Posts Tagged ‘genetics’
Lost in January Links
* Out now: Extrapolation Volume 62.3 explores the representation of cyborgs in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, care in Gen Urobuchi’s science-fiction, and the critique of Western technoscience in Welcome to Night Vale.
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: Neurodiversity and Disability. CFP: Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture.
* Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? Notes on Squeecore. Portrait of the Author As a Component of a “Punk-Or-Core” Formulation. Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed. The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.
* Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature.
* Notes on the Forum of the Simulacra.
* How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.
* How climate catastrophe has consumed popular culture. Ride or Die? Mark Bould and the Fast-and-Furiocene.
* Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock.” Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us. Coming back from a time of illness: how finance can learn from climate change fiction. Melancholy Utopianism: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We Can’t Just Grow Our Way Out of This Climate Mess.
* Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise.
* Pop culture can no longer ignore our climate reality.
* Marvel Movies Made 30% Of The Total Box Office.
* Nnedi Okorafor on SF through an African Lens.
* The Matrix Resurrections and trans life (and death). Unpacking the Hidden Meanings in The Matrix Resurrections. A Muddle instead of a Movie.
* Games Studies Studies Buddies is such a good podcast and this is an exemplary episode. Like and subscribe!
* Joss Whedon fully burns down what’s left of his career. The Joss Whedon Era: A Look Back.
* Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.
* Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
* From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry.
* California’s Forever Fire.
* California, Arizona and Nevada agree to take less water from ailing Colorado River.
* The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record. The Oceans Are Now Hotter Than At Any Point in Human History, Scientists Warn. Here’s how hot Earth has been since you were born. The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment. US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, Noaa report says.
* As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave. How Did We Go From Stimulus Checks to “Go to Work With COVID”?
* The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism. Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens.
* Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection: The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
* Ultras.
* Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump. The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here’s What Life Is Like Inside. The January 6th Republicans (from Jonah Goldberg no less). Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes charged with seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The Rise and Fall of Latinx.
* Don’t Look Up Is a Terrible Movie. Really bad. I ranted.
* The Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’. Why ‘Star Trek’ made San Francisco the center of the universe.
* A Grieving Family Wonders: What if They Had Known the Medical History of Sperm Donor 1558?
* Percentage that would visit the Moon as a tourist, if money were not a factor.
* On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism.
* The end of the pandemic? Study: Omicron associated with 91% reduction in risk of death compared to Delta. Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble. America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire. We are the 3.2%.
* School Closures Led to More Sleep and Better Quality of Life for Adolescents. After last year’s learning loss, we need a plan for students with disabilities. Ideology and school closings. Who is this gentleman, Dude?
* The Mangle of Federalism.
* Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students.
* Becoming Martian.
* Last Year’s Longest Strike Just Ended in Victory.
* Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges.
* Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others.
* This Is the Way the Humanities End.
* A professor welcomed students to class by calling them ‘vectors of disease to me.’ He has been suspended.
* These Tenured Professors Were Laid Off. Here’s How They Got Their Jobs Back.
* So you want to work in academic publishing.
* As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth.
* US inflation reached 7% in December as prices rise at rates unseen in decades.
* Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class.’
* A simple plan to solve all of America’s problem.
* Sea Power, ‘Disco Elysium’, and the importance of being miserable.
* HBO’s Station Eleven Surpasses the Novel.
* Oh boy, they’re finally rebooting Quantum Leap.
* I’d never known this: Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile.
* Wes Anderson’s next sounds like another mistake.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly.
* ‘Invincible’ Animated Series Sparks Profits Suit Against Robert Kirkman.
* What Elmo’s Viral Moment Tells Us About How Parents Watch Kids’ TV.
* A people’s history of the Beatles logo.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Is a Terrible Masterpiece.
* The Wire as copraganda.
* BEHOLD! MEGA-MANHATTAN!
* The Strange Literary Puzzle Only Four People Have Ever Solved. And welcome to the Wordle century.
Friday Links!
* The ‘1619 Project’ Isn’t Anti-American — It’s Anti-White Identity Politics.
If Erickson and Co. would simply choose to identify as Americans – instead of as white Americans – then they’d free themselves from the compulsion to defend Thomas Jefferson’s sainthood, and belittle Sally Hemings’s suffering. If they would only seek meaning and belonging through identification with every American whose deeds affirmed our republic’s highest ideals – instead of with those whose pigmentation affirmed their racial pride – they could feel themselves ennobled by MLK’s heroism, and unthreatened by a frank accounting of the Founding Fathers’ crimes.
* Most Canadians Are Now Better Off Than Most Americans.
* How Paying for College Is Changing Middle-Class Life.
* Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media.
* Welcome to the US, Greta. With your help we can save the planet and ourselves.
* But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the high-definition simulation we call reality, and to unravel the physical mysteries of our world? A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts.
* ‘Nobody cared’: A woman gave birth alone in a jail cell after her cries for help were ignored, lawsuit says. Trump administration leaves menstruating migrant girls ‘bleeding through’ underwear at detention centres, lawsuit claims. The Trump Administration Wants To Start DNA Testing Undocumented Immigrants In Government Custody. When Solitary Confinement Is A Death Sentence. CDC reports 900 mumps cases in migrant detention facilities over past year.
* Every day with this guy. It’s a truly astounding record of achievement.
* How Democrats Can Win Back Rural Wisconsin.
* The DNC Doesn’t Want a Climate Debate for a Reason.
The DNC has shown what it represents: plutocratic interests and their deep commitment to human extinction. Even a lightweight Ivy League skateposer like Beto has a better sense of where the political culture is headed than the DNC does. Greta Thunberg arrived yesterday in New York City after crossing the Atlantic in a small, janky-looking zero-carbon boat from Europe. She and the many other people around the world fighting capitalism and the fossil fuel industry are our best hope — not only for the future, but for the present.
* just manipulating markets lol
* YouTube is a very bad company.
* Big Pharma Is Starting to Pay for the Opioid Crisis. Make Those Payments Count.
* Same joke but about PornHub planting trees to fight climate change.
* How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
* By and large, arbitration just shouldn’t exist.
* The largest study of same-sex sexual behavior finds there is no gay gene.
* Mark Twain wrote his own sad projections about Huck in 1891, when he planned a sequel: “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.”
* Garak and Bashir: The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relationship That Should’ve Been.
* What is it with the kids today and Friends?
* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. Wild to see how some of these communities have limped on or evolved into cults since becoming irrelevant.
* I nearly cried reading this.
* And if you want a vision of the future.
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Friday Links!
* I didn’t find it an easy question to answer. I couldn’t deny the accuracy of their observations (other than a tendency to neglect or misunderstand the distinctiveness of the situation in Scotland). Successive British governments have enacted a series of measures that seem designed to reshape the character of universities, not least by reducing their autonomy and subordinating them to ‘the needs of the economy’. ‘Marketisation’ isn’t just a swear-word used by critics of the changes: it is official doctrine that students are to be treated as consumers and universities as businesses competing for their custom. The anticipated returns from the labour market are seen as the ultimate measure of success. Last year the government imposed a new wheeze. Universities are now being awarded Olympic-style gold, silver and bronze medals for, notionally, teaching quality. But the metrics by which teaching quality is measured are – I am not making this up – the employment record of graduates, scores on the widely derided National Student Survey, and ‘retention rates’ (i.e. how few students drop out). These are obviously not measures of teaching quality; neither are they things that universities can do much to control, whatever the quality of their teaching. Now there is a proposal to rate, and perhaps fund, individual departments on the basis of the earnings of their graduates. If a lot of your former students go on to be currency traders and property speculators, you are evidently a high-quality teaching department and deserve to be handsomely rewarded; if too many of them work for charities or become special-needs teachers, you risk being closed down. And most recently of all, there has been the proposal to dismantle the existing pension arrangements for academics and ‘academic-related’ staff, provoking a more determined and better-supported strike than British academia has ever seen.
* What the hell is happening at Michigan State? How Universities Deal With Sexual Harassment Needs Sweeping Change, Panel Says.
* Nobel literature scandal deepens as Jean-Claude Arnault is charged with rape.
* ‘They just took them?’ Frantic parents separated from their kids fill courts on the border. Inside Casa Padre, the converted Walmart where the U.S. is holding nearly 1,500 immigrant children. A Twitter thread. Trump looking to erect tent cities to house unaccompanied children. Defense Contractors Cashing In On Immigrant Kids’ Detention. Administration will house migrant kids in tents in Tornillo, Texas: summertime high, 98, December low, 28. ICE Detained a 50-Year U.S. Resident Outside the Home He Owns and Now It’s Trying to Deport Him. “Zero Tolerance” Crackdown Won’t Stop Border Crossings But It Could Break the Courts. Migrant caravan mom calls for family reunification as fate of asylum claim looms. She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center. A grandmother seeking asylum was separated from her disabled grandson at the border. It’s been 10 months. She Fled to the U.S. After Being Raped Repeatedly by Her Husband. Trump’s New Asylum Rules Would Have Kept Her Out. Trump Administration Launches Effort to Strip Citizenship From Those Suspected of Naturalization Irregularities. It’s Happening Here Because Americans Can’t Admit it’s Happening Here. It’s All Too Much, and We Still Have to Care.
* The New York State attorney general’s office filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign.
* A rare person of integrity in this nightmare government: Senior Justice Dept. lawyer resigns after shift on Obamacare.
* In the wake of the horrors currently being done to children in America’s name, here’s one thing we can do: Recognize we’re in a linguistic emergency. We have a president whose single-minded praise for macho might is wearing down even those who refuse to overlook his incompetence. Trump, the only presidential candidate to refer to his penis size during a national debate, wants nothing more than to be seen as powerful and manly, and to align himself with those who project the characteristics he desires. And he’s gotten help—from us. If you’ve ever called Trump “tough” on immigration, note that he just called a dictator “tough” for murdering his citizens. (And “very smart” for staying in power.) That should be a wake-up call to journalists responsible for telling the story of this moment: Stop using the words he routinely chooses to describe himself. And think hard about whether you’re accidentally reinforcing the model of power he’s trying to sell.
* FEMA Blamed Delays In Puerto Rico On Maria; Agency Records Tell Another Story.
* Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs.
* Addressing an imagined reader in the all-too-likely “hot dark world” of our all-too-near human future, William T. Vollmann begins his two-volume, twelve-hundred-plus-page Carbon Ideologies (the second volume of which was published last week) with a curious and characteristically audacious gambit. In the opening pages of Volume I: No Immediate Danger, as he sets out upon this tome concerning fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Vollmann explains: “I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived—namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none.”
* In Name of Free Speech, States Crack Down on Campus Protests.
* Never love anything, it’ll only break your heart: Star Trek: Discovery Showrunners Leave CBS All Access Series.
Sources say the decision to oust Berg and Harberts was based not on the creative but instead for leadership and operational issues. Production on Discovery‘s first five episodes of season two are near completion, with Kurtzman likely taking over for episode six and beyond. Berg and Harberts, who were longtime collaborators with original showrunner Fuller, will likely still be credited on the episodes they oversaw. Sources say the budget for the season two premiere ballooned, with the overages expected to come out of subsequent episodes from Discovery‘s sophomore run. Insiders also stress that Berg and Harberts became increasingly abusive to the Discovery writing staff, with Harberts said to have leaned across the writers room table while shouting an expletive at a member of the show’s staff. Multiple writers are said to have been uncomfortable working on the series and had threatened to file a complaint with human resources or quit the series altogether before informing Kurtzman of the issues surrounding Berg and Harberts. After hearing rumors of HR complaints, Harberts is said to have threatened the staff to keep concerns with the production an internal matter.
That they’re openly admitting their best episode came about by accident isn’t great, either.
* World Cup news! As Saudi Arabia played at the World Cup, the country launched a massive attack on Yemen.
* Everyone Should Root for Peru in the World Cup. FIFA’s Rule Changes Won’t Solve Soccer’s Concussion Problem. 2026.
* Ugh, don’t ask Amy Poehler about comedy when the world sucks this fucking much.
* A Disgruntled Federal Employee’s 1980s Desk Calendar.
* Suicides by Gun Have Steadily Climbed, Federal Data Shows.
* In “Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos,” Christian Davenport tells the backstories of the billionaires who are vying for control of the emerging NewSpace industry. In addition to Musk and Bezos, Davenport writes about Branson and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and an early investor in new spaceflight technologies. The members of the quartet are so similar in type that their biographies, as Davenport relates them, start to blur into one. As boys, they mostly read the same science fiction. (Musk has said that his favorite Robert A. Heinlein novel is “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which is set on a lunar colony where young girls marry men and women are either homemakers or work at beauty shops or brothels.) The space barons were all outsiders as young men; they’re all obsessed with rockets; they all want, more than anything, to win. Their space ventures are supposedly driven by a common goal of elevating or saving humankind, but they don’t always treat others humanely. Elon Musk and the Failure of Our Imagination in Space.
* There were signs early on that the jurors deciding whether Rhines should be sentenced to life in prison or to death might have been considering more than the facts of the case before them. During deliberations, the panel sent a note out to the judge. They had a list of pointed questions about what life in prison would mean. Would Rhines have a cellmate? Would he be allowed to “create a group of followers or admirers”? Would he be allowed to “have conjugal visits”? They apologized if any of the questions were “inappropriate,” but indicated that they were important to their decision-making. The judge declined to answer, telling the jurors that all they needed to know was in the jury instructions they’d received. Eight hours later, they sentenced Rhines to death.
* Bipartisan war party panics as Kim meets Trump. The North Korea Summit Through the Looking Glass.
* The Class Politics of Teeth.
* Everything you need to know before The Good Place S3.
* DC edging dangerously close to having a good idea for once.
* Antarctica and the end of the world.
* According to the results, Côté shares more than a friendship with Snoopy the chihuahua; they share the exact same Indigenous ancestry.
* The position of the nanny—of the family but not in the family; asked to care and love but only while on the clock—is narratively provocative. And yet unless she is Mary Poppins-level magically perfect, in books and films the nanny is mostly a threat. She is the entry point into a family’s vulnerability, she is the stranger we thought we knew. She is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. She is a Lifetime movie about a family broken apart by a nanny’s violence toward the children or sexual advances toward the husband.
* The headline reads, “Nevada’s most notorious pimp wins Republican primary.”
* The Las Vegas Union That Learned To Beat The House.
* A thought-provoking thread on vegetarianism and colonialism, though I don’t consider it the end of the argument by any means.
* The astronauts disturbed the Moon’s surface soil by walking and driving a rover on it. As a result, the Moon reflected less of the Sun’s light back out to space, which raised the lunar surface temperature by 1-2 degrees Celsius (1.8-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) where it was disturbed.
* The World’s Best Pickpocket Reviews The Ocean’s 8 Heist.
* A movie ticket costs somewhere between $10 and $15 and yet MoviePass offers monthly subscription packages for $9.95 that let users can see up to one movie a day. How the hell is that supposed to work?
* The epic hunt for the place on Earth where life started.
* Teachers Fight To Keep Pre-Colonial World History In AP Course.
* University of North Carolina Students Accuse Administration of Artwashing.
* Hugh O’Connell reviews Ian McDonald’s Luna: Wolf Moon with an eye towards post-Thatcher neoliberalism.
* No one could have seen this coming.
* This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like.
* This is relatable content: Many animals are shifting from day to night to avoid people.
* Where Your Stuff Goes When You Lose It in Tokyo.
* And this is really happening: Measure to split California into three states qualifies for November ballot. I know it’s a trick, but even still, trading 2-4 Senators for a slightly harder path in the Electoral College seems like a good trade to me. But I bet it’s also illegal, so it’s probably a nonstarter either way.
Sunday! Morning! Links!
* CFP: “Hobgoblins of Fantasy: American Fantasy Fiction in Theory,” Special Feature in The New Americanist.
* CFP: Historical Fictions Research Network, “Radical Fictions.”
* We are almost certainly underestimating the economic risks of climate change.
* I had suicidal depression. I got better. Here’s how.
* My father’s was a textbook case: Depressed white male with gun offs himself in May.
* Manson bloggers and the world of murder fandom.
* Nearly 1,800 families separated at U.S.-Mexico border in 17 months through February. 1,358 Children Separated at Border. Torture at the border. ‘The Worst Place Ever’ Is ICE’s Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama. ICE’s Rejection of Its Own Rules Is Placing LGBT Immigrants at Severe Risk of Sexual Abuse. A family was separated at the border, and this distraught father took his own life. Down on the border, a new trail of tears. ‘They just took them?’ Frantic parents separated from their kids fill courts on the border. ICE detainee commits suicide while in transit to home country. Restaurants Boycott Army Base That Called ICE on Pizza Delivery Man. Federal judge temporarily blocks deportation of pizza worker. ICE Deserves Every Bit Of Our Contempt.
* In Academia, Professors Coming On to You Is on the Syllabus. Be better than this.
* 6 current, former MSU employees with ties to Nassar scandal under state licensing inquiries.
* Mizzou’s Freshman Class Shrank by a Third Over 2 Years. Here’s How It’s Trying to Turn That Around.
* The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet.
* Black Mirror was a documentary.
* Bold new horizons in cheating to win. Not that they need the help, with Democrats like these…
* Lucky break: Cozy land deals meant big money for Trump family and friends.
* Great moments in government.
* Some women “wouldn’t know what masculinity was if it hit them in the face.”
* White People Are More Likely to Get the Raises They Ask For.
* Stories like the one in this thread are so striking because we live in a society that prevents us from taking care of each other. Defying Prevention Efforts, Suicide Rates Are Climbing Across the Nation.
* Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children.
* The Next Pseudoscience Health Craze Is All About Genetics.
* From the archives: “Sum,” an afterlife fiction.
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
* Despite this, Graeber has convincingly called “bullshit” the nature of work today and reveals how – in his words – “economies have become vast engines for producing nonsense”. To his ideological opponents, convinced of the efficiency of free markets, his most devastating attack is to reveal how inefficient these systems can be. I suspect millions of workers around the world will instantly recognise the nonsense and inefficiency he describes. Whether they do anything about it is another matter. A more lukewarm review at the New Yorker.
* Wisconsin reeling from tariffs coming from Mexico, Canada, Europe.
* Golf is dying, many experts say. According to one study by the golf industry group Pellucid Corp., the number of regular golfers fell from 30 to 20.9 million between 2002 and 2016. Ratings are down, equipment sales are lagging, and the number of rounds played annually has fallen. Dead Golf Courses Are the New NIMBY Battlefield.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* CFP: Darkness.
* Never Tell Them Your True Name: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin.
* The Demanding, Essential Work of Samuel Delany: The Atheist in the Attic.
* Games for a Fallen World: On the Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene.
* Why we march: a then and now look at Marquette student’s involvement in protests.
* Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability. The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.
* A grim new angle on the intergenerational struggle: Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors.
* Harvard study estimates thousands died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria.
* Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger.
* The Criminalization of Knowledge.
* A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student. Niall Ferguson, amazingly. Niall Ferguson quits Stanford free speech role over leaked emails.
* It’s Not Liberal Arts And Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed.
* Inside the NCAA’s years-long, twisting investigation into Mississippi football.
* Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty.
* Here’s every Star Wars movie, ranked by female screen time. Should Donald Glover Have Played Han Solo? Disney and Star Wars: An Empire in Peril? The growing emptiness of the Star Wars universe. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves.
* Isaac Cates on Infinity War‘s False Conclusions.
* How Tolkien created Middle-earth.
* Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls. White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them. TMZ Goes MAGA. Can the Rule of Law Survive Trump?
* Three tweets on impeachment from Corey Robin.
* thread re: how NYT has now basically locked out Congressional Dems from commenting on Trump news.
* Trump’s ‘Forced Separation’ of Migrant Families Is Both Illegal and Immoral. Separated at the border: A mother’s story.
* After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back. Customs stole a US citizen’s life savings when he boarded a domestic flight, now he’s suing to get it back. Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood. This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk.
* Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google.
American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?
* In the richest country in the history of the world: Nine year old raises thousands of dollars at lemonade stand to help pay brother’s medical bills.
* Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself agreeing with David Brooks.
* Bear’s Dairy Queen ice cream treat earns zoo $500 fine.
* Archaeologists uncover remains of man crushed as he fled Pompeii.
* Why Isn’t Asbestos Banned in the US?
* Choose-Your-Own-Security-Disclosure-Adventure.
* Meet the Rising New Housing Movement That Wants to Create Homes for All. Tenant and Squatters’ Rights in Oakland.
* We compared Milwaukee police reports on Sterling Brown’s arrest with the video. They don’t match.
* Jury Leaves $4 to Family of Man Killed by Sheriff’s Deputy, Along With Many Questions.
* LARB reviews Dirty Computer.
* How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language From a Terrible One. How to Build a World.
* Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a “residential” zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I assume the rivers of meat blood come later.
* A weather report from an alternate universe, in which science is real and people aren’t idiots.
* Climate grief in the classroom.
* Banning straws won’t save the oceans.
* Bet this won’t either: Trump Prepares Lifeline for Money-Losing Coal Plants.
* Summah. Don’t kill your wife with work. If these trends continue. Teach the controversy. Dads & grads. When you’re almost forty.
* “Says he had to stage his own murder in order to capture someone, apologises to his wife.”
* How #MeToo Impacts Viewers’ Decisions on What to Watch.
* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.
* How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking.
* The art of the grift in 21st century Manhattan.
* Shockingly, ‘impossible’ EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all.
* New podcast watch: Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes. The Good Place: The Podcast.
* An oral history of the Muppets.
* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.
* We’re not prepared for the genetic revolution that’s coming.
* And you can’t argue with the facts: Wearing glasses may really mean you’re smarter, major study finds.
people and nature
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
Weekend Links!
* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”
* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!
* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.
* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…
* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.
* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.
* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.
* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.
* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.
* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.
* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.
* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”
* The female price of male pleasure.
* The gig economy and sexual harassment.
* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.
* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.
* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.
* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.
* Oh no.
* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.
* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.
* A world without Holocaust survivors.
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.
* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.
* On the greatness of Swastika Night.
* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.
* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.
Saturday Morning Links!
* Canonical Handmaid’s Tale sequel from Matt Besser and Lauren Lapkus.
* Marquette getting attacked in the right-wing anti-college fever swamp for the stupidest reason yet.
* College campuses haven’t been immune to a surge of hate speech and violence over the past year. BuzzFeed News found 154 incidents at more than 120 campuses nationwide.
* I didn’t like the bizarre ableist framing at the beginning (1, 2, 3, 4), but this piece on genetic testing and prospective disability is worth reading nonetheless.
* Another study demonstrates student evaluations should not be used for job evaluation.
* Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.
* Trump’s Upbeat Puetro Rico Rhetoric Clashes with Reality on the Ground. Gasp. He’s now attacking the mayor of San Juan on Twitter. From yet another golf course.
And precisely the sort of by-the-day news roundup I said yesterday I wasn’t going to be doing anymore:
* DHS says it will force everyone who’s ever immigrated to the USA to hand over social media.
* In search of Charlottesville 2.0.
* The new reality of old age in America.
* Mr. Lent said the group’s system of heads and handmaids promotes “brotherhood,” not male dominance. He said the group recently dropped the term “handmaid” in favor of “woman leader.” Well, I hardly see how anyone could object to that!
* Trump Could Save More Than$1 Billion Under His New Tax Plan. Oh, is that all?
* The end of public unions, the end of Democrats.
* And a classic from Tom Gauld, found on Twitter.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference, May 2018. CFP: The Future of Fandom. CFP: J. G. Ballard and the Sciences.
* The Rise of Brittle Paper: The Village Square of African Literature.
* The Library of America’s Story of the Week is an Ursula K. Le Guin classic, “The Day Before the Revolution.”
* Four book series that are shaping the future of science fiction on television. Butler! Okorafor! Jemisin!
We all know it is ending.
Trump is not an aberration. There will be no “return to normal.” The damage has been done. America is over.
* For years, Richard Florida preached the gospel of the creative class. His new book is a mea culpa.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The Ludicrous Prepper Plans of the Super Rich.
* Today’s “dominant cultural elite”—those Currid-Halkett has labeled “the aspirational class”— “reveal their class position through cultural signifiers” instead of material possessions, as was the custom during the golden age of conspicuous consumption. Ownership of relatively luxurious products (large electronics, SUVs) is now so widely accessible that the new elites eschew material things not because they’re reluctant to publicly display their affluence but because material goods no longer offer enough distinction. The hottest commodity for this group, whose members range from “partner[s] in a law firm” to “unemployed screenwriter[s],” is participation in a value system with the imprimatur of moral excellence: the conviction that they are living in the best (most responsible, most mindful, most objectively right) ways. These consumers are united by “shared cultural capital” as opposed to similar financial standing. “This new elite,” she contends, “is not defined by economics.”
* How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
* Soviet Pseudoscience: The History of Mind Control.
* The Mind-Set List, Faculty Edition.
* What is antifa? Who are the antifa?
* Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.
* Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter. Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV. A bizarre memo by an administration official suggests why Trump was so hesitant to blame white nationalists for the fatal violence in Charlottesville. Trump and his party continue to creep ever closer to a destination that once seemed unthinkable. And three and a half years of his term remain. Optimist. McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency. The President of Blank Sucking Nullity. “We tried to stop him.” Losing Mitt. If you want a vision of the future.
* 7 things Republicans could do to check Trump without ditching conservative policy.
* Was it worth it, America? Was it?
* Forever and ever amen. How the Forever War Brought Us Donald Trump. Trump’s Afghanistan buildup is revealing a rift among Democrats.
* Whose heritage? Lee comes down at Duke.
* How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother.
* Catholic priest steps down after revealing he was a Ku Klux Klan member decades ago.
* I Used To Be a Neo-Nazi. Charlottesville Terrifies Me.
* If you’re one of the more than 140,000 people doing time in a Texas state prison, you’re not allowed to read books by Bob Dole, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Sojourner Truth. But you’re more than welcome to dig into Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” or David Duke’s “My Awakening.”
* Leaving town at rush hour? Here’s how far you’re likely to get from America’s largest cities.
* “Buffy at 20″ will have to find some way to reckon with Joss Whedon at 53. Joss Whedon was never a feminist. Joss Whedon and the Feminist Pedestal: A Reading List.
* Infographic of the far future.
* Machine learning and misogyny.
* Afrofuturism has finally been gentrified.
* This deal is getting worse all the time. Because you demanded it.
* Marvel’s Black Panther Has Been Fighting White Supremacists For Decades and He’s Not About To Stop.
* Marvel Superheroes Who Basically Only Protect New York City, Ranked.
* In the future every franchise will be revived for fifteen minutes.
* Game of Thrones is definitely collapsing under its own weight. Bady and Mesle. Game of Thrones has become a terrible show. “Straining plausibility.” Game of Thrones‘ “Instantaneous Westeros Travel” Fallacy Is Driving Me Insane. Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story.
* Dogs Are Turning Blue in India for the Saddest Reason.
* Astronaut Pee and Sweat Could Be the Key to Getting Humans to Mars.
* A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think.
* Family Jumps Rising Drawbridge in Car, Lands on Other Side.
* A bonus episode of Thor: The Lightning and the Storm for your listening pleasure.
* And the arc of history is long, but Chuck E. Cheese is phasing out its animatronic bands.
Thursday Morning Links!
* At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.
* If you got a call offering a free cruise, you might be entitled to at least $300. I did! Check your numbers.
* Artist’s Statement, by Kara Walker.
* The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.
* President Of Charlottesville Synagogue Recounts Scene During Weekend Rally. More Witnesses. More. Documentary.
* Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist. All the President’s Klansmen. Goodbye, Pepe.
* Here are all the Republican members of Congress who have called out the president. Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity.’ Gwen Moore Calls for Trump’s Removal.
* Durham protester charged in Confederate statue vandalism. Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue. Virginia. Richmond! The Capitol. Even Robert E. Lee didn’t think Americans needed all those Confederate statues. Leave the Durham memorial on the ground. News you can use. Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost. Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely. Trump Blasts Critics Who Judge Neo-Nazi Groups By Most Extreme Members. Now you’ve gone and made Ron Johnson ‘not entirely’ comfortable. Poor guys.
* Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed. White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him. Disgusted Robert Mueller Eats 2 20-Piece Chicken McNugget Meals In One Sitting In Attempt To Get Into Trump’s Mind.
* They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported.
* The curious case of a man detained by ICE who can’t stay, but can’t be sent back either.
* Today in Millennials killing things.
* White racists and genetic testing. Doxxing White Supremacists Is Making Them Terrified.
* Today, Cloudflare reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and booted The Daily Stormer out from behind its DDoS protection service.
* ‘Elder Orphans’ Facebook Group Creates Community For Adults Aging Alone.
* THE COURT: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.
JUROR NO. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.
* The Voter Purge Crusade That Preceded Trump’s Sketchy Elections Commission.
* A good year for television adaptations of black SF!
* The Patterns Around Octavia Butler.
* Superhero Comics’ Long History of Beating Up Nazis.
* WSU grad student designs map of precinct-level election results.
* Free Speech Year at Berkeley! I bet it goes great.
* Sonic Mania has a great mechanic for playing with a five-year-old, but I swear Sonic used to be faster.
* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?
* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.
Closing Every Tab Not In Anger But In Disappointment Links
* I have a new essay out on zombies and the elderly in this great new book on zombies, medicine, and comics: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image. And if you’re interested in my Octavia Butler book, podcaster Jonah Sutton-Morse (@cabbageandkings) is going through it piece by piece on Twitter with #mmsfoeb. Also, check out this LARB interview with Ayana Jamieson on her work in the Butler archives!
* CFP: Comics Remixed: Adaptation and Graphic Narrative, University of Florida. CFP: ASLE 2017 (Detroit, MI). CFP: Special Issue of Green Letters on Crime Fiction and Ecology. CFP: Global Dystopia.
* Maybe the best thing you’ll read this year: Clickhole’s Oral History of Star Trek.
* Wes Anderson made a Christmas commercial. Updated Power Rankings coming soon!
* ‘Feast or Famine’ for Humanities Ph.D.s.
* Las Vegas is a microcosm. “The world is turning into this giant Skinner box for the self,” Schüll told me. “The experience that is being designed for in banking or health care is the same as in Candy Crush. It’s about looping people into these flows of incentive and reward. Your coffee at Starbucks, your education software, your credit card, the meds you need for your diabetes. Every consumer interface is becoming like a slot machine.”
* Jesuit university presidents issue statement supporting undocumented students. Catholic college leaders pledge solidarity with undocumented students. Dissent on sanctuary cities.
* Public universities and the doom loop. UW-Madison drops out of top five research universities for first time since 1972. Student visas, university finances, and Trump.
* Stealing it fair and square: In split decision, federal judges rule Wisconsin’s redistricting law an unconstitutional gerrymander. And so on and so on.
* The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.
* How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’ Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All. Postelection Harassment, Case by Case. Here are 20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today. Making White Supremacy Acceptable Again. Trump and the Sundown Town. No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design. If only someone had thought of this eight years ago! A time for treason.
* Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him. Trump and the End of Expertise. On Taking the Electoral College Literally. Some Schmittian reflections on the election. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President. Emoluments. A running list of how Donald Trump’s new position may be helping his business interests. A billionaire coup d’etat. Wunderkind. Voting under the influence of celebrity. We have an institution that could stop this (no not that one), but it won’t. Wheeeeee! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!
* And I’m afraid the news only gets worse.
* “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Ms. Palmieri said.” Respectfully disagree! The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt. Who Lost the White House? Careful! We don’t want to learn anything from this.
* I was reminded recently of this post from @rortybomb a few years ago that, I think, got the Obama years right earlier and better than just about anyone. And here he is on the election: Learning from Trump in Retrospect.
* Maybe America is simply too big.
* Inside the bizarre world of the military-entertainment industry’s racialized gamification of war.
* Trump’s already working miracles: Dykes to Watch Out For is out of retirement.
* The Nitty-Gritty on Getting a Job: The 5 Things Your English Professors Don’t Teach You.
* Remembering Scott Eric Kaufman.
* Huge Cracks In the West Antarctic Ice Sheet May Signal Its Collapse.
* Four Futures: Life After Capitalism review – will robots bring utopia or terror?
* If I developed a drug and then tested it myself without a control group, you might be a bit suspicious about my claims that everyone who took it recovered from his head cold after two weeks and thus that my drug is a success. But these are precisely the sorts of claims that we find in assessment.
* A world map of every country’s tourism slogan. Here Are the Real Boundaries of American Metropolises, Decided by an Algorithm.
* The youth concussion crisis.
* Cheating at the Olympics Is at Epic Levels.
* Mr. Plinkett and 21st-Century Star Wars Fandom. An addendum.
* Moana before Moana. This one’s pretty great by the way, my kids loved it.
* From the archives: Terry Bisson’s “Meat.”
* Stanislaw Lem: The Man with the Future Inside Him.
* U.S. Military Preps for Gene Drives Run Amok.
* Fidel Castro: The Playboy Interview.
* Cap’n Crunch presents The Earliest Show.
* Coming soon: Saladin Ahmed’s Black Bolt. Grant Morrison’s The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ.
* Parker Posey Will Play Dr. Smith and Now We Suddenly Care a Lot About Netflix’s Lost in Space. TNT fires up a Snowpiercer pilot. Behind the scenes of the new MST3K. The Cursed Child is coming to Broadway.
* “Magneto Was Right”: Recalibrating the Comic Book Movie for the Trump Age.
* Now my childhood is over: both Florence Henderson and Joe Denver have died.
* Of course you had me at “Science fiction vintage Japanese matchbox art mashup prints.”
* A brief history of progress.
* The first, last, and only truly great object of our time.
* And say what you will about OK Go, this one’s pretty damn good.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mellon Postdoctoral Program invites recent PhDs to apply for its three two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The theme for 2017-2019 applicants is Translation, Adaptation, Transplantation.
* A message from the Marquette administration: Milwaukee, our home. And a letter from MUPD. Decades of grievances come to a head in Milwaukee after police shooting. The “unrest” in this city began decades ago. The Racial Segregation And Economic Devastation That Made Milwaukee A ‘Powder Keg.’ Powder keg. Decades in the making. Decades in the making. Ongoing tensions. Not a surprise. No one can deny. Outsider agitators! The radicalism of Black Lives Matter. “What can I do to help Milwaukee?” What It’s Like To Experience Black Pain In Milwaukee. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails.
* Scientists say the US is facing the strongest hurricane season since Sandy hit the East Coast. California is in flames right now, with fires fueled by historic drought. A first-strike against climate change is the only solution.
* The 10 Most Overly-Specific Supervillains in Comics.
* The story no one asked for will finally become the series no one can watch. And when I made that joke on Facebook a friend reminded me of the goddamn forehead ridge thing that will be totally inescapable.
* I told you, Dad! New research from the Journal of Health Psychology seems to supports the theory that intelligent people spend more time being lazy than people who are more active.
* Racial Politics After Obama.
* Insurers say they’re losing money under the Affordable Care Act and are fighting for double-digit rate increases. This week Aetna announced it is pulling back from most exchanges.
* When the Hospital Is Covered but the Health Care Isn’t.
* Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans.
* Area Man’s Wife Achieves Lifelong Dream Through Dedicated, Drive, and Incredible Physical Prowess. It gets worse, my friends. (It gets better too.)
* Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed. Right wing ratfucking though it may be, the cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously honor contemporary norms about sexual consent and the 90s-era “none of our business” defense of Bill Clinton’s predatory behavior seems increasingly difficult to sustain.
* The amount of effort this took was the most alarming thing given his history,” the guy told the Post. Anthony Weiner’s Back at It Again With the Saucy Twitter DMs. I’m still saying it:
* This Andrew Cuomo fan fiction is now totally my head canon.
* Comedy Central Cancels Larry Wilmore’s Late-Night Show. Comedy Central’s decision this week to cancel “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” was a surprise. The reason it was a surprise is that Wilmore isn’t the real problem with the cable channel’s late-night offerings. Wilmore gone, but Comedy Central’s late-night problem is Noah.
* The Life Aquatic’s Seu Jorge Announces David Bowie Covers Tour. Chicago on (the day after) my birthday!
* NeverEnding Story Returns To Movie Theaters For Limited Run. I wish my kids were just a little bit older so we could do this.
* The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.
* How Cuba’s greatest cartoonist fled from Castro and created ‘Spy vs. Spy.’
* Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act.
* Hidden Figures really does look good.
* Suicide Squad and the bitter future of the DC Cinematic Universe.
* Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s.
* How to make your office gun-free. Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
* “People think a computer could run index funds—and they’re so wrong,” says Brian Bruce, a former index fund manager who’s now chief executive officer of Hillcrest Asset Management in Plano, Texas, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Index Investing. Five years, tops.
* The rise of neuroprosthetics.
* Augmented reality games and ethics. And just for instance: Mich. couple suing Pokémon Go for ruining their quality of life.
* It is easier to imagine the end of dads than the end of capitalism.
* How legroom on major airlines compare to one another.
* “People don’t realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics.” Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
* Don’t Bring Your Dog to Work.
* Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on “Trump: The Game.” Trump Could Sweep Toss Up States And Still Lose The Election. Right now polls show Donald Trump losing every single swing state. The kids are all right. Hell, even their parents are all right. The Great GOP Divide.
* Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction.
* Taken in cumulative, these data suggest two unusual possibilities:
A. Karl Marx is the single most important, influential, and far-reaching thinker who ever lived, and his empirically attested syllabus presence accurately reflects this extreme degree of influence that he has over virtually all aspects of human knowledge.
-or-
B. Karl Marx enjoys a grossly outsized presence on college syllabi relative to his importance as a thinker, owing to a similarly disproportionate affinity for his thought among university faculty and particularly those faculty outside of the economics profession.
I really think you could make a halfway legitimate case for some version of (A) — bracketing religious figures like Christ or the Buddha, and limiting the scope of influence to the mid- and post-20C milieu — but the later observations about the Manifesto as a kindergarten lesson probably poison that possibility.
* A genetic mutation that has been found to cause people to act outrageously when they’re drunk also appears to lower the risk of certain metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity. Peculiarly, the mutation has so far only been found in Finnish people, and is thought to affect around 100,000 people in the Nordic country.
* You’ll Get to See the Documentary About Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four This Fall. And keep your eye out for For the Love of Spock.
* Why I’m loving No Man’s Sky.
* Weird futurism watch: in the future, should everyone be a twin?
* And this is basically just a panel from The Flash.
Sunday Night Links!
* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.
* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.
* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.
* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.
* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
* Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.
* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.
* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.
* Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.
* “Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
* We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.
* Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.
* We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed. In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.
* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.
* America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’
* It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.
* Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.
* The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.
* Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.
* six months tops
* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.
* What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
* “Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.
* Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.
* A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.
* The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.
* Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.
* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.
* Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.
* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.
* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.
* Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.
* The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.
* How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.
* 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.
* Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.
* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.
* Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.
* Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.
* The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.
* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.
* “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.
* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.
* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.
* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.
* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.
* New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.
* Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.
* Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.
* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?
* I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.
* Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.
* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.
* The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.
* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.
* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.
* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.
Monday Morning Links!
* Coming soon: Adam Kotsko’s long-awaited book on the devil, The Prince of This World. And from Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
* Important White House petition: “Include Adjuncts in Loan Forgiveness Program.”
* But here’s the rub: I am able to afford this faux middle-class life on $40,000 a year because I live around poverty. I didn’t write this, but basically anyone with a job like mine in a city like Milwaukee could have.
* Marquette University John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty announced Monday that they have filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for what the plaintiffs describe as “illegally suspending” McAdams more than a year ago.
* Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.
* Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs.
* Clinton is the second-most disliked general election candidate in modern history. Guess who is #1. Using this approach, the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%, and the probability that Clinton will remain ahead of Trump is 91%.
* Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year.
* “Uber for MBAs Is a Worrying Sign.”
* How Gender Confirmation Surgery Actually Works.
* But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
* Suing? What for? The coffee was too cold. It’s supposed to be cold. Not THAT cold.
* Pop culture moment: we’ve been watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson and have been completely floored by how good it is. Thanks Lili Loofbourow for the rec!
* This month is also the Comedy Bang Bang live tour — with each date appearing on howl.fm the next day — so my pop culture dance card is kind of filled right now.
* I can’t decide if the White House Correspondents Dinner becomes more or less obscene when Obama is so good at it.
* Monkey bars alert: Playground concussions are on the rise. I’m really surprised parental use of cell phones isn’t suggested as a possible aggravating cause.
* Understanding epigenetic. Forgotten lessons of the American Eugenics movement.
* Andrew Sullivan is back, and he says your precious democracy is doomed. Doomed!
* And tell my kids I’m sorry: Scientists find more reasons that Greenland will melt faster. World on catastrophic path to run out of fresh water. And in case you’ve forgotten.
Gerry Canavan 