Posts Tagged ‘galactic empires’
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them
— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 9, 2021 at 12:55 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1984, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, Afrofuturism, aliens, Amazon, America, amputation, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, Black Panther, Breath of the Wild, California, capitalism, cars, CFPs, Charles R. Saunders, CIA, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cyberpunk, Democrats, diabetes, disaster, diversity, Dragonlance, ecology, esports, film, food, Frozen, futurity, galactic empires, gambling, games, gig economy, glitches, Grad School Vonnegut, Green Planets, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, interviews, Jack Kirby, Jameson, Jeff Bezos, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Le Guin, lithium, mad science, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Michael Hardt, Middle-Earth, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Nathan Grawe, neoliberalism, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, pandemic, pedagogy, politics, postdocs, protest, queerness, race, racism, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, Santa, science fiction, science fiction studies, Slaughterhouse Five, socialism, Stan Lee, technology, The Life Aquatic, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Ministry for the Future, the stock market, the wisdom of markets, theory, this is not a place of honor, Title IX, Tolkien, Utopia, UVM, Wakanda, Walter Benjamin, Wes Anderson, white supremacy, work, Zelda, zombies
Monday Morning Links (The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mama)
Well, I’ve been on the new Star Tours, and I regret to inform you I have some pretty serious concerns about its canonicity 1/89
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2018
* CFP: The Evolution of Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Academia Lunare.
* But the other thing that strikes me – we were talking early on about the history of modernity as connected in a structural way to the history of slavery, of capitalism, to histories of ordering and wasting – when I read that long history, a striking thing is capitalism’s impulse to abolish limits. From a capitalist’s standpoint, there are simply no limits. In regard to almost anything and everything, limitlessness is the law. Another striking thing is that capitalism aims to abolish some of the key dualisms without which the very idea of society as we understand it would have been unimaginable. To some extent, capitalism is the only religion without taboos humans have ever invented.
* The way it works is that, once the first settlers on a new planet demonstrate that they won’t die horribly from allergies, pathogens, or getting buried under the excrement of herds of titanosaurs, they then spread out to build mining settlements all over the planet, high-grade all the most accessible mineral deposits, drill for oil, and grow the infrastructure needed to build starships. With starhips built and trade links established, they grow into a mature colony over the course of a few centuries, all the while founding as many daughter colonies on new planets as possible. Eventually, they run into serious pollution problems, loss of usable mineral deposits, changing climate (both natural through the equivalent of Milankovich cycles, and anthropogenic), and a biosphere that coevolves to exploit the colony, because that’s just what life does (think pesticide resistant bugs, coyotes, superweeds…). At that point, the colony starts to fall apart. Interstellar trade shifts away from it (after all, whatever’s causing them to collapse them might be contagious). Ultimately the survivors hang on to become a truly resilient indigenous population in a backwater world–or all die horribly as their critical infrastructure fails. Their fate doesn’t matter to our interstellar civilization, because it has literally already moved on to new frontiers, boldly going where no man has gone before. So long as they can find new worlds to conquer, they can go on forever.
* Hard to argue with this reading of Harry Potter, honestly.
Wizards in Harry Potter fought a war over whether they should be genteel and cultured about racism but vulgar about everything else or vulgar about racism and genteel and cultured about everything else.
— Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) July 9, 2018
The figureheads of the war (Harry Potter and Voldemort) were mostly divorced from the larger cultural context of the sides they inspired or led. Their motivations were personal: Harry wanted revenge and to protect people he knew personally, Voldemort wanted power to live forever.
— Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) July 9, 2018
* “Eco-Philosopher Fails Hurricane Test, Crawls Under Rock.”
* A mere couple of hours away till the end of America, get excited.
* Still, God help me, I can’t get enough of this stuff: What if Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987?
* Madeleine Albright: ‘The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad.’ Yeah, that’s what I keep saying!
* America is catastrophically incapable of holding its elites responsible for their crimes, and that’s supposed to be the good news.
* Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation was a comically illegal slush fund and it just doesn’t matter.
* A Mexican couple was turned over for deportation this week when they tried to visit a New York military base to celebrate the Fourth of July with their son-in-law, who is an army officer. They had lived in Brooklyn for decades. More here.
The couple’s son-in-law is a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. According to the family, the Department of Defense won’t let him intervene in the case.
“Most worrying is the fact that both parents have recently undergone surgery and need medication,” the report said. “The Silvas say they have gotten calls from their mother, who said she was denied her medication. They say they have not heard from their father.”
This is a different army base in Brooklyn than the one that called ICE on a pizza delivery guy a few weeks ago.
* Trump admin won’t reunite all migrant families, will place some kids in foster care.
* Illinois governor profits off ICE detention center contracts.
1. 3K children were separated from their parents which is a humanitarian catastrophe
2. Trump signed a document in the Oval Office designed to communicate that family separation was “over”
3. 3K kids remain separated
4. There’s no indication of any real plan for reunification
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 9, 2018
1. You really want to know what grinds me gears about a good portion of "the resistance?" We are literally going through the early stages of ethnic cleansing, yet people are urging that we play chess against an opponent that has flipped the board over & set the house on fire.
— ✊🏿Black Aziz aNANsi✊🏿 (@Freeyourmindkid) July 7, 2018
Hard to imagine a greater blasphemy against Jesus than the living example of Christians in 2018, to be honest.
— Julius Goat (Read Pinned Tweet!) (@JuliusGoat) July 8, 2018
* Not for nothing. Of course you’ve heard me sing this song before.
My plan is to accept a cushy job at a university in New Zealand about six months before the killings start, if you’re wondering
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 8, 2018
hmm 🤔 https://t.co/3l7cFabX7p
— MF (@MF_return) July 8, 2018
* Notes from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign.
* Even “being drunk” is culturally specific.
* Introducing the Marvel Curriculum: A look at film history via the MCU.
* What if HBO, but super, super creepy?
please, i want to die now https://t.co/WPKj1ew1RC pic.twitter.com/TPEWNF0bEG
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) July 9, 2018
* How Much Does Being a Legacy Help Your College Admissions Odds?
* Elon Musk’s submarine is nonsense. Meanwhile.
* Brexit vs. Gibraltar. Brexit vs. Britain. Brexit vs. the Tories. Brexit vs. Brexit.
* I happened to listen to NPR for a few hours this morning, and I heard three stories that are very much connected to climate change without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.
This week in climate change:
-Quebec: heatwave kills 54
-Algeria: 124.3 degrees F as hottest temps ever recorded scorch Africa.
-Japan: “unprecedented” rain kills dozens
-California: LA notches all-time-high temp, wildfires kill 1 and force 1000s to evacuate.— Alexander Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) July 7, 2018
Still astounded by the people arguing that the Puerto Rican government has a moral responsibility to funnel all of its money to bondholders rather than making basic services work as hurricane season begins
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) July 8, 2018
Tired: Humans are killing the planet
Wired: literally like ninety specific people are killing the planet and we literally know their names— Bigger Laius Theory (@the_bird_roads) July 8, 2018
* U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials.
* Like Pizzagate but it actually happened.
* 150 Cheers for the 14th Amendment.
* Killing all the whales and turtles to own the libs.
1/7: We are now in a transitional moment: as was the case internally for people in the Soviet system c.1980, most people in the West who today are involved in or thinking about the int’l system realize that the warm & fuzzy things that are said about this crumbling system are BS.
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) July 8, 2018
a more just social order is not only possible it’s near, reactionary fascism is just that – a reaction.. to the rest of us, don’t let them steal the future
— Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@AyeshaASiddiqi) July 8, 2018
Whenever I get irritated with young people for incomprehensible weirdness like calling crispy duck pizza racist or watching videos of people playing computer games, I feel it's important to remember that old people voted to burn down the economy and put babies in prison.
— John B (@johnb78) July 8, 2018
* Actually existing media bias watch: 1, 2.
* Siri: show me fragile masculinity.
* And the headline reads: “Fake sultan was scamming a Miami billionaire. Then he ate pork.”
Siri: show me fragile masculinity pic.twitter.com/XVtCDKSW5D
— Nun Ya (@Ishfery) July 8, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
July 9, 2018 at 12:07 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 14th Amendment, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Achille Mbembe, actually existing media bias, alcohol, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America, apocalypse, books, border patrol, breastfeeding, Brexit, Brooklyn, Bruce Rauner, cable news, California, capitalism, censorship, CFPs, charity, Charles Stross, China, Christianity, class struggle, climate change, college, concentration camps, deportation, Donald Trump, drunkenness, ecology, elites, Elon Musk, endangered species, ethnic cleansing, evil, fantasy, fascism, film, fragility, galactic empires, Gibraltar, Great Britain, grifts, Harry Potter, HBO, How the University Works, hurricanes, ice, Illinois, journalism, kids today, legacy admissions, lies and lying liars, Madeleine Albright, Marvel, masculinity, math, MCU, Mexico, Miami, MSNBC, New York Times, New Zealand, outer space, parenting, philosophy, pizza, Pizzagate, politics, Putin, racism, rape, rape culture, Russia, science fiction, Soviet Union, Supreme Court, surveillance society, taxes, Thailand, the courts, the law, Tim Morton, trade war, true crime, Trump Foundation, turtles, United Kingdom, USSR, whales, zero
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
Love this! "They should put Prince on the $20 bill and call it $19.99. It's "The bill formerly known as a twenty." pic.twitter.com/BdCFjg3ozR
— Ty Francis (@tyfrancis) April 24, 2016
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 25, 2016 at 5:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academia freedom, activism, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, ALA, animals, apocalypse, Bernie Sanders, black holes, books, capitalism, cars, CEOs, Chernobyl, Chicago, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, comics, communism, cryptozoology, disability, Division I, Doctor Who, dolphins, ecology, Ecto Cooler, EVE Online, Extrapolation, feminism, football, galactic empires, Galápagos, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Google Reader, Harriet Tubman, HBO, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Janelle Monae, JFK, Judaism, kids today, kosher, language, Lee Harvey Oswald, libraries, literature, longevity, managerialism, marijuana, maybe everything that dies someday comes back, medical humanities, Melissa Click, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, millennials, Milwaukee, moral panics, music, my media empire, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New York Times, nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, old people, parenting, pedagogy, pirate libraries, police, police state, politics, porn, porn parodies, Prince, public health, reality, reality is a hoax, science, science fiction, Simpsons, sleep, Springsteen, stop snitchin', student movements, suicide, superheroes, Superman, survivalism, teaching, Ted Cruz, television, tenure, the Arctic, the courts, the kids are all right, the law, The Lives of Animals, torture, Uber, Vonnegut, what it is I think I'm doing, wildfires, winter, Won't somebody think of the children?, wrongthink, you don't exist
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
69% NTT faculty already (https://t.co/r9iXfWWbZL) | State College of FL eliminates tenure http://t.co/I2KZo9ToEk via @miriamkp @gerrycanavan
— Andrew Goldstone (@goldstoneandrew) September 24, 2015
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 26, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, affirmative action, Afrofuturism, Ahmed Mohamed, airlines, Alice in Wonderland, aliens, American exceptionalism, American literature, apocalypse, architecture, austerity, Benjamin Banneker, Bowe Begddahl, campus newspapers, cars, Catholic education, Catholicism, CEOs, CFPs, climate change, college, comics, content, copyright, Cornell, corpocracy, DC Comics, digitally, diversity, eBooks, galactic empires, golden parachutes, graduate student life, graduate student unions, Gulf Stream, happy birthday, Harry Potter, high school, House of Representatives, How the University Works, I want to believe, Jesuits, John Boehner, journamalism, kids today, Kindle, kleptocracy, Lewis Carroll, lies and lying liars, medicine, millennials, Muppets, my media empire, Mysteries of the Unknown, neoliberalism, Netflix, outer space, pedagogy, podcasts, prison-industrial complex, queer theory, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, Republican primary 2016, resignations, resilience, Retraction Watch, rude hand gestures from around the world, Salvador Dali, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, Serial, Star Trek, State College of Florida, Steven Salaita, television, tenure, the Internet, the Spectre, the truth is out there, Tylenol, UIUC, unions, universal basic income, University of Chicago, Volkswagen, Wesleyan, what it is I think I'm doing
Saturday
* Should LeBron play for the league minimum? Sports Illustrated makes a strong case. (via Eric Barker)
* Naomi Klein on climate debt.
* How to power your galactic empire.
* And two from this week’s New Yorker: a piece on Caster Semenya, the intersex South African runner, and “My Parents, Enid and Sal, Used to Be Porn Stars.” The piece on death hysteria in American politics, centered around Morris County, New Jersey’s Karen Ann Quinlan, is also quite good—but it’s not online.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 28, 2009 at 11:43 am
NYEE Links! A Whole Lot of Them!
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* What happened when slaves and free men were shipwrecked together. Amazing read.
* Schedule for the MLA Subconference.
* The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. The full report.
* “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.”
* Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote.
* “Obscure law lets Prince of Wales set off nuclear bombs.”
* “The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: at least 33,480 Americans dead.”
* Your weekly must-read: N.K. Jemisin has a new SF/F column in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
* Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation.
* Adjuncts at Loyola University Chicago Want a Union. Will the Jesuit University Respect Their Demands?
* The Absolute Disruption blog has some thoughts on spoilerphobia and The Force Awakens, with a digression through my Tolkien/TFA piece. That piece has had some interesting patterns of circulation, incidentally; the Salon piece did well on Facebook and Twitter while the WordPress version has had a second life in the conservative blogosphere by way of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen….
* George Lucas, genius. Another oral history of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Star Wars and the death of culture. What was cut from The Force Awakens. 13 Story Ideas That Were Dropped from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What is a Mary Sue, and does Star Wars: The Force Awakens have one? I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. Anakin Skywalker and the Methods of Rationality.
* Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use.
* “This iconic picture will live in history. When a women escaped ISIS territory and was able to wear color again.” More links after the photo.
* A suggestion for search committees, and some questions.
* The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales.
* From the archives: The Really Big One.
* ESPN is such a money pit it’s even dragging Star Wars down.
* My life as a job creator.
* Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game.
* Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death. How Can No One Be to Blame for Tamir Rice’s Death? How Philadelphia prosecutors protect police misconduct: Cops get caught lying — and then get off the hook. Police Rarely Criminally Charged for On-Duty Shootings. When is it legal for a cop to kill you?
* Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories.
* ASU’s Global Freshman Academy Is a Complete Bust.
* Being Véra Nabokov.
* Today in loopholes: consumptive demand.
* Loophole watch, part two: Pope Francis: atheists who follow their consciences will be welcome in Heaven.
* Why not cubic centimeters, or raw tonnage? Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”
* Great moments in political campaigning.
* This story has everything.
* Like Goodfellas but for embezzling from a fruitcake company.
* For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions.
* Africa and the Looting Machine.
* The House That Marx Built. Marxism for Tomorrow.
* How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.
* NSFW, obviously, but: These Real Women Want to Show You How to Give Them an Orgasm.
* Everything is totally normal, don’t even sweat it.
* We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles’ Enormous Methane Leak.
* The Opium Wars, Neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.
* The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books.
* The DMCA poisoned the Internet of Things in its cradle.
* More than one-third of wells in dairy farm-intensive Kewaunee County were found to be unsafe because they failed to meet health standards for drinking water, according to a new study.
* William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer.
* This Man Just Guessed How Much the Movies Have Spent “Rescuing” Matt Damon.
* For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.
* Your 2016 TV Preview.
* Why Do Employers Still Routinely Drug-Test Workers?
* When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.
* Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.
* After difficult summer, UW-Madison fighting off efforts to poach top professors. The view from the provinces.
* The Coolest Images From National Geographic’s 2015 Photo Contest. This Is Your Brain on Nature.
* Star Wars Lego Sets Exploding at 3,000 Frames per Second Is the Best Guilty Pleasure.
* When Bobby Shrugged.
* The science myths that will not die.
* Because you demanded it! The DeBoerist Manifesto.
* And Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. But don’t you believe it! Bring on 2016!
Written by gerrycanavan
December 30, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Arizona State University, bad handwriting, Bobby Fischer, Cascadia Subduction Zone, Catholicism, chess, Cleveland, climate change, coloring books, consumptive demand, corruption, cultural studies, culture, Delaware, Disney, DMCA, don't read the comments, drug testing, earthquakes, ecology, Eliezer Yudkowsky, embezzlement, English departments, entrepeneurs, epidemics, Episode 7, ESPN, fairy tales, fallout, Fallout 4, feminism, football, Freddie deBoer, galactic empires, Galápagos, games, gender, genius, George Lucas, Goodfellas, graves, guns, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, innovation, ISIS, Jesuits, leftism, LEGO, loopholes, Loyola, Madison, manifestos, Marx, Marxism, Mary Sue, mascots, methane, MLA, money, MOOCs, my media empire, mythology, N.K. Jemisin, National Geographic, neoliberalism, NSFW, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, opium wars, orgasms, Pacific Northwest, pacifism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photography, police corruption, police state, police violence, pornography, Prince Charles, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, science, science fiction, search committees, SETI, sex, sexuality, shipwrecks, slavery, spoilers, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, superexploitation, Tamir Rice, taxes, television, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, the CDC, The Force Awakens, the internet of things, the Pope, the prequels, the rich are different, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, true crime, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USPS, Vera Nabokov, violence, Vonnegut, water, Wisconsin