Today, batshit jobs are more widespread than ever. You’re likely doing a batship job if you’re working in advertising trying to maintain mass consumption, in air traffic, industrial farming and forestry, in mining, in the car industry, and first of all if you’re working in oil drilling, fracking, coal mining.
To become dilligent batshit workers we have to be trained, and we have to be able to block out the harm that our work participates in. The beauty of the school strikes is that a generation of young people are preparing themselves to refuse batshit work.
Posts Tagged ‘free speech’
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
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.
* 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.”
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Surprise! Links
* Shakespeare in the state park: Why a group of Marquette students created an empowering outlet for creativity that provides students with summer jobs.
* CFP: Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures.
* A historian of concentration camps explains that this will only get worse.
* Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters. Botched family reunifications left migrant children waiting in vans overnight.
* It’s not just at Guantánamo. In a supermax facility on US soil, inmates are force fed — and barred from sharing their stories. An inmate breaks his silence for the first time.
* Earth’s carbon dioxide has jumped to the highest level in human history. Can the Paris Climate Goals Save Lives? Yes, a Lot of Them, Researchers Say. Climate change is will cause our third world war. Extreme weather has made half of America look like Tornado Alley. India roasts under heat wave with temperatures above 120 degrees. If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* Meanwhile, the DNC has bravely decided to… forbid candidates from participating in any climate debate.
* Is Chernobyl historically accurate about the things that matter? HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Doesn’t Understand History.
* Learning The Shape Of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019.
* Understand the destruction of the UC system the reclaimUC way.
* Free speech on campus remains the last great mystery.
* The madness of school shooting drills.
* YouTube pivots to pedophiles.
* Not the Catholic Church’s best week.
* “And then he’d still be Captain America, instead of a lying, indolent, murdering sack of shit.”
* I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
* Tremendous wealth mysteriously producing tremendous poverty.
Tuesday Links, Plus a Very Canavan Podcast!
* There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. The latest in my irregular series of conversations with KSR. The transcript is just the highlights — for the full effect you’ll have to listen.
* Extrapolation 60.1 is out! Articles on rape motifs in contemporary fantasy, Japanese print SF, and Nihād Sharīf’s The Conqueror of Time.
* Endgame ephemera! Avengers: Endgame, or, why this is all your fault. Avengers and the Endgame of Liberalism. And the Russo brothers are on a quest to make sure you know that Endgame being good had nothing to do with them.
* The Night King? Never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. Bonus appearance by the coffee cup! If these are the final two choices, the only way to win the Game may be not to play.
* Watch The Wandering Earth on Netflix!
* Ted Chiang has a new book, why haven’t you bought it yet?
* A new climate change story from Paolo Bacigalupi at MIT Technology Review. Killer ending.
* Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life. One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns. Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace. An open letter to David Wallace-Wells. We are ruled by psychopaths.
* Greta Thunberg, autism, and climate activism.
* For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever. AirPods Are a Tragedy.
* It’s time to speak about batshit jobs.
* It seems to me that anyone who considers this for more than ten minutes has to recognize that “student demand” is a construct: it is the product of a pervasive, cross-institutional pedagogy in social and educational value in which students are immersed from (at least) primary school onward. If students are demanding STEM in record numbers, this is a because they have been systematically invited to embrace a number of interlocking beliefs: that
- STEM fields matter to the welfare and future of human societies more than other fields — that social problems respond best to technocratic solutions;
- college is a course of career training;
- college is an investment that ought to be maximized in order to yield the highest possible return in the form of lifelong higher income;
- STEM fields represent areas of continuing high-growth, recession-proof employment.
“Student demand” is a fact insofar as it reproduces these assumptions, which are already endemic to the privatized, market-driven university. Other forms of “student demand” (for example, demands for a more racially and ethnically diverse faculty that better reflects regional and national demographics) are routinely ignored.
* Marquette Academic Senate calls for administration neutrality on unionization.
* Measuring the tenure-track success of pre-2009 Ph.D.s is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers before industrialization. Researcher’s suicide reflects bleak prospects for post-Ph.D. life. Adjuncts and Freelancers: Reading Signs of Eventual Destruction.
* Turning Point USA’s dark coup on college campuses.
* A lot of older academics will point to the 1970s or the 1990s to say that crisis has always been the default, and there’s truth to this. But they didn’t have the same debt loads back then.
* “Second Chance: Life without Student Debt.”
* For Colleges, Climate Change Means Making Tough Choices.
* People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps.
* What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right. As capitalism starts to crumble, hate finds a familiar foothold.
* Liberalism: the other God that failed. The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College. Here’s how many millennials get help from their parents to pay rent and other bills. Twitter users answer the question: “When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system?” 42% of Americans are at risk of retiring broke.
* If the president does it, it’s not obstruction.
* This seems heathy. This too! Things are great.
* The forgotten history of how Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans.
* Dialectics of Milwaukee: ‘It’s clear that the secret is out about Milwaukee,’ increased tourism spending shows. There seems to be a surge of unsettling things happening on the Milwaukee education landscape, some of them just more of the same (low student achievement, divisive politics) and some of them not so typical (corruption). Glendale would provide $37 million to help redevelop struggling Bayshore — with $57 million debt paid off.
* Sandra Bland, It Turns Out, Recorded Her Own Video of Traffic Stop Confrontation. ICE provides local police a way to work around ‘sanctuary’ policies, act as immigration officers.
* On April 30, my Liberal Studies class, framed as Anthropology and Philosophy of Science, was the site of a horrific event. Two of my students were killed while four more were injured.
* Study: Therapy dogs reduce children’s fear, anxiety during dentist appointments.
* Aging baby boomers are about to push Alzheimer’s disease rates sky high.
* The Saga Of ‘Star Citizen,’ A Video Game That Raised $300 Million—But May Never Be Ready To Play.
* Dystopia watch: Oh Good, a Subway System Is Making Riders Stare at Ads Before They Can Buy a Ticket. Amazon’s staffing up a news vertical full of crime stories designed to scare you into buying a spying, snitching “smart” doorbell. We’ve lived so long that the founding of Amazon Prime is something we can be nostalgic about now.
* Who Owns the Moon Watch: Why the Moon Is Suddenly a Hot Commodity.
* How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dismissing UFO sightings.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.
* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.
* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.
* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.
* A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.
* United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.
* Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.
* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.
* Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.
* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.
* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
* And Lord, make me outgrow Quentin Tarantino, but not yet.
Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!
* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Children’s Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.
* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.
* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!
* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.
* A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.
* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.
* Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.
* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.
* The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Can’t Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.
* Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.
* The suffocation of democracy.
* The president sure did some crimes.
* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?
* And how will they solve securities fraud?
* KSR: The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.
* The Bosses’ Constitution: How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
* NC’s Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!
* The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.
* A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.
* Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economy—and Voter Turnout.
* Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isn’t when they’ll rebuild — but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.
* Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.
* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.
* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US. ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court.
* Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”
* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.
* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.
* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.
* How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.
* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.
* I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.
* Geological time versus capitalist time.
* The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.
* The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.
* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.
* “The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”
* On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.
* On raising a non-neurotypical child.
* The film’s real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggers—the gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.
* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.
* I’m here only to present the facts.
* The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.
* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.
* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.
* You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96—less than 1 percent—had their debt erased. And it gets worse.
* How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.
* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.
* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.
* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.
