Posts Tagged ‘How did we survive the 1990s?’
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 13, 2018 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1990s, 9/11, Abu Dhabi, academia, air travel, airlines, airports, algorithms, America, anesthesia, animals, Antarctica, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, books, boomerang effect, cancer, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, CEOs, CFPs, child protective services, China Miéville, Choose Your Own Adventure, class struggle, climate change, college football, computer security, conferences, copyright, Dan Harmon, debt, debt collection, deportation, depression, dinosaurs, Disney, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, Episode 8, family, fandom, fascism, Flight of the Concords, Fox, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, global south, graduate school, graphs, guns, Hamilton, homelessness, How did we survive the 1990s?, How the University Works, human capital contracts, humor, hurricanes, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income inequality, Intel, left-handedness, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literature, Lovecraft, LSU, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marxism, mental health, mental illness, Mickey Mouse, MLA, mortgages, NCAA, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, no exit, no way out, North Carolina, North Korea, Octavia Butler, offshore drilling, opera, Parable of the Sower, parenting, pedagogy, philosophy, police state, politics, pollution, prison, Puerto Rico, Quantum Leap, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rise of the machine, Rise of the Machines, roads to nowhere, robots, Saga, Saving Private Ryan, science, science fiction, SCUMM, segregation, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexual harassment, Slenderman, Social Security, Solo, Southwest, Star Wars, Stephen King, student debt, syllabi, teaching, The Handmaid's Tale, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the university in ruins, tigers, time travel, trans* issues, universal basic income, Uno, Utopia, Vonnegut, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, Wisconsin
Thursday Links!
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) November 4, 2015
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Written by gerrycanavan
November 5, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Aaron Sorkin, Ark of the Covenant, astronauts, atheism, Barack Obama, BBC, Ben Carson, Bush, Cheney, class struggle, Democrats, dinosaurs, Elmo, football, gender, globalization, His Dark Materials, How did we survive the 1990s?, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Iraq, Kate Hayles, McKenzie Wark, military-industrial-academic complex, NASA, neoliberalism, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, patriotism, Philip Pullman, Pixar, Player Piano, politics, propaganda, stories, teach the controversy, technology, the Anthropocene, the dark side of the digital, the digital, the pyramids, time travel, Uber, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, writing
A Young High-Functioning Sociopath Named Zack Morris Who Has the Strange Ability to Stop the Flow of Time Itself
Following up on the cliffhanger ending of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman 1988: The League of Extraordinary Gentlepersons 1996.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 22, 2012 at 12:03 am
Friday Links
* Our music was terrible, our fashion was terrible, our movies were corny as fuck and no meaningful growth took place: How to be 1990s.
* How to argue on the Internet. In the spirit of Derailing for Dummies.
* Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch as “transreal SF.”
*Headline of the week: “Professor charged with peeing on colleague’s door.”
* And alas, Dubai.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 28, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Three for Friday
* You had me at “lost unpublished Dr. Seuss manuscript.”
* You had me at “art show tribute to Wes Anderson.”
* You had me at “a Clinton aide lost the nuclear launch codes.”
Written by gerrycanavan
October 15, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Behold, the Mother of All Saturday Linkdumps!
* Polish President Lech Kaczynski has apparently been killed in a plane crash in western Russia, alongside much of the leadership of the country. Updates at MeFi.
* Yesterday Stevens made it official. The timeline. A shortlist. The politics of shortlists. An offbeat shortlist. How about Cory Booker? Why Obama shouldn’t shy away from a confirmation fight. Why Glenn Greenwald is lukewarm on frontrunner Elena Kagan. Why the GOP may use the SCOTUS hearings as another excuse to freak out about health care. Or maybe just another excuse to flip out period. Still more at MeFi.
* Totally independent of anything anyone anywhere has said or done, threats against members of Congress have increased threefold in recent months. It’s a funny coincidence that means absolutely nothing.
* George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
* Everything old is new again: Gingrich says Republicans will shut down the government if they take over.
* Tony Judt on crisis, neoliberalism, greed, the end of history, and the need for a new New Left.
For thirty years students have been complaining to me that “it was easy for you”: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. “We” (the children of the Eighties, the Nineties, the “Aughts”) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us—just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a “lost generation.”
If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: “we” know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?
* Full with polls: The IRS is more popular than the tea partiers.
* “Kind of a Glenn Beck approach”: On male studies. More at Salon.
* Another great segment from the Daily Show about blatant Fox News dishonesty, this one on the lies they’re telling about the START treaty. But the quote of the day on this comes from who else but Michele Bachmann, who calls for the U.S. to commit to nuclear retaliation in the event of a devastating cyber attack.
* Matt Yglesias on Treme‘s battle between realism and sentimentality.
* Comic book cartography. Their link to the principles of Kirbytech from my friends at Satisfactory Comics is pretty great too.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? I’m surprised there’s even debate about something that is so trivially true.
* Negative Twenty Questions, John Wheeler’s analogy for quantum mechanics.
* Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Welcome to the elderly age.
* Multicellular life found that can live entirely without oxygen.
* xkcd’s version of hell is now fully playable.
* Chris Christie working overtime to destroy public universities in New Jersey.
* In Washington, D.C., you’re not a rape victim unless police say so. Via Feministe.
* HIV-positive Michigan man to be tried as bioweapon.
* Are we still waiting for the other shoe to drop on Greece?
* The Texas miracle? Wind power in an oil state.
* Two from Krugman: Building a Green Economy and Al Gore Derangement Syndrome.
* Somewhat related: Tim Morton on hyperobjects.
Hyperobjects are phenomena such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience. In this sense, hyperobjects are like those tubes of toothpaste that say they contain 10% extra: there’s more to hyperobjects than ordinary objects.
* The Illinois Poison Control Center has a blog. MetaFilter has highlights.
* And Gizmodo has your periodic table of imaginary elements.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 10, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, airplanes, Al Gore, anti-feminism, Barack Obama, biology, blogs, Chris Christie, climate change, comics, Cory Booker, crisis, cyberterrorism, Daily Show, David Simon, disaster, ecology, Elena Kagan, eliminationism, end of history, energy, Fox News, Greece, greed, Green Recovery, Guantánamo, health care, Hell, HIV and AIDS, How did we survive the 1990s?, How the University Works, hyperobjects, Jack Kirby, John Paul Stevens, Krugman, Krypton, lies and lying liars, male studies, many worlds and alternate universes, maps, Michele Bachmann, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New New Left, New Orleans, Newt Gingrich, nuclearity, oil, periodic tables, poison control, Poland, politics, polls, quantum mechanics, rape culture, realism, Republicans, Satisfactory Comics, science fiction, sentimentality, student debt, Superman, Supreme Court, taxes, Tea Party, television, Tetris, Texas, the cosmos, the elderly, Tim Morton, Tony Judt, Treme, violence, war on terror, Washington D.C., when you stare too long into the abyss the abyss stares back into you, wind power, xkcd
‘The Clinton Curse’
Colbert reveals the startling truth behind the Clinton curse.
The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
The Clinton Curse | ||||
www.colbertnation.com | ||||
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Written by gerrycanavan
July 2, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with Bill Clinton, How did we survive the 1990s?, Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich, politics