feels like a betrayal. We thought we had something special, with their voices so close to our ears. Podcasts were the first medium designed to be listened to primarily on headphones, by a single person. Hell is other listeners.
* Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research.
* On knotweed, the invasive plant that drives homeowners to madness.
* And the kids are all right: Tucson high school students walk out after Border Patrol detains classmate.
