Posts Tagged ‘Gamergate’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!
* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.
* The coming death of just about every rock legend.
* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.
* The job so nice they posted it twice: Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.
* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.
* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: “The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.” But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.
* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.
* “The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.”
* Liberalism can’t defend itself.
* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.
* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.
* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.
* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.
* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.
* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.
* Another free speech exception.
“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”
Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.
* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.
* ‘UVA has ruined us’: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”
* Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.
* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.
* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.
* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.
* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.
* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.
* UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.
* Climate change is here. Climate change isn’t an intangible future risk. It’s here now, and it’s killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.
* Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.
* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!
* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia: Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.
* Agribusiness against the Amazon.
* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.
* Today in the wisdom of markets.
* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.
* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”
* And speaking of white fragility.
* Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.
* TWO MONTHS BEFORE my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companion’s arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.
* The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained.
* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.
* In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.
* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.
* Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Harris’s “Criminal Justice” Plan Is Not Progressive.
* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Biden’s Candidacy.
* Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.
* Imagine if we had a democracy.
* Trump’s already cancelling elections.
* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.
* The case for changing the voting age to zero.
* The Fall of the Meritocracy.
* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.
* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.
* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is
* extremely normal very normal
* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.
* Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.
* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.
* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.
* How We Shut Down the Nation’s Largest Child Detention Center.
* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!
* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldn’t exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.
* The struggle to save Day-Glo.
* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?
* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.
* A history of Tetris randomizers.
* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.
* 44 African Architectural Styles.
* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.
* A people’s history of labor history.
* They solved the Geedis mystery.
* The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man From 1988 – “Dominion.”
* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.
* Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.
* Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.
* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.
* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.
* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.
Sunday Links!
* Been waiting for this one for a while: Chris Ware talks Rusty Brown.
* Boots Riley has a key read on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that has been left out of nearly every review or thinkpiece I’ve seen. Here’s one thinkpiece that does take it up.
* Elsewhere on the Tarantino beat: Box Office Milestone: ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Crosses $200M Globally, one of only two non-franchise films to earn that much this year.
* What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires. The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone. Why Are We Even Responding to John Delaney? The Democrats are climate deniers.
* Summer on the swollen Great Lakes.
* The Bone Thief died. :( David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier.
* The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren.
* We got him! I’d like to see Ole Donny Trump wriggle out of THIS jam!
* Northern Ireland is already spiralling out of control but no one is paying attention.
* When Your Rapist Demands Custody.
* Gamergate will always be with us.
Such an ending would imply that the ludicrous caricatures we imagine into existence to justify our preposterous wars with each other are, actually, just the pretexts we want and need to justify violence. In other words, it would skewer movies like The Hunt, and the ideological fantasies that divide the country into red and blue caricatures. If The Hunt seems to take a side — endorsing, by all indications, the worldview of its “deplorable” protagonists — Ready or Notnearly ends by suggesting that the stories we might tell ourselves to normalize violence are nonsense.
Instead, as it turns out…
* An update on a bizarre story: Ugandan mothers want justice for their children who died in care of an unlicensed American health worker.
* When You Can’t Afford School Lunch, the Toll Is More Than Just Physical.
* Insulin Prices Killed Josh Wilkerson. Now His Mother Is Taking On Big Pharma.
* Negative interest rates are coming and they are downright terrifying.
* Hellen Keller was a revolutionary socialist who wanted to abolish capitalism lol
* Fairy stories have always been radical.
* The legality of owning a kangaroo in the United States. Kudos to Wisconsin for keeping freedom alive.
* And, finally, the story that never needed to be told is here!
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.
* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.
* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!
* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.
* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.
* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.
* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.
* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT
* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.
* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.
* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.
* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.
* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.
* Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.
* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.
* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.
* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.
* How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.
* Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.
* Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.
* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?
* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.
* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.
* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.
* In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
* NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…
* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.
* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”
* I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.
* Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.
* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.
* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.
* A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.
* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.
* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?
* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.
* In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.
* California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!
* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.
* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.
* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.
* One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.
* There is no Africa in African studies.
* The dialectic of enlightenment.
* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.
* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?
* The language of Mario Maker.
* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.
* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.
* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.
* And this is some extremely relatable content.
Just Another Saturday Night Linkdump
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic. CFP: Edited Collection, Fan Studies: Methods, Ethics, Research. CFP: Reclaiming the Tomboy: Posthumanism, Gender Representation, and Intersectionality. CFP: Special Issue on Indigenous and Sovereign Games. CFP: The Age of the Pulps: The SF magazine, 1926–1960. CFP: Productive Futures: The Political Economy of Science Fiction, Bloomsbury, London, 12-14 September 2019.
* Awesome #altac job watch: Humanities Editor at Minnesota Press.
* The second half of the Women’s Studies issue on Octavia E. Butler, featuring my article of Parable of the Trickster, is now officially out. Check it out!
* Find out when someone started crying during Endgame, and you’ll find out who they’ve lost. (Really, though, it doesn’t make any sense.) “Avengers: Endgame” is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of “cinema” by “content.” In Praise of Poorly Built Worlds. The Avengers are the heroes of ‘Endgame,’ but Disney was the villain all along. But this time, we’re talking about a tragedy beyond what could possibly be commemorated through memorial sites. It would land somewhere closer to mass suicide and total infrastructural collapse–and where Endgame is concerned, there are no tragedies, there is only Marvel. Eco-Villains: Thanos and the Night King. To put it bluntly, and in Deleuze’s terms, superhero films are action films for people who no longer believe in action, for whom the capacity to act has been overtaken by the spectacle. It’s probably the best version of what an Avengers movie can be. And even that turns out to be silly, sloppily written, and to require massive amount of suspension of disbelief. Is it really too much to hope that Marvel stops debasing its characters and stories with events that can never live up to the MCU’s individual pieces? Interview With A Local Man Returning After Thanos’ Snap.
* MCU continuity enters its “fuck you, that’s why” period.
* An analysis of both side’s tactics in the Battle of Winterfell, from a military strategist. A counterpoint.
* Hate to agree with Ross Douthat, but it really does seem to be the case that hype aside Martin is just warmed-over Tolkien, but worse in every particular. Bonus Twitter thread goodness on GoT and colonialism.
* America is a horror: on Jordan Peele’s Us.
* Vox celebrates the great James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).
* Keeping company with my Audible app over lunch, I’ve come to see it as the buddy our tech overlords have granted me in the isolation that they help to impose. I feel this way about podcasts.
* Report Realism: Tentative Notes on Contemporary Kenyan Writing.
Genres that strain realism—the gothic and neo-gothic, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, and so on—are conspicuously absent in Kenyan writing, even as they are incredibly well represented in Kenyan book consumption. We are not writing what we are reading; even the very popular Christian-themed fiction about fighting demonic forces, which is really a variation of the horror novel, remains relatively sparse in terms of what we write or, perhaps more accurately, what we choose to make public of our writing. The believable and the realistic are bounded by NGO narratives and perspectives. And too many writers believe that the only writing worth anything is the believable and the realistic: to be a “committed” writer requires adhering to report realism.
Report realism believes in the power of “truth,” whether contemporary or historical, with a faith that borders on fundamentalism. In report realism, the truth will set us free. Report realism confirms objective NGO reports and affirms what Kenyans feel to be the truth of a particular condition. In report realism, for instance, the Kenyan prostitute is always a morally degraded figure looking for a way out to a respectable moral life. This realism is celebrated and supported by the NGO organizations who fund writing competitions and publish winning entries devoted to describing the real Kenya and by mainstream publishers who have the conservative mission of producing appropriately moral literature.
* ‘It drives writers mad’: why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?
* The saddest story ever told, beating Hemingway out by one word: Esports Part-Time Online Instructor.
* Yes, you will get a job with that arts degree. With that history degree, too!
* Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university.
* 6 Majors Were Spared the Ax at Stevens Point. But the Damage Might Be Done.
* Students and (not) doing the reading.
* How to Be a Better Online Teacher.
* Getting a Game Studies PhD: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars. Game Boys: The “gamer” identity undermines the radical potential of play.
* Sexual harassment is pervasive in US physics programmes.
* The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s. Being a Black Academic in America.
* ‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus.
* Swarthmore Fraternities Disband.
* Marquette faculty, students and community members rally for unionization. Unionization effort at Marquette leaves organizers, administration in a stalemate.
* The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb. A Moral Stain on the Profession.
* “Student loan debt is crushing millions of families. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational: Universal free college and the cancellation of debt for more than 95% of Americans with student loan debt.”
* Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find.
* Stanford keeps Stanford University Press alive… for one year.
* Charles Koch gave $25m to our university. Has it become a rightwing mouthpiece? George Mason University’s Donor Problem and the Fight for Transparency.
* Grad Students at Private Colleges Were Cleared to Unionize 3 Years Ago. Here’s What’s Changed.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated.
* All Literature Is Climate Change Literature. The Green New Deal Costs Less Than Doing Nothing. Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies. ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: vast expanse of rainforest lost in 2018. Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April. ‘Decades of denial’: major report finds New Zealand’s environment is in serious trouble. Alaska’s in The Middle of a Record-Breaking Spring Melt, And It’s Killing People. The Folly of Returning to Paradise, California. Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital. Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse. “You did not act in time.” We Asked the 2020 Democrats About Climate Change (Yes, All of Them). Here Are Their Ideas. The Billionaire’s Guide to Hacking the Planet. What if air conditioners could save the planet? The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth. ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive. A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet. Between the Devil and the Green New Deal. Five years. And here comes eco-fascism.
* Down and Out in the Gig Economy: Journalism’s dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry—not to mention writers like me.
But for most of us, freelance journalism is a monetized hobby, separate from whatever real income one earns. The ideal relationship for a freelance journalist to their work becomes a kind of excited amateurism. They should hope for professional success and acceptance but always keep a backup plan or three in mind. They will likely not be welcomed past the gates of full-time employment. By year five or six, they might be rebranding themselves as “editorial consultants” or “content strategists,” realizing that any genuine fiscal opportunity lies in shepherding corporate content to life.
* ‘Two-Tiered Caste System’: The World of White-Collar Contracting in Silicon Valley. The Future of Unions Is White-Collar. We Just Remembered How to Strike.
* These five charts show how bad the student loan debt situation is.
* “I am a woman and I am fast.” The ongoing harassment of Caster Semenya is simply incredible.
* Ten years later, police lies about Oscar Grant come to light. And elsewhere on the police beat: We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records. New York City’s DAs Keep Secret Lists Of Cops With Questionable Credibility. Virginia police sergeant fired after being linked to white supremacy.
* Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes. Emails Show Trump Administration Had No Plan to Track and Reunite Separated Families. Militia in New Mexico Detains Asylum Seekers at Gunpoint.
* TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be.
* France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity. An art historian explains the tough decisions in rebuilding Notre Dame. How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral. The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy.
* Mental health minute: Researchers say there’s a simple way to reduce suicides: Increase the minimum wage. The challenge of going off psychiatric drugs. The kids are not all right.
* The Rise of Useless Health Insurance. High-Deductible Health Policies Linked To Delayed Diagnosis And Treatment. American Prescription Drug Prices Are Out of Control. One Man’s Furious Quest to Get to the Bottom of It.
* Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests.
* Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
* A new Gallup poll says that America is home to some of the most stressed people in the world, reporting extraordinary levels of anger and anxiety that could be cause for concern, say doctors.
* Workers Should Be in Charge.
* I Work With Suicidal Farmers. It’s Becoming Too Much to Bear.
* On crunch time in the games industry.
* Instagram Memers Are Unionizing.
* How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever.
* Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird.
* Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium.
* Believe them when they say they want to kill us.
* Children of the Children of Columbine.
* My parents didn’t tell me they skipped my vaccines. Then I got sick.
* How a mall dies, Milwaukee edition.
* The hunt for rocket boosters in Russia’s far north.
* Job-hunting will only get worse.
* Of course I believe in hell. I vote for Democrats.
* The gamification of fascism.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fandom, and anti-fandom.
* My feckless Googling had reaped a monstrous reality that I knew was going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I asked myself: Is there something righteous in facing reality, or would it have been better to stay ignorant? A surfeit of ugly knowledge is a feature of our age, a result of the internet carrying to our doorstep, like a tomcat with a dead rat, all manner of brutal information. How many others have flippantly Googled an old friend and discovered something ghastly? This was not knowledge as power; it was knowledge as sorrow.
* “Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats.”
* The oldest known tree in Wisconsin.
* A Video Game Developed To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Seems To Be Working.
* How “Liberal” Late-Night Talk Shows Became A Comedy Sinkhole.
* Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men. What Good Dads Get Away With.
* When Measles Arrives: Breaking Down the Anatomy of Containment.
* Despite being legally required to conduct audits since the early 90s and holding a staggering 2.2 trillion in assets, the Pentagon held its first-ever audit this week — which it, unsurprisingly, spectacularly failed.
* I have so little faith in the holders of the Star Trek IP I can’t greet any of this news with pleasure. Even the realization that Discovery is (finally) going to do something truly original in its third season just fills me with dread. And I don’t know how to feel about this at all: Star Trek: Picard Series May Not Reunite TNG Cast. Star Trek: Discovery’s Depiction of Captain Pike’s Disability is a Betrayal of Roddenberry’s Utopian Vision. My mini-tweetstorm on the subject.
* Sundown on Deadwood: David Milch, battling Alzheimer’s, finally finishes his TV Western.
* Professional obligation watch, god help me.
* Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer.
* Tolkien estate disavows forthcoming film starring Nicholas Hoult.
* John Lennon’s 15 year old report card.
* Colonizing Condiments: A (Very) Short History of Ketchup.
* The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.
* Obituary corner: Gene Wolfe Was the Proust of Science Fiction. Before the Labyrinthine Lore of ‘Dark Souls,’ There Was Gene Wolfe.
* Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention.
* Medicine is magical and magical is art / The boy in the bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart.
* Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs.
* The Great Pornwall of Britain Goes Up July 15.
* The United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan.
* what piece of cosmo sex advice most haunts your waking hours
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix ‘buys 50 literary projects in last year.’
* It was in autumn that the happy face arrived. Death of a Salesman. No mathematics, no science can ever predict the human soul. Where do you want to eat tonight?
* 2019 National Geographic Travel Photo Contest.
* And only mass surveillance can save us now! Rough news day for Oxford if you ask me.
Thursday Afternoon Links!
* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!
* I haven’t had a chance to see Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so I’m gratified someone went ahead and wrote my triennial rant about franchise fictions and narrative closure on my behalf.
* Texas Studies in Literature and Language has a special issue on Wes Anderson.
* CFP for the SFRA guaranteed panel at ASLE 19. ASLE 19 (in Davis, CA) is a week after the planned dates for SFRA 19 in Hawaii, so if you’re going to the West Coast anyway it could be almost like a two-for-one…
* The second issue of Fantastika Journal is now available.
* That the things that gave my life meaning growing up have all become vectors for recruitment to misogynistic and white nationalist hate groups is the bitterest surprise of my middle age. That and Trump. Two bitterest surprises.
* Nominations Are Open for the 2018 Brittle Paper Awards.
* Ken Liu Presents Broken Stars, A New Anthology of Chinese Short Speculative Fiction.
* The Fall of Wisconsin. How to win Wisconsin back.
* Shakespeare in the state parks.
* The Self-Helpification of Academe: How feel-good nostrums cover up the university’s cruelty.
* Another piece on searching for work outside academia.
* Professor Faces Fraud Charges for False Job Offer. Reading the confession letter just makes me cringe.
* His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.
* Why Donald Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh Will Mean Challenging Times For Environmental Laws. The Vice Report. The Coming Era of Forced Abortions. The end of net neutrality. The imperial presidency 2.0. Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workers’ Rights. Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did. The issue with Kavanaugh is that he seems completely reactionary, bouncing from one indefensible position to another, without applying any judgment whatsoever. Liberal media in full effect. The Liberal Case for Kavanaugh Is Complete Crap. He’s a very normal Republican pick — that’s the problem. Establishment Extremist. What’s coming. It’s bad y’all. Someone investigate precisely how this deal was made and what the terms were. And from the archives: The Three Alitos.
* The Supreme Court: still bad.
* Capitalism is ruining science. The Business Veto: The demise of social democracy shows the precariousness of any project of reform under capitalism.
* Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras.
* Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state. How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order.
* Silicon Valley Is Bending Over Backward to Cater to the Far Right.
* How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System. Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco.
* Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out The Trump Years By Cashing In.
* The end of NATO. ‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
* Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents. Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations. ‘Don’t You Know That We Hate You People?’ ICE is lawless, racial profiling edition. Where Cities and Counties Are Detaining Immigrants. Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed. Government Told Immigrant Parents to Pay for DNA Tests to Get Kids Back, Advocate Says. As Migrant Families Are Reunited, Some Children Don’t Recognize Their Mothers. Deported after Trump order, Central Americans grieve for lost children. ‘What if I lose her forever?’ Undocumented Grover Beach mother deported despite community rallying in her support. Facing a Tuesday deadline to reunite about 100 migrant toddlers with their parents, feds say they’ve reunited 2. Inside The Courts Where Some Immigrants Plead Guilty Without Knowing What’s Happening. Now they’re coming for grandmas.
* Woman arrested in assault of 91-year-old Mexican man who was told to ‘go back to your country.’
* There’s been a spate of violent far-right extremism since the 2016 election.
* If you’re anti- antifa, that must mean…
* It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission.
* Liberalism, legitimacy, and loving the Parkland kids.
* Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters.
* Nixon’s $7B carbon tax forms centerpiece of energy agenda.
* The Industrial Age May Have Actually Been Kind of a Bad Idea.
* An interview with Julia Salazar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, In Her Own Words. Cynthia Nixon: I’m a democratic socialist. Meanwhile our old pal Joe Crowley looks like he’s trying to get away with something.
* We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment.
* Alan Dershowitz is ALL IN on Trump. But he’s not the only person with some truly around-the-bend ideas of what lawsuits can do.
* Weird science: Girls sometimes inherit almost two full sets of their dad’s genes, which seems to cause rare cancers.
* An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
* Did… did Milwaukee write this?
* Jeff Bezos Is Now $50 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth.
* All 12 Thai Boys Successfully Rescued from Cave after Third Dangerous Mission. The only person unhappy is Elon.
* WHO’s Language on Breastfeeding Really Is Flawed. This was our experience with breastfeeding for sure; I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people but we needed formula as a supplement from the first night on. That said, the corporate forces that promote formula over breastfeeding are utterly gross.
* When the relationship status truly is complicated.
* Scotland’s official plan if the Loch Ness Monster is found.
* Japan and the stay-at-home dad.
* Reality Winner and the espionage act.
* My Best Friend Lost His Life to the Gig Economy.
* When your child reveals sexual abuse from your parent.
* The Socialist Case for School Integration.
* Your town tomorrow: Kure residents cut off from outside world due to flooding.
* I knew wearing a tie was making me stupid.
* Bad subtitling is a daily problem for deaf viewers.
* How swimming pools became a flashpoint of racial tension in America.
* California brings emissions down below 1990 levels. But it’s not all good news.
* Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. RIP, Papa John.
* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.
* David Graeber’s new book argues that many of us are toiling in dummy jobs with no ostensible purpose. Any poll will show you he has a point. But his thesis is built on scant evidence and dubious claims of a ruling class conspiring to keep us busy. Bullshit jobs exist not due to orchestrated oppression but because of something altogether simpler: bad managers.
* An even tougher review of a book that seems like a big step down from Debt.
* The SAT, constantly innovating new ways to make teenagers unhappy.
* Through such characters, Muluneh’s work explores the layered psychic realms of blackness and womanhood that the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whom she cites as a major influence, explored through her otherworldly prose. In the process, Muluneh’s work has helped reorient the way black women are perceived. “As women, especially as African women,” Muluneh said, “we forget—and the world forgets—our positioning in history and religion and culture.”
* And amusing ourselves to death: 12 theme parks where the danger is real.
February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…
* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.
* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.
* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.
* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* Presenting the Nebula finalists.
* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.
* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.
* Comics studies comes of age.
* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.
* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.
* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.
Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.
The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.
* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.
* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!
* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.
* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.
* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.
* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.
* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.
* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!
* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.
* Why facts don’t change our minds.
* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.
* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.
* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.
* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.
* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.
* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!
* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.
* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.
* Radical feminism finds a way.
* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.
* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.
* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.
* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!
* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.
* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.
Closing Every Tab Because My Computer Will Barely Work Right Now Links
Sorry I’ve been so quiet! Between summer teaching and wrapping up a few big projects it’s been a very busy couple of weeks. Here’s every tab I had open!
* CFP: Hamilton: A Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre.
* 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalists and Shirley Jackson Award Winners.
* Graduate students in literary studies may often feel despair, even deadness and meanness, but an excess of cool seems like an especially implausible explanation. Far more damaging are bad mentoring, crippling overwork, social and geographic isolation, and the absence of opportunities to join the profession after spending a decade training. For too many graduate students, whether critical or postcritical, earning a PhD is the end — not the beginning — of a promising academic career. The skepticism that threatens graduate students and young faculty members results, therefore, not from the skepticism of academic theorists but from the skepticism of legislatures, administrators, donors, austerity-loving think tanks, and taxpayers. The Hangman of Critique.
* Jeff Vandermeer: Hauntings in the Anthropocene.
* The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF.
* The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Have Been Determined.
* The Best of Science Fiction (1946) and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016).
* Cleveland Police Are Gearing Up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention. Case Western in the News: Changes to campus operations during RNC. What’s a University For? Meet the Student Fighting Case Western U. for Shutting Down Campus to House 1,900 Police Officers.
* At least the convention went great.
* “Secretary Clinton Is A Different Person Than Donald Trump,” Says Bernie Sanders in Ringing Endorsement. GOP Establishment Relieved After Conventionally Abhorrent Beliefs Make Way Onto Presidential Ticket.
* Clinton has 945 Ways to Win. Trump Has 72.
* A Brief History of Turkey and Military Coups. The view from inside the bunker. Turkey ‘suspends 15,000 state education employees’ after attempted coup, including 1,577 deans at all universities.
* US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters.’
* Bleeding the poor with fees and fines, Virginia edition.
* The end of Roger Ailes. The Drudge Era.
* Now, Baton Rouge. A 538 Special on Gun Deaths in America. The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear. “One group is responsible for America’s culture of violence, and it isn’t cops, black Americans, Muslims or rednecks.” No lives matter. And from the archives: A Manifesto from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.
* Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth. Donald Trump Heads Into The Convention With Barely Any Campaign At All: Many of the numbers listed for his state offices don’t even work. Did you ever have to make up your mind? Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets. “Trump’s campaign logo mocked on Twitter.” He’s Really Pretty Bad at This. Being Honest about Trump. Jeb! We Play the Trump Board Game So You Don’t Have To. Republicans Keeping Their Dignity. Teach the controversy: Is Trump Working for Russia? Understanding Trump Supporters: The Machine of Morbius. Back to the Future in Cleveland. The Last GOP President?
* Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? Confessions of Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter.
* Donald Trump Said Hillary Clinton Would ‘Make a Good President’ in 2008. Donald Trump should talk about Hillary Clinton’s email all the time. Here’s why. Pollster Frank Luntz: GOP has ‘lost’ the millennial generation.
* There are about 20 households where she now lives. Like Susie, most of the residents in Snowflake have what they call “environmental illness”, a controversial diagnosis that attributes otherwise unexplained symptoms to pollution.
* Newborn Ducklings Judge Shape and Color.
* Small Arms, Long Reach: America’s Rifle Abroad.
* Education Department’s proposed rule for student debt forgiveness could threaten traditional colleges as well as for-profits, particularly over its broad view of what counts as misrepresentation. College and the Class Divide. Wicked Liberalism.
* As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis.
*Dying in America, Without Insurance.
* When Not to Get Married: Some 19th Century Advice.
* The Ontology of Calvin and Hobbes.
* The Fight Between Berkeley’s Academics And Its Football Team Is Getting Ugly.
* A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.
* Black Dishwasher at Yale University Loses Job After Shattering “Racist, Very Degrading” Stained-Glass Panel. Yale Rehires. Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor.
* Ghostbusters (2016) and The Fan. Fake Controversy, Terrible Comedy. Ghostbusters‘ nostalgia problem. And from the archives!
Ghostbusters more than any other film highlights the growing devaluation of public-sector jobs at the hands of privatized for-profit entities operating for mercenary reasons. The protagonists of this movie spend their time removing unwanted, unpaying residents from spaces they occupied their whole lives (and longer) and placing them into a form of prison at the behest of the current owners who can get more rent from more affluent persons and don’t like the neighborhood being ‘brought down’ by those now-undesirable who lived there first. Not only that, but budget cuts have forced the New York Public Library to retain the dead as current employees, cutting into what should have been their final retirement, and the entire crux of the film comes from belittling and mocking elected officials’ uselessness in the face of corporations who can solve the city’s problems for cash and without all the useless regulation tying up the mayor, firefighters and police. Ghostbusters is essentially Blackwater for the dead, cleaning up the town of its unwanted past, making life safe for the corporate oligarchies.
* A Zero Star Review of The Secret Life of Pets.
* ‘Pokémon Go’ and the Persistent Myth of Stranger Danger. If Pokémon Go could resemble the best of childhood, it might have some value. What it actually does is very different.
* Did Wes Anderson Design North Korea?
* How Sexual Harassment Halts Science.
* Why rich parents are terrified their kids will fall into the “middle class.”
* Prepare to cry: Appleton teen makes heartbreaking decision to die.
* To recap, the idea behind the Reverse Turing Test is that instead of thinking about the ways in which machines can be human-like we should also think about the ways in which humans can be machine-like.
* “He noted that further research is needed”: Women Wearing Low-Cut Tops In Application Photos Are 19 Times More Likely to Land a Job Interview.
* Penn State Football really should have gotten the NCAA death penalty.
* Am I a man, dreaming he is a Pokémon, or am I a Pokémon dreaming he is a man? Here’s All the Data Pokémon (Was) Leeching From Your Phone. Resist Pokémon Go. And as Adorno said: To catch Pokémon after Auschwitz is barbaric.
* OK, just take my money: Nintendo’s next assault on nostalgia is a mini-NES with 30 built-in games.
* Canon Police: Sulu’s Sexuality. But, you know, let’s not lose our heads. J.J. Abrams Won’t Re-Cast Anton Yelchin’s Role in ‘Star Trek’ Movies. For Some Baffling Reason, This Star Trek Beyond TV Spot Spoils the Big Twist. But the next one will be good, we swear.
* That piece I’m writing on Star Wars and canonicity will just never, ever be finished: Grand Admiral Thrawn Joins Rebels and the New Star Wars Canon.
* The headline reads, “Gonorrhea may soon be unbeatable.”
* Cancer, or, death by immortality.
* Hacking the brain in Silicon Valley.
* This blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22.
* Comic Books Are More Popular Now Than They’ve Been in 20 Years.
* Presenting the Apollo 11 Code.
* 67 Years of LEGO — by the numbers.
* Darwin’s Kids Doodled All Over His “Origin of Species” Manuscript.
* Neanderthals Ate Each Other and Used Their Bones as Tools.
* The Films Rian Johnson had the Episode 8 Cast Watch.
* This sizzle reel from Rogue One is the best.
* Treaty loophole might let someone claim ownership of the Moon.
* Should You Quit Your Job To Go Make Video Games?
* A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories of consciousness.
* And Mightygodking pitches the dark, gritty Sesame Street reinterpretation you didn’t know you needed.
Thnksgvn Links
* Once again, this year as every year, we give thanks.
* CFP: SFRA 2016, in Liverpool, UK.
* The first space age was about politics. The second space age was about science. The third space age is about money.
* How to Read Žižek on the Refugee Crisis.
The basic dynamic here is that ostensibly left-wing parties have put the right wing in the driver’s seat and have no strategy other than to denounce the very right-wing racism that their preferred policies actually stoke. The refugee article aims to unmask a similar dynamic in more radical leftist circles. Among leftist commentators, academics, and online activists as well, there is an abdication of any responsible policy-making that takes actual-existing reality into account. In its place, we find only empty rhetoric aimed at guaranteeing the speaker’s ideological purity.
* xkcd has another supersize edition. Here’s what we know so far.
* Officially outsourcing all my political commentary to John Kasich.
* Meanwhile! Arrests Made After Protesters Destroy Part of City Christmas Tree.
* Police killings since Ferguson, in one map.
* The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman.
* Teach the controversy: Life on Mars was ‘destroyed by nuclear attack’, says physicist – and we could be next.
* Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.
* The Fragile Framework: Can Nations Unite to Save Earth’s Climate? Spoiler alert: I have some terrible news.
* Disability and science fiction fandom.
* Jessica Jones is a Primer on Gaslighting, and How to Protect Yourself Against It. How Jessica JonesAbsorbed the Anxieties of Gamergate.
* Kinsey Was Wrong: Sexuality Isn’t Fluid.
* How Chicago Tries to Cover Up a Police Execution.
* In a Crazy Turn of Events, Viral Sensation “Phuc Dat Bich” Says It Was All a Hoax. Is nothing sacred?
* Neil Blomkamp wants to fix the biggest mistake in the Aliens franchise: the death of Newt.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits rich and poor alike to sleep outside.
* Every Hint and Clue Hidden in the Captain America: Civil War Trailer.
* And today in data visualization: The Magnificent Bears of the Glorious Nation of Finland.
All The Wednesday Links!
* I got some really good news the other day: an NEH Summer Stipend! Here’s the full list of $22.8 million in awards and offers for 232 humanities projects.
* Two of the poems from the award-winning first collection of my partner, Jaimee Hills, are up at Waywiser Press: “Synaesthesia” and “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* I taught #GamerGate in my video game class yesterday. It wasn’t my favorite day of the semester, not by a long shot, but TNI‘s “Gaming and Feminism” post was a great help, particularly the link to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 and Playing with privilege: the invisible benefits of gaming while male. I didn’t spend that much time on it, but I’m still tickled by Why So Few Violent Games?
* Salvage-Marxism embraces the Socialist rococo, the feel-good where we can and the feel-bad where we must, the utopian and the unflinching. Salvage will bring together the work of those who share a heartbroken, furious love of the world, and our rigorous principle: Hope is precious; it must be rationed.
* An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor. It is a world which does not require a Brechtian V-effect since it is already objectively estranged. The cosmonaut, stranded for an unforeseeable period on this planet owing to faulty technology (incomprehensibility of set theory or mathemes, ignorance of computer programmes or digitality, insensibility towards hip-hop, Twitter, or bitcoins), wonders how one could ever understand what is by definition radically other; until he meets a wise old alien economist who explains that not only are the races of the two planets related, but that this one is in fact simply a later stage of his own socio-economic system (capitalism), which he was brought up to think of in two stages, whereas he has here found a third one, both different and the same. Ah, he cries, now I finally understand: this is the dialectic! Now I can write my report! Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity.”
* Terry Pratchett: “Not having battles, and doing without kings.”
* Confabulation in the humanities.
* Fantasy scholarship needs theory. Badly.
* The first African science fiction short story? Leonard Flemming’s ‘And So It Came To Pass.’
* Adam Kotsko: Notes toward an overanalysis of a failed sci-fi spin-off.
* Did the Anthropocene Begin with the Deaths of 50 Million Native Americans? Defining the Anthropocene. The Inhuman Anthropocene.
* Scars of the Anthropocene: Japan builds a sea wall.
* Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought. A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water.
* Devastating report finds humans killed almost 3 million whales last century.
* Costa Rica powered with 100% renewable energy for 75 straight days.
* It’s May 2065, and Cornell’s Dean of Nonlitigable Revelry is angry. So good.
* Welcome to Ohio State, Where Everything Is for Sale.
It’s true that some of the faculty opposed this deal (but only 84 percent,according to a survey), and it’s also true that since the Australian takeover, prices for parking permits have gone through the roof. But it is not true, as has been reported in some places, that faculty have formed hitchhiking co-ops because they can no longer afford to park on campus.
The important point here is that this deal puts the lie to the complaint we hear so often that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world. Our CFO, the guy who orchestrated this deal, has just landed a very lucrative job with the Australian firm he sold the parking to. It’s called synergy, baby! Look it up.
* UW Struggle: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Public Authority Edition. This Is What Wisconsin’s 2.5% Budget Cut Looks Like.
* Sweet Briar Alumnae Outline Legal Case Against College.
* U.Mass. Faces $3B in Debt. reclaimUC: “That’s nothing.” More links below the chart.
* New York Attorney General Is Investigating Cooper Union’s Decision to Charge Tuition.
* “Why Tenure Matters.” Holy moly.
A former administrator at Chicago State University has accused its president and other officials of firing her in part because she refused their demands that she file a false sexual-harassment charge against a faculty member critical of the leadership.
* University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation.
* Free expression and academic labor.
It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates. They had the protection of the tenure system and often the benefit of faculty unions that could agitate on their behalf. But with so many instructors in a state of minimal institutional protection or authority, lacking long-term contracts, benefits, or collective bargaining, the risk of angered students multiplies. Adjuncts don’t even need to be fired; they can just not get any classes the next semester. Grad students don’t even need to be fired; they can just have their job applications placed on the deny pile. This is why I think the problem is actually probably much larger than the high-profile anecdotes would suggest. The greatest impediment to real pedagogical and political freedom on campus is self-censorship due to labor insecurity. Discussion of contingency is almost entirely absent in Cooke’s essay.
* Academics talking about money.
* On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”
* What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place?
* Nearly a quarter century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong.
* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?
* How one dad opted out his kindergartner from standardized testing.
* Trying the 12-year-old “Slender Man” stabbers as adults is as illogical and barbaric as they are.
* Plane Safety Cards Explained.
*A University of Calgary professor has written “the first scholarly study of the Archie comic,” titled Twelve-Cent Archie. Though some of his colleagues were skeptical, his motivation, Bart Beaty explains, was “to really challenge the kind of snobbery that’s inherent in the way that comics aren’t studied.”
* Meanwhile, we live in very weird times: Archie vs. Predator.
* Ted Cruz, I think, speaks for us all: “My music tastes changed on 9/11.”
* Lead prosecutor apologizes for role in sending man to death row.
* BREAKING: your weed killer is poisonous.
* America’s race problem has been solved, and it was easier than you would have thought.
* SF Bishop Sorry Sprinklers Installed To Roust Homeless Were Discovered ‘Misunderstood.’
* Worst person in the world speaks.
* If you give a lion a CAT scan.
* This Floating McDonalds Has Sat Empty For 28 Years.
* There goes my Plan B: Business Owner Millions in Debt Arrested Two Years After Faking Death.
* “As They Lay Dying”: Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.
* 1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child’s forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world. Mustaba Snoopy.
* Texas’ brazen attempt to silence one of its most effective death penalty defense lawyers.
* The Wall Street Journal reports that the leading trade group for compound pharmacists is now discouraging its members from supplying the drugs necessary for lethal injections — in what represents the first official stance the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP) has ever taken on death penalty issues. Relatedly.
* I’m not one for tech solutions generally but they should figure out a way to put microlocal cell phone jammers in cars. Nothing else is going to stop this from happening.
* The best description of social media I’ve ever seen:
* Podcast: Government Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know FBI Agents Can See They’re Creating Terrorists.
* Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad.
* The strange things people Google in every state. The most common job in every state.
* Before Judges, the Godfathers Become Sick Old Grandfathers.
* H-Bomb Physicist Ignores Federal Order to Cut 5,000 Words From Memoir.
* The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia.
* The Second Death of Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe, no longer at ease.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Zelda TV show isn’t going to happen.
* And it’s not all death and destruction: There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined.
Weekend Links!
* But at least one line in the tax form gives pause: The college lost roughly $4-million in investment income compared with the previous year, for unknown reasons. That year the college posted a deficit of $3-million, compared with a $325,000 deficit the previous year. I certainly hope someone follows up on that little oddity.
* Of course, it’s not entirely insane: How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion.
* Academia and the Advance of African Science Fiction.
* SimCity, homelessness, and utopia.
It seems we all now live in a Magnasanti whose governing algorithm is to capture all work and play and turn them not only into commodities but also into data, and to subordinate all praxis to the rule of exchange. Any data that undermines the premise that this can go on and on for 50,000 years, has to be turned into non-data. If there’s work and play to be done, then, it’s inside the gamespace that is now the world. Is there a way that this gamespace could be the material with which to build another one?
* Parenting and the Profession: Don’t Expect Much When You’re Expecting.
* Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory.
While the post-9/11 attacks have taken an even more dangerous turn, higher education is still a site of intense struggle, but it is fair to say the right wing is winning. The success of the financial elite in waging this war can be measured not only by the rise in the stranglehold of neoliberal policies over higher education, the increasing corporatization of the university, the evisceration of full-time, tenured jobs for faculty, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the view of students as customers, and the growing influence of the military-industrial-academic complex in the service of the financial elite, but also in the erasing of public memory. Memory is no longer insurgent; that is, it has been erased as a critical educational and political optic for moral witnessing, testimony and civic courage. On the contrary, it is either being cleansed or erased by the new apologists for the status quo who urge people to love the United States, which means giving up any sense of counter memory, interrogation of dominant narratives or retrieval of lost histories of struggle.
* 158 Private Colleges Fail Government’s Financial-Responsibility Test.
* The gangsters of Ferguson. But even this is still not “proof!”
* The Ferguson PD is NOT medieval. It’s modern white supremacy.
* Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax.
* It’s Not Just the Drug War: Progressive narratives about what’s driving mass incarceration don’t quite add up.
* Sotomayor May Have Saved Obamacare.
* Designing The Grand Budapest Hotel with Marquette alum Adam Stockhausen.
* Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?
* “Rahm Emanuel pays the price for not pandering.” Why should the poor man be voted out of office just because his policies are horror-shows that no one likes?
* A corrupt politician from New Jersey? What will they think of next?
* Wow: Ringling Bros. Circus Will Stop Using Elephants By 2018.
* Cities Are Quietly Reviving A Jim Crow-Era Trick To Suppress Latino Votes.
* Hartford, CT says friends can’t room together unless some of them are servants.
* This Is What It’s Like To Go To Prison For Trolling.
* Brianna Wu vs. the Troll Army.
* Short film of the weekend: “Chronemics.”
* Gasp! Science proves men tend to be more narcissistic than women.
* The Time That Charles Babbage Tried To Summon The Devil.
* Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast.
* Wellesley Will Admit Transgender Applicants. Planet Fitness Under Fire For Supporting Trans Woman, Kicking Out Transphobic Member. Students seeking to redesignate restrooms as “all gender” face harassment and police detention at UC Berkeley. US Army eases ban on transgender soldiers.
* The headline reads, “Decades of human waste have made Mount Everest a ‘fecal time bomb.’”
* Colonization: Venus better than Mars?
* On Iain M. Banks and the Video Game that Inspired Excession: Civilization.
* Get it together, Millennials! “Millennials like to spank their kids just as much as their parents did.”
* The Catholic Church Opposes the Death Penalty. Why Don’t White Catholics?
* What’s Next After “Right to Work”?
* David Graeber talks about his latest book, The Utopia of Rules.
* The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme That Shook Canada.
* Conservative columnist can’t mourn Nimoy’s death because Spock reminds him of Obama. Is there nothing Obama can’t destroy?
* 9 Social Panics That Gripped America.
* How Unsafe Was Hillary Clinton’s Secret Staff Email System?
* To whatever extent Doctor Who series 8 was a bit rocky, it seems like it’s Jenna Coleman’s fault.
* Making teaching a miserable profession has had a completely unexpected effect.
* Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? What could explain it?
* Is Yik Yak The New Weapon Against Campus Rape Culture?
* Tilt-shift effect applied to Van Gogh paintings.
* They say we as a society are no longer capable of great things.
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine’s Day
* Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in: Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
* Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted. Oh, okay.
* The UW: Update from the Struggle.
* How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
* The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here’s a link to the full article, which has a definition of “merit” (as/against “prestige”) I can’t make heads or tails of.
* The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft’s work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft’s fiction was “finicky,” “childish,” and “antagonistic to reality.” But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being “shocked” is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren’t reading Jason Shiga’s Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it’s great.
* The social network’s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees — the same level that Facebook strives for. “We’re well below that now,” he said. I’m sure if you keep up what you’re doing you’ll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat: The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he’s a communist.
* Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
* An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC ’16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant. I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice, but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
* To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. “Restore.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
* I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
* When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
* Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him. I’ve come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I’m not a scientist.
* Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where “you didn’t know you were poor.” But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin’.
* The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony’s Secret Spider-Man Deal.
* The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
* By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I’ve resolved to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
* Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
* South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
“If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks,” the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
* NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
* Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn’t ‘Appreciate Her Tone.’
* The arc of history is long, but: Putin Banned From ‘Mighty Taco’ Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc., Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc. Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up: Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week’s The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
* The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals. Wash that “good Vox” taste out of your mouth with this “bad Vox” chaser: The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white prisoners.
* Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer. Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Somber news this Valentine’s Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
Thursday Night Links!
* [Deletes blog, deletes Twitter, unplugs phone, burns everything]
* A little bit on the nose, don’t you think? Scott Walker Strikes ‘Truth,’ ‘Human Condition’ from Wisconsin Idea. The Walker administration has now backed off the plan. The Power of the Wisconsin Idea.
* Top 11 things to know about the proposed budget.
* Meet the Regents, Wisconsin, or Welcome to Our New University System Overlords.
* Ursula Heise on what happens when dystopia becomes routine.
* The FCC clears the deck on net neutrality, possibly for good.
* Questions for Harper Lee’s editor. Be suspicious.
* From Ph.D. to the professorship, the market moves downward. Of the graduates who get tenure-track jobs, most end up at universities ranked lower than the ones they attended. Virtually no one moves up. Even moving from a fourth-tier Ph.D. program to a tenure-track professorship at a third-tier one is nearly unheard of.
* 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education.
* To portray Samus’ sudden refusal to carry out her genocide mission, the game has the player nurture and nourish life instead of ending it. The fundamental nature of Metroid’s game-design ethos is subtly changed to reflect the altered tone. Paths are no longer opened with destructive weapons; instead, progress can only be made when the player provides life-giving nourishment to a newborn whose entire family they’ve just killed. The significance is that the player cannot stand idly by while the metroid child eats; they must lead the child to the food and take part in feeding them. Understanding Metroid II.
The FRA gave the site of Tuesday’s crash a probability of 3.1 percent — or, all things being equal, about one crash every 32 years. (Ironically, the last crash at the intersection was just over 30 years ago.)
But in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, there’s a New Jersey Transit crossingwith a predicted-collision probability of 49.6 percent — a coin flip, more or less. In total, 31 crossings in the New York area have probabilities above 10 percent, plus another 31 in Chicago.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on the future of the left. Ursula K. Le Guin on men.
* Presenting the original pitch for Game of Thrones, with unspeakably gross Arya-Jon incest plot.
* The original pitch for The Muppet Show. More links after the clip!
* Why Transparent Has Lost The Trust Of The Trans Community.
* It’s time to stop letting sports team owners blackmail taxpayers for new stadiums.
* “Let’s talk about sex in English class.” Okay but let me get tenure first.
* “What Roman slave owners knew about managing staff.” Um.
* As Parents Get More Choice, S.F. Schools Resegregate. But only artisanal segregation is good enough for my kids. Meanwhile, in Mississippi: A School District That Was Never Desegregated.
* NYPD Has a Plan to Magically Turn Anyone It Wants Into a Felon.
* Strange Maps takes up The Man in the High Castle.
* The Truth About What Went Wrong With The Third Season Of Star Trek. Roddenberry himself takes most of the blame in this telling.
* The Amazing Village in The Netherlands Just for People with Dementia.
* Singlism and married privilege.
* Two takes on language and activism at Ravishly and Student Activism.
* Jonathan Chait and the Overton Window.
* Yung found that, during the government audits, the number of sexual assaults reported by those schools increased by about 44 percent. But after the audits were over, the number of reports dropped back down to their previous levels. The study also found that the vast majority of participating schools frequently reported zero cases of annual off-campus sexual assaults, even though the Clery Act requires officials to make a “good faith” effort to work with local police to get that data.
* Twitter CEO admits Twitter is terrible.
* What Happens When a Prominent Male Feminist Is Accused of Rape?
* Former Teacher At Elite L.A. Girls School Arrested For Sex Crimes.
* Twilight of the fraternities.
* You had me at “sci-fi alterations of 19th century portraits.”
* Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person.
* And the kids aren’t all right.
Wednesday Links!
* Today at Marquette! Dr. Robin Reid, “Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.”
* Tomorrow at Marquette! The English Department pop culture group geeks out over The Hunger Games.
* Solving prostitution the Swedish way.
“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 13: Engagement.
The point of engagement in this sense is not to involve the public in making decisions, but make them feel involved in decisions that others will make. That this may be done with the best of intentions is important, of course, but ultimately besides the point. Like “stakeholder,” “engagement” thrives in a moment of political alienation and offers a vocabulary of collaboration in response. So if civic engagement is in decline, one thing that is not is the ritualistic performance of civic participation. The annual election-cycle ritual in American politics is a case in point here. In one populist breath, we routinely condemn the corruption of politicians who, it is said, never listen to the average voter. And in the next, we harangue the average voter for failing to participate in a process we routinely describe as corrupted. So it’s not the “apathy” or “disengagement” of the public that we should lament or criticize—it’s the institutions that give them so many reasons to be disengaged in the first place.
* A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks.
JR: In the past you have said that you are a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Could you expand on this a bit: why are you pessimistic about the short term? What changes do you anticipate taking place between the near and far futures that change your pessimism to optimism?
IB: On a personal level, it’s damage limitation; a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we’ve got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren’t terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we’ll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia, in other words, muddling through despite ourselves.
* “Gamechanging” climate deal that seems radically insufficient to the scale of the crisis. What could go wrong?
* Think Progress has a good rundown on King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare. Eight Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About the Supreme Court’s Next Obamacare Case.
* The growth of auxiliary activities was the primary driver in spending increases by the schools, the report concludes. From 2005 to 2012, $3.4 billion was spent on instructional and research facilities. The cost for nonacademic auxiliary facilities was $3.5 billion from 2002 to 2012. Limit athletic fees, check construction to control college costs, study says.
* The State Funding Sleight-Of-Hand: Some Thoughts on UC’s Proposed Tuition Hike.
* The Vitae Adjunct Retirement Survey.
* ProQuest says it won’t sell dissertations through Amazon anymore.
* Why Wall Street Loves Hillary
* It’s a start: Massachusetts Town Proposes First Complete Ban On All Tobacco.
* Inside America’s inept nuclear corps.
* The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is under attack by critics who say academe is colluding with the mainstream media to push a feminist agenda in video games. How deep does this conspiracy go?
* When we think about the collapse of communism, we should emphasize and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy — not free enterprise.
* Can You Gentrify America’s Poorest, Most Dangerous City?
* Today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced through the New York Times that it may stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession, opting instead to issue tickets without detaining the suspect. This would feel like an important step toward reasonable weed policy if New York state hadn’t already mandated it 37 years ago.
* The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.
* One in every 8 arrests was for a drug offense last year.
* Milwaukee Public Museum’s Sci-Fi Film Fest gathers large audience.
* Running a school on $160 a year.
* Is Pre-K academically rigorous enough? That’s a real question this real article is asking.
* Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.
* Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this?
* Also on the subject of Lena Dunham: this is an extremely clickbaity headline, but the testimony from a juvenile sex offender is fascinating and horrible.
* Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.
* In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford. The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have. The result is a fearful society in which poorer parents are cast as threats to their own children.
* Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia.
* Scientists Have Finally Found The First Real Reason We Need To Sleep.
* Wes Anderson might be making another movie with puppets.
* In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation. One of these days, the crew will be dispersed. The Enterprise will be put in mothballs. Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in. But for now, their voyages continue.
* Peak Prequel: Sony Rumored to Be Prepping Aunt May Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie.
* And the best news ever: HBO Will Make Asimov’s Foundation With Interstellar‘s Jonathan Nolan. I may lose my mind over this show. I may even do a podcast. And a lot of what went wrong with Interstellar wasn’t even Jonathan Nolan’s fault!
Weekend Links!
* C21 2015 call for papers: “After Extinction.”
* More 2014 postmortems: The Democrats Have Two Choices Now: Gridlock or Annihilation. And in Michigan: Democrats Get More Votes, Lose Anyway. Davis Campaign Marked by Failed Tactics, Muddled Messages. Stop denying the truth: The Democrats got walloped. What happened to that Democratic turnout machine? Game Change ’14. What Does It Mean for Hillary? Stop Whining About Young Voters, You Jerks. Shockingly, my call to abolish the Constitution altogether has received little traction.
* Thankfully, it’s not all bad news: I was about to hype up a Scott Walker 2016 run. Then I watched his victory speech.
* Elsewhere in the richest, most prosperous society ever to exist in human history: Ninety-year-old man faces jail for giving food to homeless people.
* The 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion.
* It’s Cheaper to Buy a Judge Than a State Senator.
* Uber Is Pushing Drivers Into Subprime Loans. If you want a vision of the future: Amazon Is Beta-Testing Uber to Deliver Packages.
* What I’m not concerned with here is achieving some final and total harmony between the interests of each and the interests of all, or with cleansing humanity of conflict or egotism. I seek the shortest possible step from the society we have now to a society where most productive property is owned in common – not in order to rule out more radical change, but precisely in order to rule it in.
* Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. Flipping Schools: The Hidden Forces Behind New Jersey Education Reform. Massachusetts Committed to Chasing Teachers Away.
* Are We Forgiving Too Much Student-Loan Debt? CHE is ON IT.
* What could possibly go wrong? Obama Vows to Work With Republicans on College Costs.
* Oh, right, that. Banks Urge Investors To Buy For-Profit College Stocks Now That The GOP Is Taking Back Congress.
* Seems like a great bunch of guys: For-Profit Groups Sue to Block Gainful Employment Rules. The estimate is that 65% of for-profit students are enrolled in programs that wouldn’t pass.
* Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
* R0y Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” painting is based on one of my panels from an old DC war comic. Roy got four million dollars for it. I got zero.
* Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con’s Guide To Prison Weaponry.
* How GamerGate Is Influencing MIT Video Game Teachers. I’m wrestling with how much this needs to take over the syllabus of my “Video Game Culture” seminar next semester.
* It’s hard to study Scientology.
* “For those of us born in a post-Reagan America, having operated within this system our whole lives, there can be no doubt that Michel Foucault’s thinking describes our present.”
* In search of oil realism. I’ve just submitted an abstract for a chapter title “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking,” so this is definitely on my mind.
* NYC pastor: Starbucks is flavoured with the semen of sodomites. It’s called pumpkin spice, sir.
* My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the legal industry.
I actually don’t think this sounds terrible. I like the hint of menace I hear in “The Force Awakens,” as if the Force itself could be the enemy in the new trilogy. Who put this unelected energy field in charge of everything, anyway? Abolish the Force.
* Abolish the CW: Physicists determine that being rescued by The Flash is worse than being hit by a car.
* If you want a vision of the future: Disney announces Toy Story 4. More below the hilarity.
* I regret to inform you the ideology at its purest contest has closed. Thank you for your submission, but we have a winner.
* In a era without heroes, his website was our last hope: Meet the Mysterious Creator of Rumor-Debunking Site Snopes.com.
* The original version of Being John Malkovich, which I have fond memories of, would have been almost completely unwatchable.
* The Slow Unveiling of James Tiptree Jr.
* About 200,000 years ago, it was determined that spaceships could be powered by ennui.
* The Innocence Project was the last thing I believed in. Now I’m finally purged of hope.
* And they say this society can no longer achieve great things: Reality TV’s New Extreme: Being ‘Eaten Alive’ by a Giant Anaconda Snake.
Monday Morning!
* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
* Smartly realizing that nothing is going to change on the climate change beat, NPR guts its environmental reporting.
* Epigrams for my research agenda: That’s to say nothing of the fact that the people involved in GamerGate that Grieco defends are, in fact, not poor bullied kids. They are, overwhelmingly, employed, educated, privileged adult men, many of whom work for some of the most powerful and profitable industries in our economy. Their beloved sci fi and comic books and fantasy genres and media– those aren’t reviled and disrespected properties that people are ashamed to like. They’re economically dominant and critically lauded, and given the way the internet makes culture spread more broadly and intensely than ever before, are probably the most powerful force in the history of the arts.
* Different Bodies & Different Lives In Academia: Why The Rules Aren’t The Same For Everyone.
* Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns.
* 6 Brilliant Art Projects That Ruin Classic Kids’ Characters.
* Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps.
* All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone.
* Top Health Official Warns That Ebola Quarantines Could Backfire. And yet.
* Spock was right: Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion.
* National insanity watch: Students at a Nebraska High School Can Now Pose With Guns in Their Senior Portraits.
* I want to talk about how badly we’re failing the boys who can’t see their way out of a totally lethal, totally toxic distortion of masculinity — the kind that says that if boys aren’t manly, or gentlemanly, they can be gunmanly.
* Forty percent of mass shootings start with the gunman targeting his wife, girlfriend, or ex. And access to firearms makes it seven times more likely that a domestic abuser will kill his partner.
* Yes, Mass Shootings Are Occurring More Often.
* Elon Musk: Developing artificial intelligence would be as dangerous as ‘summoning a demon.’
* The “Southern Belle” Is a Racist Fiction.
* LARoB interviews David Mitchell.
* Why Google wants to replace Gmail. They should have nationalized Google fifteen years ago.
* Now we see the violence, &c: Wisconsin cops deploy armored vehicle to collect fines from 75-year-old man for messy land.
* “The city’s new budget includes $25,000 to buy one-way bus tickets for homeless people.” “Hawaii even passed a measure that offers paid flights off the state to homeless people.” (via)
* Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required.
* Building a Better Panopticon: The Wire as melodrama.
The Wire extends and elaborates melodrama in remarkable ways. But, as Williams says, melodrama remains a broadly liberal medium — and as Williams doesn’t say, liberalism and neoliberalism are not especially distant cousins. Liberalism can critique neoliberalism for its inequities, its cruelties, and its callousness. But to neoliberalism’s call for data and surveillance, liberalism can only respond with a call for better data and more nuanced surveillance; to neoliberalism’s doctrine of individuality as sameness, liberalism can only offer a deeper individuality subsumed within a deeper sameness. The Wire is undoubtedly one of the greatest melodramas extant, and an object lesson in how powerful the form can be. Its limitations aren’t a failure on the part of its creators so much as an indication that melodrama, having gotten us to this particular liberal democratic impasse, is unlikely, on its own, to get us out.
* Hackers of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
* And I learned today that Star Trek secondary canon features a running subplot where an unfrozen Wall Street guy slowly takes over the Federation. This is going in the Khan essay for sure…
Gerry Canavan 
