Posts Tagged ‘graduate school’
Just Another Monday Morning Linkpost
* I asked “If you were going to do a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM lit crit class where the gimmick was that you always returned to a foundational text for application, what would you choose?” and got some really good ideas. Right now, if I do it rather than a multiple-choice or wheel-of-fortune variant, it looks like it’s going to be Frankenstein.
* CFP for SFRA 2019, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
* Her Eyes Weren’t Watching God: The Empathetic Secular Vision of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin – Building a World.
* Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in first look at ‘Lord Of The Rings’ author’s biopic. Deadwood Movie Confirmed for Spring 2019 Premiere. And the new Aladdin movie looks worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.
* This week I went on a journey into the madness of The Phantom Podcast, which reviews the Star Wars prequel trilogy as if the series began with Episode 1, and I regret nothing. Scroll all the way down.
* Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided: There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.
* Students and Faculty Plan Walkout Over Johns Hopkins’ ICE Contract.
* How to Make Grad School More Humane.
* Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate.
* International Graduate-Student Enrollments and Applications Drop for 2nd Year in a Row.
* WTF Is Going on at Wright State? Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
* “Student Loan Relief or Paid Vacation? These Workers Get a Choice.” Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans.
* Every tweet in this thread is enraging. Every one.
* Julian Glander’s Art Sqool is about Froshmin, a small, round person who is going to an art school run by an artificial intelligence that is going to help Froshmin become a great artist. Or at least some kind of artist. Actually, thinking about it, the weird little robot who evaluates all of your art doesn’t make any promises about ability or skill or fame or recognition as a product of the time that Froshmin spends at Art Sqool. Wait, shit, is this a scam?
* When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation.
* When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)
* How Flight Attendants Grounded Trump’s Shutdown.
* The battle for the future of Stonehenge.
* 250 dead, $91 billion in damages: 2018 was a catastrophic year for U.S. weather; 4th-warmest for globe. A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan. Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases. Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. Global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. The end of the Colorado. Polar thinking.
* Latinos, blacks breathe 40 percent more pollution than whites in California, study says.
* Liberal Democrats Formally Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry. More here.
* Ugh. Gotta preserve this flawless system.
* Please Stop Writing Nancy Pelosi Fan Fiction.
* Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Dead.
* Meanwhile, it sounds like things going great in Britain.
* Brett Kavanaugh Just Declared War on Roe v. Wade.
* Parable of the Talents watch: Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency.
* “I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book.
* Sesame Workshop has finally given up on Bert and Ernie.
* On the end of The Good Place.
* Patreon planning to completely betray its user base, of course.
* Google is already way down that road. As is everyone else.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York’s establishment Dems to eliminate her district.
* Headlines from the end of the world: “Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate.”
* Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows. 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.
* “Hackers using black-market Israeli ICE-breakers to extort a billionaire who’s replacing his employees with robots, at the behest of a shadowy tabloid/petromonarchy alliance, is actually the cyberpunk future we were promised, and yet.” But for real.
* On Jaws 4. On a legally distinct Harry Potter.
* Young engineer upgraded the LEGO bionic arm he built for himself.
* I’m amazed it’s even legal to sell these paintings in Germany.
* Finland gave people free money. It didn’t help them get jobs — but does that matter?
* The meat industry vs. lab-grown meat.
* An antibiotic-style treatment for cancer? Let’s hope.
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
Last Weekend Before Classes Links!
* CFP: Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Gathering. MLA 2019 CFP: Stephen King at 45. Call for applications: The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.
* A special issue of Palimpsest on The Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.
* Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi. Parable of the Butler as an opera.
* Syllabus: Good Grief: Humor and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature.
* There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Very nice long read in the Guardian on what depression is and isn’t.
* Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance.
* Black Mirror did this one already: Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner’s mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.
* The 90s, World War II, and the War on Terror. Great little bit of cultural analysis in comic form, derived from a Chris Hayes essay from 2006.
* Tiny books of the resistance.
* Can the humanities be defended? Well, it depends.
* The Fierce Urgency of “How.”
* Trump’s offshore drilling plan defies ‘wishes of every coastal state, city and county.’ Insurance after climate change. Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, Ground Zero in the Fight for Climate Justice. Climate change and the global south. A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise.
* UBI already exists for the 1%. A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem.
* 5 things to know about Puerto Rico 100 days after Hurricane Maria.
* But the most notable difference in the table is political: no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance’s book.
* The woman behind the “Shitty Men in Media” list. How I Learned to Look Believable. Why Dan Harmon’s sexual-misconduct confession is actually worth listening to.
* “Every single neighbor I’ve had has died of cancer.” This Town Is So Toxic, They Want It Wiped off the Map.
* This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love. On Liking Women.
* Justice Department Announces Court Order Revoking Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue. Washington state AG sues Motel 6 over giving ICE info on 9,000 guests. 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection. Trump may deport thousands of Indian H-1B visa holders as they wait for green cards. To fulfill Trump’s vision on immigration, sheriffs are trampling over constitutional principles. The head of ICE is calling for mayors and local city councilmen to be arrested. Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor. ICE to move forward with deportation of paraplegic boy’s caregiver. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence. Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words. And of course.
* This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.
* If the President Is Uniquely Dangerous, Treat Him That Way.
* Child protective services and artificial intelligence.
* The end of computer security. An amazing coincidence.
* How students pay for graduate school.
* Bringing back indentured servitude. Let’s let kids mortgage their social security while they’re at it.
* We Finally Know Why People Are Left- Or Right-Handed.
* The case for (and against) the tiger living on LSU’s campus.
* College football has the money to pay players. The College Football Playoff proves it.
* North Carolina gerrymander ruled illegal, again.
* You Won’t Live to See the Final Blade Runner Movie.
* Uh Oh—CRISPR Might Not Work in Most People.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* Police departments nationwide agree: guns officially have more rights than people.
* Solo, oh no. Star Wars fatigue is real. Why So Many Men Hate The Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why. The Last Jedi and fandom. The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen. Poe Dameron apologetics.
* Teaching the controversy the Duke way.
* Marxism and Nintendo? I love my Switch, so anything that keeps me from not feeling too bad about owning it… Nintendo’s Resurgence Was the Best Tech Story of 2017. More at MetaFilter.
* Airline travel has become so safe even I’m barely afraid of it anymore.
* Southwest Flips on Big Three Airlines in Cartel Case.
* Boomeranging the boomerang effect.
* Web comic of the month: “Three Jumps.”
* The Handmaid’s Tale after Margaret Atwood.
* Flight of the Conchords forever.
* Stop speculating about Trump’s mental health.
* The end of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Era? We’ll see.
* Hamilton in London. Hamilton in Milwaukee. Next up: Saga, the Musical?
* As for the bots themselves, #R2DoubleD and #TripleCPU are indeed a very cool sight to behold but (in my opinion) don’t come close to anything ever approaching “arousing.”
* Carrie Fisher’s private philosophy coach.
* Updated rules for Settlers of Catan.
* Choose Your Own Adventure, in graph form. Interactive map of every Quantum Leap time jump.
* What happens to the mind under anesthesia?
* And you’ve already seen it, but just for the record. Almost been one year. Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven’t Even Imagined Yet. There’s no way out.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”
* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
Tuesday Night Links!
* AHCA/BCRA is dead but Obamacare repeal is still alive. The past 24 hours in health care, explained. They’ve already moved past “repeal and delay” to “let make Obamacare fail.”
* Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, is hurtling toward his first fiasco. Second when you remember Batman v. Superman.
* Trump, Putin had second, undisclosed talk at G-20. Donald Trump Jr. Met Russian Accused of Laundering $1.4 Billion.
* Even Wormtongue’s looking for the exits: Christie: ‘Probably against the law’ to get opposition research from Russia.
* Trump’s Air War Has Already Killed More Than 2,000 Civilians. 12 civilians a day.
* “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas. Very good piece, as is to be expected from Rortybomb.
* Bernie Sanders needs a protégé.
* What happens to local news when there is no local media to cover it?
* The city needs to do more to minimize arrests. District attorneys can take the lead by refusing to prosecute most, if not all, of these cases.
* Aaron Bady on Game of Thrones as it enters its final stretch.
This is a problem that afflicts Westeros as a whole. In a world where “everywhere…they hurt little girls,” as Cersei reminded Oberyn, the limits to rational knowledge are something only those who have been hurt seem to understand. Sansa doesn’t know the military stuff—her father never allowed her to learn—but she knows what Jon seems not to, that Cersei is a nightmarish vortex of danger for them, and that she will find a way. Jon is complacent about the south, but Sansa knows what he doesn’t: the Lannisters might be broke and outnumbered and beset on all sides, but the machinations of the plot will not allow them to fall, not yet. (And she is right, they will). Meanwhile Cersei knows what her brother doesn’t seem to know, that troop numbers and logistics and gold are not so important in a world where Euron Greyjoy can have his best ships stolen but still somehow show up with an armada of a thousand ships. But it’s not because they’re women that they know something that men don’t know, or not precisely that: having had their worlds destroyed around them—having had the unthinkable and unspeakable happen to them—they have brought out of their experiences a useful skepticism about the things that people think they know, in their security. It’s because Jon and Jaime only know what they know, and are satisfied with it, that their knowledge has limits. The world makes sense to them, as the patriarchy does for patriarchs.
* Iron Man says Ultron is an existential threat to humanity.
* The Rise and Fall of F. Lee Bailey, the Lawyer Who Set O.J. Simpson Free.
* 355 issues of sci-fi golden age magazine Galaxy are now available at The Internet Archive.
* The cure came too late for me, alas.
* No.
* And No One Looks Good in the Ugly Drama Surrounding Kermit the Frog’s Firing. No, I don’t expect anyone would…
Monday Morning Links!
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here’s a Storify of the weekend’s #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* ‘Seat 14C’ short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington’s Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump’s CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it’s much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a “bipartisan” patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There’s no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the “Xennial” label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It’s a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Iran’s temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson’s widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* McConnell’s nearing a deal. Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes.
* ‘Terrorism’ misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I’m like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane’s backstory.
Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks!
* Once more, with feeling: Should You Go to Graduate School?
* CFP: Not Reading: University of Chicago English Graduate Conference.
* What are Muppets, anyway? Monsters from an evolutionary perspective.
* No.
* The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.
* Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign. More. More.
* Dungeons and Dragons and the class system.
* Bruno Latour: The New Climate.
* Which country shall we bomb today?
* Against “Fearless Girl”: 1, 2, 3. And a counterpoint.
* The Secret at the Heart of A.I.: No one really understands how it works.
* Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense.
* How artificial intelligence learns to be racist.
* The new Star Wars theme park seems like a place my kids will completely love.
* The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners.
* The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban.
* California State University cannot justify administrative growth, manager raises, audit says.
* The coming British bloodbath.
* The fake news long con: The Anne Frank Center.
* Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia.
* “I always have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the economies of post-collapse fictional societies.”
* Every Sci-Fi Star Map. Keep scrolling, we’re not done yet!
* Why the FBI Kept a 1,400-Page File on Einstein.
* American energy use, in one diagram. 410. There hasn’t been a cool month in 628 months. A closer look at how rich countries “outsource” their CO2 emissions to poorer ones. Countries Need to Move to Zero-Carbon Energy Now–Here’s Why.
* Why are doctors giving anti-psychotic drugs to toddlers? Kids Who Use Touchscreen Devices Sleep Less at Night. Let the children play.
* A New Study Confirms What You’ve Long Suspected: Facebook Is Making People Crazy.
* History as a never-ending struggle to delay the Nazi takeover of the world.
* Star Trek: Discovery delayed again, again. Ian McShane says a Deadwood movie script’s made its way to HBO. Every New (and Returning!) Development Thrawn Brings to the Star Wars Universe. ‘Locke and Key’ Pilot From Carlton Cuse Set at Hulu. Can Batman Beyond save the DCEU? And because you demanded it!
* Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science.
* What’s the most American movie ever made?
* NASA announces one of Saturn’s moons could support alien life in our solar system. NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere. Space Leaves Astronauts Partially Blind, and We May Finally Know Why. Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist.
* Recycling is in trouble — and it might be your fault.
* Why United Was Legally Wrong to Deplane David Dao. How Much Money Will David Dao Make From United Airlines?
* Moderate drinking is good for you, if you don’t control for wealth.
* Nintendo doesn’t want you to be happy.
* Jeff VanderMeer amends the apocalypse.
* It might be easier to make a list of who isn’t working for Putin.
* The Landmark Sexual Assault Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.
* There’s just one story and we tell it over and over.
* Editing the Constitution: Wisconsin conservatives are pushing for a constitutional convention. What are their motives? Oh, I bet it’s fine.
* Fifteen Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Film and TV Projects with Black Talent to Get Excited About.
* First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump.
* Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a federal informant?
* Trustees of the Whittier Law School said on Wednesday that it would close down, making it the first fully accredited law school in the country to shut at a time when many law schools are struggling amid steep declines in enrollment and tuition income.
* If you want a vision of the future. The thing is though. The hero’s journey.
* And just in case you haven’t heard: Capitalism is violence.
