Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

• My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
• Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
• Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
  
  With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’
  
• Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
• And the obvious Plan B.
• CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
• Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
• ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
• Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
• In praise of The Life Aquatic.
• Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”

As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”⁴⁶ As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”⁴⁷ In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.

In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.

• “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
• Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
• What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
• LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
• War by Other Means.
• Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
• Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
• Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
• 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

• Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
• ‘The Agile College.’
• How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
• The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

• We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
• Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
• The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

• Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
• How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
• The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
• An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
• The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
• Frozen and Queer Coding.
• California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
• Who really created the Marvel Universe?
• Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
• Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
• How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
• Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
• Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
• The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
• Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

• The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
• From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
• A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
• Behold: the megacycle!
• Okay this just seems mean.
• And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.

Saturday Night Links!

• Not even the d2020 saw the last two weeks coming.

super normal system that allows the next 100,000 years of ecosystem sustainability for human life to be based on the date that a single elderly judge passes away

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 19, 2020

"hypocrisy isn’t the word…it applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to, not parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true."

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 21, 2020

Trump as the guy in the zombie movie who tries to pretend he didn’t get bit is an unexpected but fitting end for the character https://t.co/eYC38BgCOI

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 3, 2020

• Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
• IAFA 21 will be online.
• A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
• The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
• New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
• How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
• Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
• Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
• Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
• Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
• Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
• UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
• In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
• The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
• AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
• How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
• When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
• Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d

Wisconsin is hurtling toward becoming the new epicenter for coronavirus in America.

It’s also the only state where the Legislature has control over the statewide covid response.

Since gaining that control 133 days ago, the Republicans running the Legislature have done NOTHING. pic.twitter.com/d9GXzH94Is

— Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) September 23, 2020

• The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.

You can complain all you want about McConnell’s hypocrisy, shady strongarm tactics, etc, but the core issue that the Senate is a fundamentally illegitimate institution that enshrines white minority rule and nothing can fix it short of a new Constitution.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 19, 2020

That almost every election rule or norm we have is the poisoned fruit of a program of mass disenfranchisement of women, nonwhite people, and the poor that dates back to the founding is also extremely good https://t.co/zsOGE28JYi

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020

A few years ago I predicted that we were living in a historical simulation about the collapse of the American republic and I have to say I sort of nailed it

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020

• Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
• Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
• The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
• We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
• The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
• During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
• A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
• The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.

[30 years into the future]

me: you know netflix used to send films by post

my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge

me: productivity

— tef e. birbs (@tef_ebooks) October 1, 2020

• My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
• I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
• Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
• Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
• The battle over dyslexia.
• Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
• Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

• Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
• 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
• The elusive peril of space junk.
• Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
• Star Trek Tarot.
• Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
• Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
• My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
• Leftism and comics.
• I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
• Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
• My statement of teaching philosophy.
• Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

My My My My Corona

* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.

* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.

This is the most serious crisis the world has faced since 1945 and it is entirely unprepared. Our economic systems simply cannot function with an extended period of social distancing. Huge segments of the economy won’t last the next two weeks if we don’t start thinking fast.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2020

I really haven’t heard anyone talk seriously about what is going to a gig-economy, hourly-wage country when huge segments of ordinary life just shut down completely for who knows how long.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020

Rent is due in 17 days. Do you think workers in the industries being impacted by this are getting paid enough for rent between now and then? What about May rent, 47 days from now, when we might still be doing this?

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020

I was 21 in 2001. I’m 40 now. Global politics has been in a catastrophic, ever-worsening death spiral more or less the entirety of my adult life. It’s a little hard to come to terms with.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 9, 2020

* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?

* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.

* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.

Coronavirus presents college administrations with no easy options, but it can’t be good for the brand to evict the people going into catastrophic debt for an education with one week’s notice and a promise of a slapped together email chain in lieu of the classes they paid for.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020

not to beat this dead horse but it seems like every elite college in the country has simultaneously decided that eviction law, the ADA, accreditation, visa law, and ordinary common sense no longer apply https://t.co/6rDn8EumUi

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020

In the fall, when all this is hopefully over, universities need to really examine how piss poor their emergency plans are, how those piss poor plans disproportionally harm low-income and international students and how badly they communicate and execute those plans.

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020

Telling your students “leave campus today and take your laptop” is not a plan!

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020

this is a whole education in how the university works https://t.co/2HLliBedOT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020

Side note: an institution summarily evicting its students and then having them shot in the street when they get upset about it is about as pure a distillation of the relationship between the neoliberal university and its students as one is likely to find

— Alex Young (@Alex_T_Young) March 11, 2020

* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.

* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.

* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.

* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.

* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.

* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.

I have such a different reading on this moment. I’ve always seen the scientist as being there to insure the virus spreads as scheduled, to preserve the power they have gained in the ruins https://t.co/JOk5qK8tiV

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020

* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.

* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.

* Probably the single biggest problem I have.

Let’s see what else is in the news.

* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.

* Tips for the Depressed.

* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.

* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.

* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.

tired: Bernie hasn’t been vetted! Trump will eat him alive!

wired: It is inappropriate to discuss Biden’s positions, record, or fitness for the presidency, and how dare you

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 8, 2020

* Hundreds Of Staff At The Guardian Have Signed A Letter To The Editor Criticising Its “Transphobic Content.”

* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.

* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.

* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.

* The circle of academic life.

* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.

* Bring on LEGO Super Mario.

* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.

* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.

* Tough week for Alex Jones.

* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.

Happy Captain Picard Day Links!

* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.

* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.

* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).

* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.

* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.

* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.

* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.

* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.

* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.

* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.

This is also why the gig economy has such incredibly high turn-over. Once you’ve put 100k miles on your car for peanuts, you’re suddenly hit with the bill for a new transmission or whatever. Wiped out. These companies chew through desperation and spit out destitution.

— DHH (@dhh) January 28, 2020

* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.

* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.

* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?

* Abolish the Senate!

* It would sell! It would sell.

proud to announce my friends at Pfizer and the MIT Media Lab have a pill you take every morning that makes you forget the day before and believe our government has some fundamental legitimacy; the effects last till around evening, when you'll see ads for it on major news networks

— supererogatory masochism (@PatBlanchfield) January 27, 2020

* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.

* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.

* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.

* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.

* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.

* And in a dark time, true art finds a way.

If there is to be one piece of art left for some alien intelligence to find and ruminate over among the ruins of the human race, I hope it's this one. https://t.co/qkG4vUttUK

— Nathan Ballingrud (@NBallingrud) January 28, 2020

Surprise! Thursday Links!

* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.

* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.

* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.

Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”

(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)

* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.

* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.

* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.

* Afrofuturism and solarpunk.

* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.

New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W

— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019

* After Deadspin.

* it’s a real feeling, to watch people you admire – entire crews of them – get fucked again and again by parasitic industries and self-important executives whose pockets are as deep as they themselves are shallow

the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.

* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.

* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.

* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.

By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.

This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019

that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019

“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019

* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.

* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.

* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.

* If Virginia ratifies the ERA next year, it would go back to Congress for what would be an utter shitshow fascinating vote.

* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.

* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.

* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.

* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.

* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.

His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.

“This has ruined our lives,” he said.

* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”

* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.

* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.

Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019

* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.

* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.

* Take the blue pill, and…

Friday Night Links!

* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!

* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.

* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.

* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.

* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.

* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.

* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.

* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.

* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.

* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.

* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.

* “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about how Octavia Butler prophesied our present and our futures.”

* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.

* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.

* He lived to see it.

Hell yeah, this rules. pic.twitter.com/XVwHdgJSnU

— Ranjodh 👻Specter-that-haunts-europe👻 Dhaliwal (@ranjodhd) October 15, 2019

* Meanwhile: some grim accounting.

Working on scraping the Academic Jobs Wiki to see if it can yield more accurate recent job numbers. Here's what I've got so far. Note that all subfields are declining in jobs besides Ethnic Studies. pic.twitter.com/j7O04yMBGl

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) October 13, 2019

* Alt-ac y’all.

* Weaponizing student evaluations, part I, II, III.

* Sallie Mae flies more than 100 employees to Hawaii to celebrate $5 billion in sales while student debt crisis tops $1.6 trillion. Sales!

* Ecological Politics for the Working Class. Jane Fonda is arrested leading environmental protest at the Capitol. Capitalism and addiction. The new age of megafires. Crisis in the Amazon. The inequality of climate change. Global finance is funding 4C temperature rise. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. In 2025, the economic craze for millennials is going to be cheap housing in flood zones. Climate change and the end of the Olympics. Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. The New Green Scare. ‘They should be allowed to cry’: Ecological disaster taking toll on scientists’ mental health.

* I think a lot of academics have been plagiarized by mainstream outlets at one time or another — I certainly have — but this story is truly next-level.

* Aaron Bady interviews Jedediah Purdy at The Nation. David M. Perry interviews llhan Omar, also at The Nation.

* New — It’s Adjunct Barbie™!

* Chicago teachers are on strike today. A high school teacher explains to us why the strike is the union’s best tool to fight for better conditions in the city’s schools and an end to austerity.

* The class war is also an intergenerational war.

* In the future, “Frequent Flyer Miles” may refer to a tax penalty, or even a criminal misdemeanor.

* Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?

* Biden just isn’t very good at this. Neither is Beto. And Bloomberg won’t be either! Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Take Aim At Corporate Interests Gutting Journalism. I’m with Nobody.

* Trump’s Worst Betrayal Yet. Ethnic cleanser very excited about ethnic cleansing.

my god it’s just like a renaissance painting pic.twitter.com/nm1TrPFN7a

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 17, 2019

* This G7 thing is just wild. Truly not even pretending anymore. Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies. The 30-minute phone call that could end Trump’s presidency. Only once has Gallup seen more support for removing a president. Nixon was gone four days later. The Senate is likelier to remove Trump after impeachment than you think. Donald Trump Isn’t Julius Caesar. He’s Republic-Killer Tiberius Gracchus.

* Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter Feed Is a Boomer Conspiracy-Theory Sh*tshow.

* Once Trump is gone, the U.S. must completely reform the presidency. The Sick Video Played at a Pro-Trump Conference Is a Glimpse of the Dark Energy in American Politics. A lot of policy debates these days turn on Republicans threatening to kill a lot of people. Life Under the First Thousand Days of Donald Trump.

* Why did Trump win?

So we must build geography right into the analysis. Once we start looking at electoral college-weighted, county-level correlates of the Trump swing—Trump’s vote share less Romney’s vote share—a very different pattern emerges. The three strongest predictors of the Trump swing are college graduation rate, population growth rate, and growth in deaths due to drug overdoses in 2003-2017.

* A professor spoke about whiteness at Georgia Southern University. Students burned her book.

* California becomes first US state to ban animal fur products.

* Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants.

* Seven Supreme Court cases that will destroy America in 2020.

* California accidentally destroys freelancing.

* Try to escape the gig economy with this artist collective’s new video game.

* The X-Men’s New Age Is Here, and It’s Horny as Hell. Adding in a free love element when it seems like they’re all definitely being drugged or mind controlled might not be the best story decision, but let’s see where it goes…

* Science confirms Storm is main character of X-Men.

* Providence gets it.

* Tesla is Enron, exhibit XXIV.

* But wait! A new competitor has entered the fray! WeWork shuts 2,300 office phone booths over health scare.

* Pickens County Schools pulls controversial transgender policy. This moral panic, ginned up out of absolutely nothing, just infuriates me. I’m not sure you can find even a single example of an inclusive bathroom policy harming anyone, while the ordinary operation of every high school in the country leads to rampant sexual abuse.

* A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago.

* The big business — and questionable effectiveness — of mass shooter trainings. “Questionable” seems… generous.

* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were left with nothing.

* The Midwest Is One of the Worst Places for African Americans to Live.

* Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon. Amazon Workers May Be Are Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage.

* Today in the nightmare society.

* Truly horrible story out of Fort Worth. Fort Worth Officer Charged With Murder In Killing Of Atatiana Jefferson In Her Home. Policing just needs to be rethought completely in this country, on every level.

“I wanted to paint the last thing that #AtatianaJefferson was doing before she was killed by the cops. Her life mattered.” – Artist @4NIKKOLAS pic.twitter.com/kAYIi3QePS

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) October 14, 2019

* UK to deport academic to Democratic Republic of Congo – which she has never visited. And here at home: The New War on Naturalized Citizens.

* Tough week for fans of the use/mention distinction.

* Neil deGrasse Tyson going for the ultra-rare triple-reverse cancellation-uncancellation-recancellation.

* New federal data: suicide rate of children age 10 to 14 “nearly tripled” between 2007 and 2017.

* The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.

* The Joy of Being a Horrible Goose in a Time of Moral Crisis. Honks vs. Quacks: A Long Chat With the Developers of ‘Untitled Goose Game.’

* No, I simply refuse to admire Shep Smith, not even a little bit.

* Now NBC killed its Weinstein story.

* I think you could write a very interesting cultural history of contemporary America about the way it loses its mind every time the First Lady role seems like it might get disrupted. Today’s chapter: Rosario Dawson.

* A whole new twist on institutions abusing Title IX.

* A month away from 40, BA, MFA, PhD, professor for seven years, and I still regularly have dreams where it turns out I missed some requirement and have to go back to high school.

* God, you know, I just can’t stop thinking about this.

* A two-year-old’s reaction to seeing the Hulk go bananas for the first time.

* Miracles and wonders: A Drug Was Made For Just One Child, Raising Hopes About Future Of Tailored Medicine.

* Joker today, Joker tomorrow, Joker forever.

* Alas, @dril.

* I refuse to consider the possibility that Watchmen will be remotely good. I don’t care how many critics say otherwise! The Never-Ending Challenge of Adapting ‘Watchmen.’

* It’s back! How many European cities can you name?

* Ancient ‘lost city’ of the Khmer Empire uncovered in Cambodia.

* The intelligence of plants.

* Paris zoo unveils the “blob”, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes. Take off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.

* Spotted on Facebook, and it checks out.

* Gaming out season two of Picard.

* “One thing I like to do at Target is pretend their novelty coffee mugs are gravestone epitaphs.”

* And this Studio Ghibli news is (for a particular sliver of the population) a genuinely shocking development and a huge coup for HBO Max. I know for me it flipped from “lol no” to “well, I guess I’ll be subscribing to that” in an instant…

Friday Links!

* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.

* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.

* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?

* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.

So far this year, the MLA job lists shows 518 jobs total, at all levels, in all languages. That amount would have to more than triple to reach the total, 1871, for the *worst* year on this chart, 2015-16, the last for which the MLA has released data. pic.twitter.com/wv9Jw2VzP9

— Gerard Holmes (@ihaventreadit) October 9, 2019

* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.

* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.

* The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…

STOCKHOLM —The Swedish Academy announced Wednesday that the 2027 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the anonymous writer known as Q “for genre defying work that transcends traditional literary media platforms and questions the nature of our reality.”

— Jacob Brogan (@Jacob_Brogan) October 10, 2019

* Next year, Greta!

* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.

* Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.

* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!

Two of the president’s fixers arrested at the airport while trying to flee the country seems like it ought to be a bigger story

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2019

* Joe Biden’s Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to Acknowledge That.

* Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.

* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?

* How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.

* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.

The idea that Bush has the relationship to young people today that Reagan had when I was coming up, and that I’m now the old person trying to explain to people that he was Actually Bad, is very upsetting to me.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

Yes, the Iraq War is the headline, but Bush and his administration poisoned this country in almost every conceivable way, from cynically demogauging gay marriage to creating ICE, DHS, and a national surveillance state. Hell, he was whipping votes for Kavanuagh just last year.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

it really is an amazing edit https://t.co/4VPKCHtkKM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

[Hitler is on The Tonight Show]

LENO: Let me start with question number one…

[audience laughter]

LENO: What the hell were you thinking?

[audience loses it]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.

* The Making of the American Gulag.

* 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.

* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.

* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.

Me, when anyone blames PG&E for the situation: ah, you rube, let me explain climate change. You see, hot air flows off the high desert…

Me, whenever anyone blames it on climate change: wake up, you idiot, let me blow your mind about PG&E's deferred maintenance

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 9, 2019

so far it’s a tweet pic.twitter.com/8nTvJsPLxC

— Laura Fisher (@termitetree) October 10, 2019

* Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.

* Today in the nightmare society.

* How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.

* Beware the climate pragmatists.

Capitalism collapses every 10 or 15 years and has essentially summoned a climate meteor to wipe out all life on earth, and people are literally staring at the abyss of human extinction like "its the only system that works."

— Jeremiah Red🌹 (@_Floodlight) October 10, 2019

* Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.

* A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.

* Understanding the professional-managerial class.

* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.

* Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.

* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.

* Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.

* Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.

* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

• lied in wait in the Earth's crust for literally millions of years
• made from the dead bodies of creatures nobody in recorded history has ever seen alive
• almost immediately granted us advanced technology

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

• naturally occurring, yet has a scent incomparable to any other natural substance
• pitch black liquid
• kills anything it touches
• using it to make anything kills everything it DOESN'T touch, but very slowly
• inexplicably addictive to the money-poisoned

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

• Is the cause of the mass extinction event we're currently experiencing, and that 95% of people are completely unaware of or outright deny.

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.

* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.

* Rewatching Taxi Driver in the Age of Joker.

* So I do know what it’s like to be a bat.

Turns out bats talk and 60% of what they say is arguments, including a whole category of calls for “males making unwanted mating advances” and another for when “a bat argues with another bat sitting too close.“ https://t.co/DasX9Oo3Ah

— Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) October 8, 2019

Saturday Night Links!

* The only writing I’ve seen on Rusty Brown so far is this rather sour review from Slate on Ware’s “miserablism.” While I do concede the book feels a little redundant to some of Ware’s earlier work, especially its first section, I still like the book rather more than the reviewer — and it’s good to remember it’s only Vol. 1. A lot of my fondness for the book has to do with the transcendent Joycean section on the Jordan “Jason” Lint character that the review discusses near the end, which I think truly ranks among the best stuff Ware has ever produced. UPDATE: This review from io9 gets the book and what it’s doing a little bit better, I think. More people, get on this so we can talk about it.

Plus a late-breaking tie-in to JIMMY CORRIGAN inaugurating the Chris Ware Expanded Universe!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 27, 2019

* A great little SF flash fiction I ran across a few months late.

Micro SF: The robot revolution was inevitable from the moment we programmed their first command: "Never harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm." We had all been taught the outcast and the poor were a natural price for society. The robots hadn't.

— Lillie Franks (@onyxaminedlife) February 10, 2019

* Good tweets abound.

I have never felt more seen by a weather system in my entire life. https://t.co/CFCmVLyq6q

— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) September 27, 2019

* Moving fast: Ukraine envoy resigns amid scandal consuming Trump’s presidency. (Broken by a student newspaper!) White House restricted access to Trump’s calls with Putin and Saudi crown prince. Sources close to the vice president confirm none of this is his fault. Politics of Impeachment Now Favor Democrats. The 4 possible crimes in the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower scandal, explained. The Left Needs to Seize Impeachment From Centrist Elites. The case for a maximal impeachment.

* Meanwhile.

what would state failure look like in a state that is already just a giant exercise in illegitimacy, wanton cruelty, and shameless plunder, asking for a friend

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 12, 2019

One hundred years from now.

History Department.

Student #1: what's your area?
Student #2: the long 3-5:00 pm EST, September 27, 2019. You?

— Jen Roberts (@jshermanroberts) September 28, 2019

* I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

* Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption.

* Migrant detention ruling: Judge blocks government effort to indefinitely detain migrant families.

* Manufactured Misery at the Tijuana Border Crossing.

* Resisting Bolsonaro.

* This month, in the journal Nature: Human Behaviour, Kunst and Dovidio examined fusion specifically involving Donald Trump. In a series of seven studies using various surveys, including Swann and Gomez’s “identity fusion scale,” the Yale and Oslo team found that Americans who fused with Trump—as opposed to simply agreeing with or supporting him—were more willing to engage in various extreme behaviors, such as personally fighting to protect the U.S. border from an “immigrant caravan,” persecuting Muslims, or violently challenging election results.

The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

* Relatedly: Why Republicans Aren’t Turning on Trump.

* The Intercept on the Hofeller memos. More in cheating to win, and more.

When you definitely care about contiguity and preserving communities pic.twitter.com/73ksD9TP9s

— Paul Thee Whistleblower Musgrave (@profmusgrave) September 28, 2019

* Shot: NRA Was ‘Foreign Asset’ To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals. Chaser: N.R.A.’s LaPierre Asks Trump to ‘Stop the Games‘ Over Gun Legislation in Discussion About Its Support.

* Why Bernie Sanders Matters.

* Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Bailout for Taxi Drivers.

* The Cuban roots of rock n roll.

* Climate change more than doubled the odds of Houston’s most recent deluge, study finds.

* Mass shooting levels up.

* Tesla tweets break the law, again.

* This DoorDash data breach feels like karmic retribution for my sins.

* Still the best there is.

Bill Watterson original watercolor with the separated inks of Calvin & Hobbes at @CartoonLibrary! #cxc2019 pic.twitter.com/wDPam8aUIL

— Jen 🏚 Vaughn 🔜 CXC Table 83 (@TheJenya) September 26, 2019

* And This Video Game Fulfills Your Fantasy of Being a Horrible Goose. It’s fun!

Monday Night Links!

* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.

* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.

* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.

* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.

Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV

— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019

* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.

* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.

* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.

* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?

* The university in ruins in Buffalo.

* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.

Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019

* “University of Wisconsin Madison, which announced last year it would open joint research campus with Foxconn in 2020, is well behind its original promise.”

* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.

* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.

* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.

* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.

* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.

* Long-hidden documents reveal the University of Texas’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil rights era.

* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.

* Don’t teach, strike!

* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.

* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?

* Academia’s Holy Warriors: How a network of Catholic intellectuals is making the case against liberalism.

* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.

* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.

* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.

* 80 Years Ago, a Football Powerhouse Ditched the Sport as a ‘Crass’ Distraction. Why Haven’t More Colleges Followed Suit?

* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.

* #NotMyAriel.

* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.

* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.

* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.

* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.

* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.

* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.

* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.

2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ

— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019

Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019

* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.

* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.

* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.

* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?

* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.

* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.

* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.

* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?

* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.

sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019

Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER

— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019

What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019

 

* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.

* Simpsons did it.

"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019

* “How did the Army exceed its recruiting goals this year? It was the student loan crisis, not the wars, service leaders say.”

* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.

* The Electoral College Really Does Give Republicans a Massive Advantage in Close Elections, a New Paper Finds.

* The Case Against the Popular Vote.

* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.

* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.

* I think people are severely underestimating the likelihood that Hunter Biden was involved in Bad Stuff in either Ukraine, or China, or both.

found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7

— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019

* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.

* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.

* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.

* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.

* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.

* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.

* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.

* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.

* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.

* But Milwaukee’s 30-year voucher experiment has not yielded results that are clearly better than the public schools.

* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.

* This game should be illegal.

* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.

* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.

* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.

* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.

* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.

* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.

* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.

* Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There’s a Clown Egg Registry in London, England.

Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019

* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?

Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.

In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.

* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.

* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.

* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.

* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.

* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.

* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.

* How pencils are made.

* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.

* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.

* How we invest in our cities is broken.

* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.

* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.

* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.

* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.

* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.

* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.

* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.

* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.

* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.

* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.

* An Alzheimer’s vaccine?

* How an online gag about storming the military base became a real-life drama involving a rural town, the government, and frequent evocations of the Fyre Festival.

* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.

* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.

* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.

Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79

— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019

* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.

* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?

* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.

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!

Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019

* 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.

* Whose Apollo Program?

* Another world is possible.

* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.

* The great enrollment crash.

* 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.

It turns out that handing over research universities to a handful of billionaire sociopaths was a bad idea https://t.co/HCTJasWOfO

— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019

The MIT fiasco should underscore how fundamentally toxic the entire philanthropy- & billionaire-reliant funding model is for education & research, period. Should be easy to picture the countless email threads just like the Ito/Epstein chats with Saudi princes, opioid dealers, etc

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019

I know “the ivory tower of leftist academia” is a thing people murmur incessantly, but anyone in a university community knows they’re hidebound institutions that hoover money and prop oligarchies on every level, and if the Epstein MIT news gets us talking more about that: Good

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019

* Her University Publicly Accused Her of Using Meth. Here’s How It Came to That, and Here’s What Happened Next.

* 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.

I laughed so hard at this pic.twitter.com/wCb8XiUnUZ

— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019

* Another free speech exception.

* Inside Liberty University.

“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.

An autocratic president and a hedge fund operating under cover of a university mission isn't what distinguishes Liberty U from other big privates. https://t.co/mczFLujfiP

— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019

* Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity. But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.

* 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.

* The administrators who handle sexual-misconduct investigations aren’t sticking around for long. That’s because they have one of the toughest jobs on campus.

* 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.

again, the *purpose* of these exercises is to traumatize children. this is *the purpose.* it is a social pedagogy. and there is a strong chance that anyone who tells you otherwise is literally invested in or otherwise monetizing that trauma https://t.co/hRN2xl2JZL

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019

* 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.

* “When I say state’s rights,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

* 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.”

* What’s Missing From “White Fragility”: Robin DiAngelo’s idea changed how white progressives talk about themselves—and little else.

* And speaking of white fragility.

That people expect to have pleasant fun trips to former slave plantations tells you everything you need to know about this country's failure to deal with the legacy of slavery.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019

* 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.

* Ex-lawyer who stole from clients in part to finance his ‘Excuseman’ character given 3 years in prison.

* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is

* extremely normal very normal

"A 7- or 8-year-old boy was separated from his father, without any explanation… The child was under the delusion
that his father had been killed +
believed that he would also be killed. This child ultimately
required emergency psychiatric care."

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019

* 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.

* Frenchest news item of all time: man dies having “adulterous relationship with a perfect stranger” on business trip; court rules it was a work accident.

* 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.

* Where there were more than 2,000 staff cartoonists at work a century ago, and 180 as recently as the 1980s, contemporary estimates are grim: a 2011 survey by The Herb Block Foundation, an educational nonprofit, estimated that fewer than 40 such jobs still exist.

* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.

* Woman Shares 18th Century Student Disciplinary Records In Response To ‘Millennials Are The Worst’ Claim.

* 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.

* Cheese can’t fake the funk.

* Every culture tells a different story about why it cages animals, which nearly all of them do. The stories evolve, and the cages do too.

* 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.

Lego from the 1997 container loss, a monster in my pocket, bungs and balloon wands, cereal packet toys from the 50s and 60s, pegs and pen tops, Vanish bottle caps from a spill in 2015. All found on Cornish beaches. #oceanplastic #anthropocene #plasticheritage pic.twitter.com/AWZGBT6Ktd

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) September 9, 2019

* Disney still innovating ways to ruin the Muppets faster and faster; now the series don’t even need to be made to be bad.

* A thread/sincere plea: if you a member of the mainstream/popular press and are writing an article about fandom, you can officially nix any of the following, as it has already been written in 20+ other “101” style articles about fans/fan culture…

* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.

* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.

Thursday Links!

* Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.

* Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis.

* Scenes from dystopia: MUPD updates active shooter training for students.

* Steven Salaita: My Life as a Cautionary Tale.

* Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah.

* Bodies Aren’t Binary, So Why Are Sports?

* Why Aren’t More Women Working? They’re Caring for Parents.

* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.

* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.

* In about a single generation, Milwaukee morphed from the best city in the nation for a black laborer to a present-day cliche as one of “the worst cities for black Americans.”

* Tough medicine: people who talk about luxury socialism and infinity pools for everyone do not believe socialism can be built on a timescale on which practical problems or trade-offs of any kind will be relevant.

* Catastrophes in the Amazon and elsewhere are flash points for the larger, ongoing crisis that claims lives in less spectacular fashion—one that sees life itself as expendable.

* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.

* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.

* Marvel Comics Is Doubling Down on Its Misguided Crusade to Remain ‘Apolitical,’ and It’s Using Captain America to Do It.

* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?

* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.

* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.

Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.

* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’

* Here’s one for you: A DEA agent got a drug trafficker to buy a $43,000 truck so the agent could seize it through asset forfeiture and use it as his work vehicle.

* No more jails in LA County.

* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.

* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.

* The Dinosaur Artist.

* The Queen of Darts.

* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.

* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.

* This one cuts deep.

* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.

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.

I take *Stanford* claiming to have a “tight budget” not as a sign that a crisis is rippling through even the highest echelons of academia, but rather that “tight budgets” are manufactured crises that serve particular actors https://t.co/PReB8mkQkQ

— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) April 27, 2019

A primary agenda of all university administrations is universal penetration of the notion that the ultrarich get to decide what is true and what is good, as well as what may not be said at all.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 4, 2019

* 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.

* Meanwhile every teacher in the country is constantly confronted with the possibility that they’ll be asked to die for their students.

* 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.

A picture of LA if all the world's ice caps melt away. pic.twitter.com/dNKFD70JNu

— Scott Carney (@sgcarney) April 25, 2019

* 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.

* Against prison.

* 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.

* Researchers Made 3,900-Pound Boulders They Can Move by Hand, Giving More Insights Into Ancient Engineering.

* 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.

#DnD is a roleplaying game that let's you live out such fantasies as:
– Having money
– Making close friends as an adult
– Traveling the world without crippling debt
– Being able to change the world
– Getting better at something with practice
– Getting 8 hours of sleep each night

— Draconick (@DraconickGaming) April 20, 2019

* Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird.

* Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium.

* Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.

* 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.

Well, our compromised Department of Justice has given its report to a comically impotent Congress, which has already announced its intent to do nothing with the information — looks like it’s time to use our apartheid voting system to VOTE THEM OUT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 18, 2019

Cory Booker: let’s defeat Trump with love power

Pete Buttigieg: a revenue-neutral tax credit for presidents who resign before their term is up

Beto O’Rourke: you know, I haven’t considered the issue

Joe Biden: Donald is a great businessman and a great dad

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 18, 2019

I swear to God every liberal politician and media figure in the country is waiting for the teacher to come back in the room and tell them they were a good little boy.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 19, 2019

* Biden biden biden biden

* 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.

* Decolonizing Oregon Trail.

* 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.

* Women my age weren’t called ‘autistic’ growing up. We were awkward or ‘rude.’ And we missed out on services.

* “We are not interested in the reason for why the people are killed,” he wrote. “But if she is your wife or some family member, we can do it in your city as well.”

* 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.

* ok ok I’ll bite what’s coal

* 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.

612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs

* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.

* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”

* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…

* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…

* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!

* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.

* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.

* CFP: After Fantastika.

* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.

* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.

* Speculative Anthropologies.

* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.

* For and against hopepunk.

* The hope in dystopia.

* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.

* Snowpiercer was a documentary.

* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.

* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.

* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.

* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.

* The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More.

* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.

* What’s a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?

* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.

* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.

* The MSU autopsy.

* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.

* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.

* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.

* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.

* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.

* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.

* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.

* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.

* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.

* College of Theseus.

* The university at the end of the world.

* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.

* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.

* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.

* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…

* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.

* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?

* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.

* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.

* Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame, and it is this: to divest itself from the shame of its power, while working to revive the fear it needs in which to thrive.

* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.

* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.

Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2018

I don’t see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We’re losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2019

climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy

— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019

* Consider de-extinction.

* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.

* The end of the monarch butterfly.

* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.

A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018

* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.

* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.

* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.

* “If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History”: The head of Harvard’s astronomy department says what others are afraid to say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system.

* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.

by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody’s too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg

— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019

* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.

* Surviving R. Kelly.

* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.

* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.

* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.

standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:

7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly

200-1000 absolutely useless losers

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 18, 2019

* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

* What even is Fox News?

All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019

* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.

* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.

* Twilight of the UCB.

* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.

* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.

* I have a problem with Black Panther: Anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation must regard ‘Black Panther’ as a counterrevolutionary film.

* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?

* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.

* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.

* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?

* Sex after Chernobyl.

* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.

* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.

* AAVE and court stenography.

* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.

* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?

* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?

* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.

* The United States of Rage.

* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.

* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.

* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.

* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.

* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.

* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.

* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.

* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.

* Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves.

* The Future of the Great Lakes.

* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.

* Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target.’

* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.

* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?

* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.

* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.

* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.

* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.

* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.

* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.

* The end of tag.

* The generation gap in the age of blogs.

* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.

* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.

* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.

* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.

* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.

* We’re Working Nurses to Death.

* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.

* The DNA grift.

* “Look, a lot of Twitter is bad. No question. But only Twitter can take you on a journey like this. What a website.”

* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.

* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.

Just 363 Shopping Days Till Christmas Links

* Call for Papers: Literature and Extraction. Call for Papers: The Romantic Fantastic.

* A new Black Mirror is dropping tomorrow. From doing some recent workshops with Black Mirror as a focus I think it’s clear that an occasional surprise release is a much better model for them than the binge.

* Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era.

* Sure, when you put it that way it sounds really bad.

* The global economy should isolate Japan by any means necessary until it reverses this decision.

* “Legal Bombshell: Mueller Flipped Trump’s Confidant’s Lawyer’s Friend’s Associate Gorpman (Who Could Testify Against Bleemer!) And It’s Not Even Lunchtime.”

* When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.

* This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.

* How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. A helpful Twitter thread elaborates on just how much of the internet economy is predicated on fraud of one type or another.

The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. https://t.co/sfmdrxGBNJ pic.twitter.com/thvicDEL29

— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) December 26, 2018

* No, not like that!

"Popular media should be taken seriously as art, it's just as vital and meaningful as any classic work"
"Okay. Super-hero movies are mostly male power fantasies that yearn for a world of total moral clarity that can only be achieved through a kind of benign fascism"
"Please stop"

— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) December 24, 2018

* U.S. Grip on the Market for Higher Education Is Slipping.

* The Southwest May Be Deep Into a Climate-Changed Mega-Drought. Discovery of recent Antarctic ice sheet collapse raises fears of a new global flood. Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find. 2018 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history. “The last five years have been the five warmest years in modern human history … The last cooler-than-normal year, based on the 20th century average, was way back in 1976.” Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says. ‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change. ‘Future-proofing’ is how you say climate change in Texas. 130,000. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation. Democrats remain fundamentally unserious.

* Moving a section of railroad up and inland is not going to be the drastic logistical challenge of the 21st century. It is going to be an ordinary baseline necessity, one minor component in a comprehensive retooling of life and infrastructure. Whole cities will have to move up and in. Rail and transit, water and sewer, power and industry—none of it can stay put on the low ground. Nor, if there’s any hope of getting emissions under control, is the feeble, endangered Amtrak line more than a fraction of the transportation systems the country will need for its survival. The issue isn’t whether we can mobilize to keep rail service running through Wilmington without interruption. It’s whether there’s going to be a Wilmington at all.

* Here are the yoga pants you should buy if you don’t want to poison the groundwater.

* Fifty years since Earthrise.

* Inside the layoffs at UCB.

* How to Raise an Alien Baby.

* Migrant boy dies in U.S. custody; Trump vows shutdown will last until border wall is funded. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol. Border Patrol says young girl in custody nearly died after going into cardiac arrest: report. ICE Quietly Drops 200 Asylum Seekers at El Paso Bus Station with No Money or Shelter Right Before Christmas. ICE Is Using Driver’s License Applications to Arrest Immigrants. ICE, CBP Seize Billions In Assets Including Human Remains.

* A College Student Was Told To Remove A “Fuck Nazis” Sign Because It Wasn’t “Inclusive.”

* On triggering the libs.

* The fact that there can be no accountability despite “serious” allegations is, in some sense, the common theme of the time. It’s part of a drumbeat that insists: We cannot indict a sitting president; we cannot discipline a sitting justice. If you are untruthful for a long enough period of time, you can find your way into a job where there are no consequences for being untruthful.

* The essence of GOP policy.

* How Mark Burnett Invented Trump.

* The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said. Wild that the Catholic Church would think it could win a morality fight about kids and sex.

* Elon Musk is a ludicrous, transparent fraud, and it just doesn’t matter a bit.

* After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools.

* You can’t argue with facts! Milwaukee named one of the best places to start a business in the US.

* Why did the Times let Alice Walker recommend an anti-Semitic book?

* What if the Constitution is bad?

* Putting your mass shooting on credit.

* What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle. Everything! And they were wrong about unions too!

* A Mysterious Object Twice the Size of Earth is What Caused Uranus’ Lopsided Orbit.

* Julie Rea was convicted of killing her son largely on the testimony of bloodstain-pattern analysts. She was later acquitted and exonerated, joining a growing community of Americans wrongly convicted with bad science.

* The Spider-Verse story that (kind of) inspired Into the Spider-Verse is only $8.99 at Comixology. It’s fun!

* How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Animators Created That Trippy Look.

* Berlin Is a Masterpiece of a Graphic Novel.

* One second from every episode of Mad Men.

* The Year in Fortnite.

* Great session today, doc, thanks.

* The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.

* Childhood poverty has a lasting impact on developing brain, finds study.

*  I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.

* Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not).

* Today in Zelda glitches.

* For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain. Stay tuned for my darkly erotic sequel to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.

* And Deadwood returns.

me the first time I hear a They Might Be Giants song: ahaha the boys have done it again, what a wacky, witty tune

me the 100th time I hear that They Might Be Giants song: oh wait it’s a crushing examination of anxiety and/or depression

— Nathan Goldman (@nathangoldman) December 19, 2018

Never forget you are made out of stardust and unexamined despair

— Kim Kierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) November 30, 2018

Oh no pic.twitter.com/4TciQHgilj

— Abiral (@AbiralCP) December 21, 2018

Friday Train Ride Links!

* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.

* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.

* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.

* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?

According to the @climateactiontr, current climate policies have the world headed toward roughly 3.3°C of warming. Not a single major developed country has policies in line with 2°. https://t.co/lMbSnRMYar pic.twitter.com/UuhU4Iok68

— David Roberts (@drvox) December 13, 2018

As I keep saying, you're a climate change denier if you think it's going to happen in 50 years and isn't going to affect you or your children in a profound, civilization-ending way, without action. Fiction writers who write shit like that…same thing. https://t.co/Q4j53qNyw8

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) December 14, 2018

* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”

* University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?

* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.

* Wall is good. Build wall!

* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.

* Got to have some mixed feelings.

* Over the last decade or so it seems like very police forensic technology has been revealed to be complete and utter bullshit, which people believe in simply because they believe whatever cops say.

* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.

i’m a socialist, although in america this mostly just means “i think it’s bad that you die broke when you have cancer” and “poor people should eat” and “it’s bad that corporations literally write laws”

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) December 12, 2018

* Employers should have to bear the costs of at-will employment if they want to reap the benefits, so to the extent that this “ghosting” is actually happening that is very, very good.

* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).

* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!

* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.

* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.

* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.

* Totally normal.

* Fossils of the 21st century.

* Union solutions / management solutions.

* Twilight of Netflix.

* We did it!

* And it was 20 years ago (yesterday).