Posts Tagged ‘futurity’
Father’s Day Links!
* Statement of teaching philosophy.
* CFP: Empirical Ecocriticism.
* But anyone with a modicum of utopian imagination should be asking, what are the opportunities secreted within this emerging network of control? When older forms of democratic possibility are being foreclosed or rendered obsolete, what new (and perhaps better) possibilities can be found? How can the emerging order, which has thus far depended so much on deliberately produced ignorance, and on keeping its political allegiances occulted, be politicised? Utopian thinking beyond Brexit.
* In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” It Can Happen Here It Happened Here 18 Months Ago.
* The Trump administration’s policy of separating families is designed to erase hope—with devastating consequences for thousands of children. Extinguishing the Beacon of America. Conservative Religious Leaders Are Denouncing Trump Immigration Policies. A Legal Resident, an Arrest by ICE and Father’s Day in Jail. In Father’s Day plea, wife of man held by ICE after delivering pizza asks for his release.
* Yeah, that’ll do it: The National Institutes of Health on Friday canceled a mammoth study of moderate drinking after determining that officials had irrevocably compromised the research by soliciting over $60 million from beer and liquor companies to underwrite the effort.
* I should have seen this coming, but it still shocked me: NASA’s Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities.
* If You’re A Facebook User, You’re Also a Research Subject.
* James Bridle’s essay on disturbing YouTube content aimed at children went viral last year. Has the problem gone away – or is it getting worse?
* How does a Google-averse generation figure out how to deal with acne, fake friends, and boy trouble? On Instagram, of course.
* Well, sure: Americans Are Unprepared for a Nuclear Attack.
* Trump’s EPA Greenlighted a Pesticide That Harms Kids’ Brains. Hawaii Just Said, “Hell No.”
* High tech lock is “invincible to people who do not have a screwdriver.”
* Adventure House: the sequel to the Haunted Mansion that never was.
* And Wired Has Your Secret History of the Racy Module That Almost Ruined D&D.
Saturday! Morning! Links!
* CFP: Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions: Reframing Identity, Culture, and History.
* CFP: “Playing Utopia – Futures in Digital Games,” Game Studies Summit, Cologne, Germany.
* Climate change is creating a new kind of grief, and we’re completely unprepared for it.
Colleagues at a government-contracted shelter in Arizona had a specific request for Antar Davidson when three Brazilian migrant children arrived: “Tell them they can’t hug.”
The kids will be expected to perform some kind of work, typically extreme self-maintenance. Spotless rooms, bathrooms, etc. Early morning inspections. Questions for journalists are, what happens to kids who don’t comply?
* 1,995 children separated from families at border under ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Doctors Concerned About ‘Irreparable Harm’ To Separated Migrant Children. A fmr top CIA interrogator is training ICE’s deportation agents in interrogation methods, documents show. Everything You Need To Know About Trump’s Immigration Changes But Were Too Afraid To Ask. The House GOP says their new bill bans separating families at the border. That’s a lie. Previously undisclosed statements from two consular officers raise questions about the legality of the Trump administration’s third travel ban. A Theory of Animals. Just Say It’s Racist. Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border. Abolish DHS.
* Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes charged with fraud. A flashback: A Look Inside Theranos’s Dysfunctional Corporate Culture.
* Maine’s experiment in ranked-choice voting is a rare cause for optimism about our democracy.
* The asteroid rush sending 21st-century prospectors into space.
* The strange case of the missing Joyce scholar.
* The Politics of Incredibles 2 Are Incredibly Confusing.
* The Court’s Decision to Let AT&T and Time Warner Merge Is Ridiculously Bad.
* What could explain this improbable result? High cost of housing drives up homeless rates, UCLA study indicates.
* And for your new podcast watch: Game Studies Study Buddies.
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* CFP: ASLE 2019: Paradise on Fire. CFP: Trans Futures. CFP: Superheroes and Disability: Unmasking Ableism in the Media.
* The return of the MA in SF at Liverpool.
* American Literature 90.2: “Queer about Comics.”
* ‘Mothers could not stop crying’: Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants. Immigrant moms in SeaTac prison ‘could hear their children screaming.’ Asylum seekers are being sexually assaulted in U.S. detention. A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants. Morristown, TN. Jeff Sessions is an evil man. There is no bottom. More denaturalization. More surveillance. ‘Again’ is happening right now on America’s border. What will you do?
* Meanwhile. By Trump’s own yardstick, NKorea pact falls flat.
* Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together.
* It’s hard to imagine a shift that better embodies a sound public health response to the opioid epidemic, and yet it’s the result—one among many—of a process initiated by Burlington’s mayor and chief of police, neither of whom have a background in health. What’s happening in Burlington suggests how a small city can begin to confront a monster epidemic and, in the process, stretch ideas about the role of a small-city police department.
* The World Cup of Disputed Nations.
* n+1’s patented World Cup Preview 2018.
* The New York Times is bad, exhibit 657. 658.
* Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House. The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence.
* Computer assistance for the modern novelist.
* Vanity Fair revisits The Staircase.
* Researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) say the obesity gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. An explosive U.N. report shows America’s safety net was failing before Trump’s election. Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together. Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.
* A Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protector Is Sentenced to Prison in North Dakota.
* Sadly The NRA is immune from prosecution no matter how flagrantly it broke the law here. Them’s the rules.
* Moving Animals to Safe Havens Can Unexpectedly Doom Them.
* Oil companies struggling to drill in the permafrost the oil they burn is melting.
* Puerto Rico’s morgue is overflowing with unclaimed dead bodies after a storm nine months ago.
* A Review of the ‘Hereditary’ Wikipedia Page, by Someone Who Is Too Afraid to See ‘Hereditary.’
* Of course: Bill Clinton comes to Al Franken’s defense.
* My petard — it seems to have somehow hoisted… me?
* What Happens When an Adjunct Instructor Wants to Retire?
* New Study on Rising Suicide Rates Suggests Capitalism Is Quite Literally Killing Us.
* Days Before Murder Trial, Prosecutors Reveal a Missing Confession. Dozens claim a Chicago detective beat them into confessions. A pattern of abuse or a pattern of lies?
* Marine Veteran Trains White Supremacists in Military Tactics.
* The best Mario Kart character, according to data science.
* Another military-industrial nightmare stealing its branding from Tolkien.
* The World Can’t Afford High-Tech Insulin.
* We Aren’t Teaching What Students Need to Know About Climate Science.
* Job Satisfaction of Humanities Master’s Degree Recipients.
* Building the Dream: LEGO Friends and the Construction of Human Capital.
* What the world would be like if land and sea were inverted.
* Talk. Talk or suffer the consequences. The state of our union is typical. Quantum computers. Herman Melville. Screenwriting. Dreams of flight.
* Infinity War crosses $2B. That this set of characters has revolutions both comics and film, fifty years apart, is pretty incredible.
* Map of North America, c. 2024 (start of Trump’s third term).
* On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.
* And giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years. Seems fine!
Thursday Links!
* * The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.
* My colleague C.J. Hribal’s essay “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” has won a Pushcart Prize.
* Sure! Why not.
* We did it! Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes.
* CFP: Indiana Jones and the Edited Collection. CFP: Blackness and Disability. CFP: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom.
* WISCON 42! “Doing Justice To The Archive: The Octavia E. Butler Papers.”
* There is only one Trump scandal.
* Stolen election pays big dividends.
* No one could have predicted this shocking turn of events.
* I’ll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy’s net returns to the University. Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish. Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA’s Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million). There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period. There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated. More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements. (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.) And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.
* Profession: The Sky Is Falling.
* Scandal after scandal focuses scrutiny on USC leadership, culture.
* The Best Question To Ask on the Last Day of Class.
* ‘Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay’: the rise of the religious left.
* Traditional Disobedience: Renewing the Legacy of Catholic Activism.
* After decades of dwarfs and elves, writers of color redefine fantasy.
* Magic: The Gathering and capitalism.
* Killing All Humans: A Flowchart.
* David Foster Wallace was terrible to women.
* The Two Crucial Filmmaking Elements Causing All Your Movie Feuds.
* Arrested Development season five has been managed so badly by Hurwitz and Netflix that it’s practically begging to be boycotted. More here.
* Marvel and the End of Counterprogramming.
* HBO’s Watchmen series sounds worse than I imagined.
* What Deadpool 2’s fridging controversy says about comics culture’s gender gap.
* Two Americans were detained by a Border Patrol agent after he heard them speaking Spanish. Gay Army chaplain struggles to save husband from deportation. Trump Gang Dragnet Caught a Teen Who ICE Said Looked Like He Was in MS-13. He Wasn’t. “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
* Breaking #MAGA: A man posed for months as an ICE agent. A traffic stop led his girlfriend to unravel the truth.
* Jordan Peterson, The Intellectual We Deserve.
* Shock: 2013 Chicago School Closings Failed To Help Students.
* The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica. Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system.
* Milwaukee cops abuse NBA star Sterling Brown. New York Jets chairman, brother of Trump ambassador, says he’ll pay fines for team players who protest during anthem.
* He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill.
* Immortality. Statement of teaching philosophy. Can YOU hit the bullseye?
* And huge, if true: America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
Thursday Links!
* Call for papers: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult
* On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of ‘The Floor is Lava.’
* There were like 15 separate Trump bribery scandals just yesterday. This one could be the biggest.
* Happy anniversary, Robert Mueller.
* None dare call it fascism: Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. “These aren’t people. These are animals.” ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. Abolish the ICE Prison Complex.
* The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo.
* The Solo reviews are rolling in. Disney has already moved on.
* Revisiting Springsteen’s worst decade.
* Michigan State University Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Larry Nassar’s Victims. Report: USC Ignored Gynecologist’s Alleged Misconduct.
* Is Chicago Experiencing a Historic Preservation Crisis?
* Can Artificial Intelligence Help Find Alien Intelligence?
* The story you don’t care about, in the format you don’t want, in the series you’ll forget about while it’s still airing: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Will Focus On Young Aragorn.
* Same thing but Young Alfred.
* The Wrath of Khan Director Reveals He Was Making a Star Trek Trilogy for CBS, But It’s Been Delayed.
* How can you make Arrested Development season five even less promising? Netflix’s top scientists are hard at work.
* Elsewhere in entertainment news: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.
* Scenes from the Anthropocene: Scientists Match Pollution in Greenland’s Ice Sheet to Events from Ancient Greece and Rome.
* Someone, somewhere, is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect.
* We can now see how humans have altered Earth’s water resources.
* Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.
* Inside the largest comic book collection in the world.
* Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park.
* It is sometimes said that a generous basic income could empower workers to better resist their capitalist bosses. This familiar claim regarding the emancipatory potential of basic income has things almost exactly backwards. A universal basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is an organized working class already powerful enough to extract it. This fact should inform the Left’s political strategy.
* And I always knew: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.
All Your Sunday Reading™
* Call for applications: Postdoctoral Scholar for Futures of Literary and Cultural Knowledge, UCSB.
* Call for Papers: “Binge-Watching and the Future of Television Research: A Workshop” Sept 13-14, 2018, at Anglia Ruskin University.
* Studying Tolkien fanzines at Marquette University.
* I make a by-the-way appearance on this massive roundup of Infinity War links.
* What is an English professor?
* The Enduring Anger of Joanna Russ.
* Bonkers Wisconsin tax policy error in my favor.
* Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services. UC Workers on Strike. After 3-Day Strike, University Of California’s Service Workers Vow To Keep Fighting.
* A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired. The icing on the cake. Well, actually, this is.
* If you’re worried about free speech on campus, don’t fear students — fear the Koch brothers.
* Why universities became big-time real estate developers.
* Stephen Kuusisto on ableism in the university.
* White student calls police on black student napping in Yale dorm. When Calling the Police Is a Privilege.
* Academia’s #MeToo moment: Women accuse professors of sexual misconduct. 45 Stories of Consent on Campus. The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time.
* (Another) progressive case against the progressive case for the SAT.
* Never-ending nightmare: why feminist dystopias must stop torturing women.
* In 2011, Minnesota got a liberal governor and Wisconsin got a conservative one. Who was better off?
* What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
* Your workplace is killing you.
* Intrigue and Drama on the Han Solo Set. Catch the fever!
* One of the most purely destructive things Trump has yet done. Early days though, early days. Evergreen.
* Taking parents from their children is a form of state terror. Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance. An upcoming Supreme Court ruling could force all workers into forced arbitration, deprived of the right to class lawsuits. Trump Administration Wants to Train Teens in ‘Hazardous’ Jobs. Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab. A taxonomy of Michael Cohen and potential Trump corruption. How Michael Cohen Cashed In. It’s harder to pay off foreign governments than the US one. Breaking Down Gina Haspel’s Tense Confirmation Hearing. Trumpism Is Having Its Best Week Ever. We know a lot about Trump’s misdeeds. But most of all we know there’s more to come.
* How bananas is this Schneiderman story going to get? Man.
* And isn’t it pretty to think so?
* ’We Can Make Him Disappear’: The Power of County Sheriffs.
* In One Year, 57,375 Years of Life Were Lost to Police Violence. Plainclothes NYPD Cops Are Involved in a Staggering Number of Killings.
* How to Survive the First Hour of a Nuclear Attack. Wow, a whole hour!
* The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse.
* Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings.’
* Democrats against the gig economy. The Politics of Full Employment.
* It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.
* The Brooklyn Comedian Whose Joke About ICE Got Him a Visit From Homeland Security. ICE Breaking into Home: “We’ll Show You the Warrant When We’re Done.”
* The “Maddening Labyrinth” Aging NFL Players Face for Dementia Compensation.
* England revving up for a Corbyn prime ministership.
* There’s No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal. Almost as if… there’s no excuse at all…
* From blood diamonds to blood healing crystals.
* It sounds like my dream of a Bill & Ted parody of the trend towards grimdark 80s revivals is gonna come true.
* What CBS found when it bought four random used photocopiers.
* How political and media elites legitimized torture.
* #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable.
* You Won’t Like The Consequences Of Making Pluto A Planet Again.
* New York Court Says Chimps Aren’t People—But a Judge Is Not Happy About It.
* The dream of communism is the elimination of wage labor. If AI is bound to serve society instead of private capitalists, it promises to do so by freeing an overwhelming majority from such drudgery while creating wealth to sustain all.
* Imagine that it’s 2044, and everyone is still listening to Duran Duran.
* Sometimes you just need two men.
* And in the advanced Turing test, the machine convinces you that it is conscious and you aren’t.
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
