Posts Tagged ‘human extinction’
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
(and so on)
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Monday Morning Links!
* In Milwaukee, I lived two lives. On the East Side was the liberal Catholic school I attended for nine years; on the North Side was everything else. Dateline Milwaukee: Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation. Some Lesser Known Justice Facts about Milwaukee and Wisconsin. And a more positive Milwaukee profile: How Milwaukee Shook Off the Rust: The Midwestern hub reclaimed some of its industrial glory by doing a surprising thing. It cleaned up.
* Google’s response to inquiries was chilling: “Google News Archive no longer has permission to display this content.” Entire Google archive of more than a century of stories is gone. Why?
* A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
* Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse. Special congratulations to N.K. Jemisin, whose The Fifth Season I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and to Nnedi Okorafar, whose “Binti” I have read already and is fantastic. Relatedly, Abigail Nussbaum asks: Do the Hugos actually need saving?
* In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.
* This seems like a pretty big deal: Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail.
* U.S. Army only fudged its accounts by mere trillions of dollars, auditor finds.
* An Indiana City Is Poised To Become The Next Flint.
* Another late-summer syllabus: Problems in Posthumanism. #WelfareReformSyllabus. And a study guide for a world without police.
* “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world. I may have half my squad there for hours.”
* Ranking the Most (and Least) Diverse Colleges in America. Marquette sneaks in at #86, while my alma mater Case Western is a surprisingly high #40 and Duke gets #32.
* The strangeness of deep time.
* “The jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. In other words, only the best-educated humans will compete with machines,” Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist, told Pew. “And education systems in the US and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what is told to them, preparing them for life in a 20th century factory.” Nothing can stop Judgment Day, but with the liberal arts you just might have a chance of surviving it…
* 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you.
* Hot.
* Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’saislados, as isolated people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of his tribe.
* The poet and activist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
* Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore.
* Pittsburgh and the birth of the self-driving car.
While people around the world will no doubt continue to project various fantasies onto the tiny island republic, the fact remains that Iceland has yet to see any surge in left mobilization comparable to that in Portugal and Greece — or even the more modest adjustments being made inside the two trans-Atlantic establishment left-liberal parties in the form of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns.
* This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP.
* 88 College Taglines, Arranged as a Poem.
Lang will reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch, Avatar’s villain who appeared definitively dead at the end of the film after taking several huge Na’vi arrows through his chest. Despite that setback, Quaritch is expected to be resurrected in some way and will appear in all the remaining sequels.
Eywa* save us all.
* Reader, I googled it.
* Lovecraft and suburbia and Stranger Things.
* Anyway, the point I’d like you to take away from this is that while it’s really hard to say “sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible”, the smart money says that it’s extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We’d need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances … and that’s for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.
* I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
* My new favorite Twitter bot: @dungeon_junk.
* Viacom is hemorrhaging money, in part on the basis of the struggling Star Trek (and Ninja Turtles, and Ben Hur) reboot franchises.
* Friend acquires a lot of cheese. What to do with it?
* And of course you had me at Historic Midcentury Modernist Motels of the New Jersey Coast.
Weekend Links!
* Good news, everyone! “A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.
* What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny of the Impression.
* U. of New Hampshire Concedes It Shouldn’t Have Bought $17,000 Table.
* Chicago State lays off a third of its staff.
* RiffTrax tackles The Force Awakens.
* The legally and ethically fraught world of post-mortem sperm donation.
* Raising a Child With Grit Can Mean Letting Her Quit.
* Yale Watch: Neither retaining Calhoun nor adding Franklin makes a lick of sense.
* Elisabeth Moss to Star in Hulu Straight-to-Series Drama Handmaid’s Tale.
* Heroic time-traveling weasel shuts down Large Hadron Collider to protect the weasel future.
* “Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.” Meanwhile: Susan Sarandon: I’m more afraid of Hillary’s war record than Trump’s wall.
* And he’s will have had always had my vote: This Candidate for President Claims He’s Traveled Through Time.
What Day Is It? Links
* Jaimee’s book was reviewed in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last week. We spent the weekend in DC for her book launch and reading at the Folger, which was amazing. She just absolutely killed it. Buy her book! And come to her reading in Milwaukee next week…
* Part of the issue is an image problem around the impact of humanities research on the wider world. The public should know about Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke University, whose explanation of the “outbreak narrative” of contagion is changing the way scientists think about the spread of infectious diseases. Yeah they should! Humanities research is groundbreaking, life-changing… and ignored.
* “The Time Traveller,” a story in tweets by Alberto Chimal.
* “Nuclear War” Turns 50: A Fun Game about Human Extinction.
* Professorial anger, then and now. A bit more here.
* Every NYT Higher-Ed Thinkpiece Ever Written. How to write an essay about teaching that will not be published in the NYT, Chronicle, IHE, or anywhere else.
* The semipublic intellectual.
* What happens when you fiddle with just one knob on the infernal machine: rich people get richer.
* Billionaires and superstorms.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Are Public Universities Going to Disappear?
* The care work of the (mostly female) academic: “I estimate that someone cries in my office at least once every three weeks.”
* An incredibly rare Tolkien-annotated map of Middle-Earth was just discovered in a used bookstore.
* Highly irregular: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be considered the eighth book in the Harry Potter series.
* In a final speech to the synod, Pope Francis endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States, while taking some clear swipes at conservatives who hold up church doctrine above all else, and use it to cast judgment on others.
* What Happens if a Former CEO Actually Goes to Prison?
* Cop Attacks High School Student In Her Classroom.
* The Hoverboard Scene In Back To The Future 2 Nearly Killed A Stuntwoman. Amazing story.
* Look, I’m not made of stone.
* A Google Tour Through The Underground: How to Read a Russian Novel Set in the Moscow Metro.
* NLRB Returns to Grad Student Unions.
* Bring on the climate trials: ICN has demonstrated that as early as the late 1970s, Exxon scientists were briefing top executives that climate change was real, dangerous, and caused by their product. By the early 1980s, their own climate models were predicting—with great accuracy—the track the global temperature has taken ever since. Meanwhile.
* David Mitchell on A Wizard of Earthsea.
* College sports: still the worst.
* Portugal has apparently smartly baked the potential for coups in its official constitutional order.
* Emolument took data from both the US and UK and found that while science grads get a bit of a headstart straight out of university in terms of pay, in later life it’s people with humanities degrees who tend to get bigger pay cheques.
* How to Make a Virtuoso Violinist: One mother’s devastating study of 100 musical prodigies.
* A DEA Agent Who Helped Take Down Silk Road Is Going to Prison for Unbelievable Corruption.
* The Ecological Uncanny: On the “Southern Reach” Trilogy.
* Boondoggle watch: The City of Milwaukee has been awarded a $14.2 million federal grant for construction of a spur connecting the streetcar with the lakefront.
* “Many Colleges’ New Emergency Plan: Try to Account for Every Possibility.” Well, that’ll work.
* Should a Cal State Fullerton math professor be forced to have his students use $180 textbook, written by his boss? Why is Cal State letting the math department chair require his own book?
* “They didn’t hire me, they hired me minus 35 pounds,” Fisher recently quipped.
* The arc of history is long, but Subway will finally pay for calling an eleven-inch sandwich a “footlong.” Next up: they shouldn’t be allowed to call that bread.
* Miracles and wonders: Landmark Huntington’s trial starts.
* Star Wars but with philosophers.
* “Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas.”
* Sesame Street will introduce an autistic muppet.
* I hate it when Yglesias is right, but sometimes he’s right: Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble. Down-ballot the Obama years have been a complete disaster in ways no one in the party seems ready or able to face.
* Wesleyan University’s student assembly is considering substantial cuts to the student newspaper’s budget, in a move that is surely *completely unrelated* to a truly stupid recent uproar when the paper published an unpopular op-ed. The paper is soliciting donations to stay alive.
* My brilliant colleague C.J. Hribal on his old house.
* The secret linguistic life of girls.
* Talkin’ Trash with Brian Thill and Pinar Yoldas.
* Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
* A literary history of whales.
* The Deadly Legacy of HIV Truthers.
* Things Men In Literature Have Died From.
* Exploring ‘Cartozia Tales,’ The Crowdfunded Fantasy Anthology for Readers of All Ages.
* Nabokov v. Kafka on drawing the monster.
* “Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here”: throwing shade the Le Guin way.
* Guys, we are definitely living inside a simulation. And possibly just a few years away from either crashing it or figuring out how to hack it.
* And teach the controversy: Luke Skywalker, Sith Lord. I really think this is just an effective viral marketing ploy, but I’ll concede I’m starting to have my doubts.
Gerry Canavan 