Posts Tagged ‘good grief’
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
Finely Curated May Fifth Links (Aged to Perfection)
* I’ve had a couple of short pieces of writing go up in the last few weeks: a piece on the often overlooked epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale at LARB and a followup piece on Infinity War and franchise time at frieze.
* Maybe my favorite Infinity War take. Bady! Nussbuam! Loofburouw! Scalzi! Dreyfuss! We’re the good guys, right? Pop Culture Won’t Save Us. How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism.
* There’s also been a couple other good pieces lately pushing on whether Handmaid’s Tale really should have had a second season.
* Two from Jaimee: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* The 2018 Marquette Literary Review is up. And so is SFRA Review #324!
* CFP: An Anthology on Carrie Fisher.
* CFP: Special Double Issue: Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.
* Twitter thread: we already live in a boring dystopia.
* Most-Liked Tweets of Famous Poets.
* Fred Moten in the New Yorker!
* Janelle Monáe in Rolling Stone!
* Maybe the best “there’s just one story and we tell it over and over” I’ve ever done.
* Channeling the anti-Trump #Resistance, a slew of recent books seeks to reduce democracy to a defense of political “norms.” But overcoming today’s crisis will take more political imagination.
* Three Identical Strangers, a dark documentary about identical triplets who were separated-at-birth. Amazing story. I wish I’d waited for the movie before Googling it.
* How a tiny protest at the U. of Nebraska turned into a proxy war for the future of campus politics.
* Just in time for my summer syllabi: Junot Diaz #MeToo Accusations Surface. No Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018.
* Michigan State. Michigan State. Michigan Goddamn State. SIU. Columbia. University of Illinois at Chicago. George Mason. UNC. And in some rare good news: Oregon.
* There is no campus free speech crisis: a look at the evidence.
* “The root cause of the F.B.I. investigation are the N.C.A.A. rules limiting — actually, prohibiting — compensation for players,” he said. “And none of the recommendations speak to them — none of them.”
* What does a non-academic job search look like for a rhet/comp PhD student? I put compiled some numbers to illustrate my experience over the last 3 months.
* What Jack Kirby proposed for the plaques on the Pioneer space probes.
* Infiltration into left-wing groups is just the sharp edge of an entire armory of political policing.
* Chicago’s drinking water is full of lead, report says. Newark Water Tests Show High Lead Levels, Prompting Threat of Lawsuit.
* Vaccine refusal is contagious — and there’s no cure.
* What’s Wrong With Growing Blobs of Brain Tissue?
* One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true.
* The arc of history is long, but Somehow, Jaxxon the Ridiculous Green Space Rabbit Has Made It to the New Star Wars Canon.
* How a Genealogy Site Led to the Front Door of the Golden State Killer Suspect.
* New Documents Reveal How ICE Mines Local Police Databases Across the Country.
* Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?
* LEGO crime boss busted in Portland. No jury in the world would convict him.
* $5,751.
* Lessons From Rust-Belt Cities That Kept Their Sheen.
* The Mighty Thor’s conclusion signals the end of a Marvel Comics era. What an odd comic this was. And meanwhile: This is the Dark Side of the Rainbow of our time.
* Enjoy a tarantula burger in Durham, North Carolina.
* In New Jersey, the top lobbying spenders are from the following industries: energy, healthcare, insurance, and… balloons.
* A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.
* eFterlife. Batmen and Robins. Natural selection. Good grief.
* ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Interactive Movie in the Works at Fox.
* Two years old, but who cares: “It smelled like death”: An oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course.
* And sure, let’s make ice-nine, at this point why not.
Weekend! Links!
* Program for the 2014 MLA Subconference, January 8-9 at Columbia College Chicago.
* CFP for “Joss Whedon: A Celebration” at DePaul University this May.
* The New Yorker considers Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?
Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
* It is an open question as to whether academics today, in their heart of hearts, still realize that the choice between the employability agenda or the death of universities actually means the death of universities through the employability agenda.
* Our football team here at Purdue went 1-11, losing the final ten games in a row by an average of almost 25 points and going 0-8 in Big Ten play, including a 20 point blowout to arch-rival Indiana. The lone victory on the season came through a nail-biting 20-14 performance against Indiana State… an FCS school… who themselves went 1-11. If beating the doormat team of the Missouri Valley Conference is the highlight of your season, it’s perhaps time for a reevaluation of priorities. After ranking 122nd in points scored a game and 114th in points against a game, making a legitimate case for being the worst team in FBS football, the campus is buzzing about how long a rebuild will require and whether first-year coach Darrell Hazzell is the man to lead it. With the season’s “One Brick Higher” slogan now seeming like a sad joke, my message to the Purdue community is simple: don’t rebuild. Retreat. The best path forward for Purdue University is to dismantle its football program altogether.
* I also liked Freddie’s piece on how the permanent squabble between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty plays directly into the hands of administrators.
* This Thousand-Year Institution Could Really Learn Something from These Fly-By-Night Scams: Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge.
* Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity.
* “If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is”: Animal rights activists vs. the agribusiness industry in Rolling Stone.
* Liberalism is a game the rich play with themselves. They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen: Liberalism in the tank.
* Aaron Bady considers Mandela, all of him.
If you’re a president, it probably feels good to think about this, about how a revolutionary came to defend the stability of the society he once threatened to overturn. It probably also feels good to think of him as historical, as past: like Nkrumah or Lumumba, he is no longer our problem, no longer our responsibility. Instead of a defiant refusal to stop short of victory and a refusal to compromise or negotiate on principles, he can represent the passing away of that very thing.
* Want the best person for the job? Don’t interview.
* Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?
* Jackson’s Hobbit II so little resembles the book, it may as well be called Some Further Adventures in Middle-earth. The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction.
* Here’s Every Time Paul Rudd Has Shown the Same Movie Clip on Conan.
* Jaws retold as Peanuts comic.
* Everything in the oceans is dying.
* The Economy Looks Good Because The Data Has Been So Bad For So Long.
* No Civilian Leadership for NSA After All.
* Ph.D.s With and Without Jobs.
* Please excuse Davontaye, he suffers from povertenza.
* Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.
* A national study being released today in book form found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely than those with just average or below average looks to go on to earn a four-year college degree.
* Take that, conventional wisdom! Study: Long Distance Relationships Can Work.
* Whether you agree with the ASA’s boycott of Israeli state institutions or not, I think we can all agree that to boycott Larry Summers.
* The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.
* America, 2013: No charges after man pulls gun on ‘b*tch’ with disabled kid over Walmart parking delay.
* Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million. The Lottery Is a Predator and You Are Its Math-Illiterate Prey.
* Space Race back on! China lands on the Moon!
* Hollywood finally goes too far.
* And Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Overflow Error: Abort, Retry, Fail….
Gerry Canavan 