Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part One!

* I had a great time as the guest on this week’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talking about my Octavia Butler book, which has gotten some nice attention lately, including an interview in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last weekend as well. I was also on Radio Free Marquette this week, talking Rogue One…

* Another great Butler piece making the rounds right now: My Neighbor Octavia.

* A New Inquiry syllabus on Speculating Futures. Wired‘s first-ever science fiction issue.

* Monday’s Electoral College results prove the institution is an utter joke. Original Sin: The Electoral College as a Pro-Slavery Tool. The Left and Long Shots. Trump Is Unambiguously Illegible to be President. Meanwhile, on the lawlessness beat: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump. Amid outcry, N.C. GOP passes law to curb Democratic governor’s power.

* Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell’s Angels, and Trump. Look, all I’m saying is let’s at least give Nyarlathotep a chance. The Government Is Out of the Equality Business. When tyranny takes hold. Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt. It’s Trump’s America now. Time to get over our attachment to facts. And on that note: Too good not to believe.

* Not that we’re doing much better over here: Vox and the rise of explaintainment.

* How to Defeat an Autocrat: Flocking Behavior. Grassroots organizing in the Age of Trump.

* Against Ivanka.

* The worst possible Democrat at the worst possible time, forever and ever amen. What the Hell Is Wrong with America’s Establishment Liberals? Of course they are. The Year in Faux Protests. And no, I’m not over it yet: The Last 10 Weeks Of 2016 Campaign Stops In One Handy Gif. How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election.

* My President Was Black. The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America.

* I am terrified about where all this seems to be heading, on every level.

* Colby-Sawyer Eliminates Five Majors to Stay Afloat. English was on the list.

* More on Hungerford and not-reading. Elsewhere at LARB: Graham J. Murphy on the Ancillary Justice trilogy.

* How Bad Was Imperial Cybersecurity in Rogue One? Why Jack Kirby is (Probably) the Forgotten Father of Star Wars and Rogue One. The Obscenely Complex Way the Rebels Stole the Death Star Plans in the Original Star Wars Expanded Universe. And behold the power of this fully operational alt-right boycott.

so, Rogue One is the dirty work that allows the smooth and shiny surface of myth and ideology to be smooth and shiny.

— Ben Robertson (@BenRobertson) December 20, 2016

* More and more I find the unpublished and unwritten versions of stories as interesting or more interesting than the published versions — which is as true of Harry Potter as anything else.

* Dear tech community: your threat model just changed.

* You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news.

* You won’t believe how many Girl Scouts joined the Polish underground in WWII.

* Milo Yiannopoulos at UWM.

* In 2010, renowned string theory expert Erik Verlinde from the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics proposed that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but rather an “emergent phenomenon.” And now, one hundred years after Einstein published the final version of his general theory of relativity, Verlinde published his paper expounding on his stance on gravity—with a big claim that challenges the very foundation of physics as we know it. Big question is whether gravity is a bug they haven’t patched yet, or if gravity is the patch.

* TNT decides that a modern-day Civil War show doesn’t sound like fun anymore. But a show humanizing the KKK, sure….

* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over, sitcom edition.

* History in the Anthropocene.

* EPA: Oh, yeah, we were lying before.

* Arms Control in the Age of Trump: Lessons from the Nuclear Freeze Movement. And some timely clickbait: How would you know if a nuclear war started?

* The end of Roe v. Wade.

* Trump and oxy.

* Understanding Chicago Dibs.

* Spoilers: What Really Happens After You Die?

* Fitter. Happier. More Productive. Comfortable. Not drinking too much. Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week).

* More news from the future: Feds unveil rule requiring cars to ‘talk’ to each other.

* It can get worse, DC Cinematic Universe edition.

* Academic papers you can use: Where does trash float in the Great Lakes?

* And the war has even come to the Shire: Whitefish Bay to trap and remove coyotes.

Elite Saturday Links Enter CANAVAN at Checkout for 20% Off

* A version of this xkcd has been running continually in my brain for two years.

* February 26-27 at Duke University: Pleasure and Suspicion: An Interdisciplinary Conference.

* Open access SFFTV! A special issue on The X-Files from 2013.

* Louisiana universities are facing the largest midyear cut in state history, Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised speech last Thursday. Even if the Legislature can find additional revenue, higher education will need to cut $42 million this year. Louisiana’s total higher education budget is $769 million, and if the Legislature cannot raise more revenue, higher education could face a $200 million cut.

What’s happening in Louisiana is a prelude to total system collapse in the US. https://t.co/5GQBAkQK2l

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 19, 2016

Putting it against Michigan poisoning Flint to save pennies it definitely seems like we’ve crossed a threshold. https://t.co/vzdBlYF19r

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 19, 2016

* RIP, Umberto Eco. What Is Harper Lee’s Legacy After Go Set a Watchman?

2016: the year all the cool people died

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) February 20, 2016

* The New Inquiry reviews The Witness.

* The Slow Violence of Climate Change.

* At LARoB: How should we periodize comics?

* I’d been talking just yesterday to a student from my Lives of Animals class about the urban legends involving pigs and pig corpses and the war on terror. I said something like “No politician who wanted a national reputation would talk this way, though. Well, maybe Trump.” And lo, it came to pass.

* Steve Martin Performed Stand-Up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.

* Chinese travel blogger likes Chicago but loves Milwaukee. Endorsed!

* ‘Black Sludge’ Pours Out Of Texas Town’s Faucets Days After FBI Arrests Nearly Every City Official.

* The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.

The trouble was that this zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed.

* Hero K is the Highly Anticipated New Novel by Don DeLillo. I’m in.

* Half The World Will Be Short-Sighted By 2050? Half of America will be freelancers by 2020?

* In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the U.N. Security Council in March 2011 authorized military intervention in Libya, a former senior State Department official praised her achievement in “turning POTUS around on this.” Meanwhile, America Is Now Fighting a Proxy War with Itself in Syria. So that means we can’t lose, right?

* And elsewhere in smart battles wisely chosen: St. Louis Archbishop Urges Priests To Cut Ties With The Girl Scouts.

* In her new book, Elaine Frantz Parsons re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.

* Proposals for new chess pieces.

* Reds in Space: Socialist Science Fiction.

* Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed. That’s something I talk about a lot when I teach the novel.

* Seems like a lowball: Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week.

* The weirdest, best photos I found in an old Bernie Sanders archive. Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives. Footage Shows 21-Year-Old Bad Boy Bernie Sanders Being Arrested at a Protest.

* Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates.

* Bloomberg yes! Bloomberg no!

* Also at Boing Boing: Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich.

* The Guardian reports on an accusation by a former Muskegon County, Michigan health official claiming that a Catholic healthcare provider forced five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.

* The Singularity’s all right: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets.

* We already knew Doc Brown was a monster, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?

* Financialization and the end of journalism.

* “on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister…”

* Just this once.

* The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

* Elsewhere on the deep time beat: What sparked the Cambrian explosion?

* The Warriors’ Odds Of Going 73-9. Written before last night’s loss.

* This one misses me, but it may help some of you feel better: Coffee May Reduce The Damage Alcohol Does To Your Liver.

* This one’s a real emotional roller coaster: Chimp Abandoned On Island Welcomes Rescuers With Open Arms.

* From the SMBC archives: Lucy, the football, and existential dread.

* And they said my work was useless.

Weekend Links

* Because you demanded it! The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is now available in Kindle format as well for just $9.99.

* SFRA CFP: “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” June 25-27 at Stony Brook.

* Mark Bould on African Science Fiction 101.

* The Moral Hazard of Big Data.

* Racism, monuments, and historical memory.

* The Anthropocene Project. An Encyclopedia (2014–).

* The Crusades: Teach the controversy!

* Friendship Is Complicated: Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony.

* “In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names.”

* Now, a union that’s been rapidly organizing adjuncts around the country thinks that number should quintuple. Last night, on a conference call with organizers across the country, the SEIU decided to extend the franchise with a similar aspirational benchmark: A “new minimum compensation standard” of $15,000. Per course. Including benefits. To put this in perspective, a tenure-track professor earning $50,000 on a 4/4 (100% teaching, no research, no service) is paid $6250 a course — so this is definitely a realistic target.

* 12 Tech Fads in Higher Ed.

* Auburn Approves $14-Million Scoreboard, College Football’s Largest.

* Scott Walker thinks my university has fat to trim. Yet my department is barely scraping by.

* Scott Walker amends the Girl Scout Oath. From otherscottwalkeredits.tumblr.com.

* The disjuncture then comes when I consider how we are encouraged to carry ourselves in the academy. I feel a lot of pressure to professionalize, and the prescriptions for professionalization often run counter to my way of being in the world. I also struggle with the directive that I am supposed to professionalize my students. I don’t hold with the idea that I should train students to be better workers, because the content of “better” — more obedient, more efficient, whatever — runs counter to what I want to teach. In my feminist theories courses, I say, “Yeah, I  just gave you assignments with deadlines! But I also want to say to you, what’s so great about work? Why do we believe work is supposed to be edifying? Should we always have to be productive? Why do we imagine work as something that gives us dignity? What if it’s just wearing us down?” My history in punk totally informs these attempts to practice other ways of being in a classroom, and other ways of being a professor.

* Jury Awards $400,000 to Professor Laid Off by Clark Atlanta U. This is an amazing result especially considering that there are 53 other people eligible for a payout.

* Thousands Of Dominicans Woke Up This Week Without Citizenship In Any Country.

* How Science Fiction Will Help Us Go to Mars.

* Paging J. Walter Weatherman: Family arrested in fake kidnapping plot to teach 6-year-old stranger danger, police say.

* And here is where we see the true malignant force that drives the Internet: It is the purest mechanism yet through which everyone can express every idiot opinion they have about everything to everyone else.

* Ableism, neurotypicality, and the vaccine debate.

* Mississippi, #1 in vaccination. The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works.

* Rufus King named one of the most challenging high schools in America.

* We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That’s a Very, Very Bad Idea. I say teach the controversy!

* Dibs on the screenplay: Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism.

* Science is magic: Engineers Developing a Retainer That Could Let the Hearing Impaired Experience Sound With Their Tongue.

* Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results.

* The Beginning of Mein Kampf, as Told by Coca-Cola. Alas, nothing gold can stay.

* Why every member of the crew should have been courtmartialed after Generations.

* Parents who raise their kids without religion are doing just fine, studies say, possibly even better. Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly. And their kids care less about what’s cool, which—say it with me—only makes them cooler.

* Teen mom sends breast milk to baby she gave up for adoption. Dad Refuses to Give Up Newborn Son With Down Syndrome. Armenia, we need to talk.

* How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being A Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement.

* DC Comics will rebrand, again. More details.

* Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America. I’ve seen a lot of celebration of this fact that seems not to see the improving economy as a factor.

* Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews: This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender.

* Canada’s Highest Court Affirms The Right To Doctor-Assisted Suicide.

* We Are Watching Brian Williams’ Entire Career Implode.

* And it’s a little unbelievable that it’s taken this long: Netflix reportedly developing new live-action series based on Legend of Zelda.