Thursday Noontime Links!

* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.

* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.

* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.

* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.

* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.

* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”

The @washingtonpost opinion staff should be ashamed of themselves for letting Michael Anton run this garbage op-ed. This, for example, is one of the most misleadingly edited quotes I've ever seen: pic.twitter.com/gARKf2OL1B

— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 19, 2018

Adding the extra "or" completely changes the meaning of the sentence, and IDK if editors actually look up quotes provided in op-eds or not, but maybe you should when the writer was a comms guy for a notoriously dishonest admin & wrote the Flight 93 election piece?

— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 19, 2018

[really getting into it] We need new, disruptive models of citizenship for a challenging new era. Instead of where you're born or where you live, why not base citizenship on relevant factors, like tax bracket, Amazon Prime membership status, or your credit rating?

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 19, 2018

* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.

* Deported for doing journalism.

* If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.

* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.

yes, the pee tape is real, but what's even realer is that sense of existential desolation that tells you, with total certainty, that it doesn't matter

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 19, 2018

* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.

* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.

* The “do what you want” theory of politics: Why embracing “Abolish ICE” and Medicare-for-all won’t doom the Democrats.

* America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.

* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.

* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?

* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.

* Snikt!

* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…

* Money is speech. It’s better actually.

* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?

* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.

* But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.

* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.

* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.

* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?

* Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.

* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.

* I’d watch it.

A reboot called My So-Called Mid-Life Crisis where Angela Chase is 40? I’m willing to write the pilot 😜📺

— Curtis Sittenfeld (@csittenfeld) July 18, 2018

* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.

* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.

* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?

* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.

* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.

* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.

* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.

You could teach a screenwriting class with this gif-
pic.twitter.com/NWIBVKi8LI

— David Yazbek (@DavidYazbek) July 14, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Against Ivanka.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Ben Robertson (@BenRobertson) December 20, 2016

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

* Dear tech community: your threat model just changed.

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

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

* Milo Yiannopoulos at UWM.

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

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

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

* History in the Anthropocene.

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

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

* The end of Roe v. Wade.

* Trump and oxy.

* Understanding Chicago Dibs.

* Spoilers: What Really Happens After You Die?

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

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

* It can get worse, DC Cinematic Universe edition.

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

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

Tuesday Links!

* The Paradox of New Buildings on Campus: Even as long-neglected maintenance threatens to further escalate the price of higher education, universities continue to borrow and spend record amounts on new buildings.

* The “terminal” sabbatical eases the aging academic into “retirement,” the meat grinder admins use to nourish new administrators.

* Visual Proof That America’s Weather Has Gone Completely Insane.

* Our friend Nina Riggs writes of her family’s history of cancer.

* The New York Times reviews Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive. And from Cracked: 20 Paradoxes Most Human Minds Can’t Wrap Themselves Around.

* Jessa “Bookslut” Crispin has a book! Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.

* Just in time for another convention, Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

* It’s not enough to just turn over your lunch money; you have to enjoy it.

* A final response to the “Tell me why Trump is a fascist”.

* Weird science: MIT Experiment Proves Quantum Mechanics Still in Effect at Over 400-Miles.

* Twilight of the VCR. A nation remembers.

* Disability in Abramsverse Star Trek.

* UnREAL probably is going to be bad from here on out.

* Trying to understand the data on desistance in transgender kids.

* What I’ve Learned From Having A Trans Partner.

* Brain metaphors in the Age of Trump: Is Your Nervous System a Democracy or a Dictatorship?

* Elsewhere on science corner: What high heels say about the massive gap between the rich and the poor. Ancient Campfires May Have Unleashed Humanity’s Top Bacterial Killer. Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life. This map shows how many people are getting high near you. Watch language evolve as little sims wander around a grid of islands. Personality Change May Be Early Sign of Dementia, Experts Say.

* #TheWisdomofMarkets: Nintendo shares plummet after investors realize it doesn’t actually make Pokémon Go.

* Details emerge about the new Nintendo system that I will almost certainly be buying my child sight unseen.

* Interesting details about the accident that hurt Harrison Ford on the set of The Force Awakens.

* Your policy, not mine: Pokémon Go players urged not to venture into Fukushima disaster zone.

* “You are surprisingly likely to have a living doppelgänger.”

* “Mysterious green slimy foam emerges from Utah sewer.”

* And I suppose you do have to admire it.

Happy Monday

* Secret origins of gonzo journalism: “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” by Hunter S. Thompson.

* What’s so frustrating about really upper class kids who go on to become elite pundits and write stupid stuff about this topic is that, had they any self-awareness whatsoever, they should know all about intergenerational class entrenchment. In most cases, their parents have done everything they can to make sure social mobility remains a myth.

* When a campus building is named for a famous white supremacist. Oh, hi, Duke!

* The Melancholy, Crumbling Remains Of Great Socialist Murals.

* The failures of Title IX. How a Title IX Complaint Is Processed.

* Which states have the highest levels of student debt?

* How Athletic Departments (And The Media) Fudge The Cost Of Scholarships.

* Partisan politics, segregation, and Milwaukee.

* I worry a bit that giving the 1% the option to become literal vampires might not work out great.

* Samuel R. Delany reviews Star Wars.

* A collision of greed, neglect, and mismanagement is endangering young people in America’s college capital while enriching some absentee investors — landlords who maximize profits by packing students into properties — and universities that admit many more students than they can house.

* Devo and Kent State.

* Mad Men and social change.

Where the show has faltered — and where it comes up against its contradictions — is when it attempts to look at those who are no longer living in the Before. So effective in detailing the quiet terrors of the old order, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way.

* Today in the rule of law: The Harris prohibition has resulted in law enforcement agencies using the stingrays without obtaining a court warrant, because the agencies have interpreted the contract to mean they cannot even tell a judge about their intent to use the devices.

* Milwaukee officer shoots man after struggle at Red Arrow Park. Drunk NYPD Officer Allegedly Shot a Stranger 6 Times.

* Meanwhile people are just straight-up setting up murder traps now in Stand Your Ground states.

* The Incidental State: Coercion in the Age of Big Data.

* But it turns out that if you consider the facts reported; he wasn’t a genius.  His violations of anti-trust law were obvious crimes.  Instead, his key characteristic was the one we always emphasize is critical about the most fraudulent CEOs – audacity.  Jobs had gotten away with committing so many crimes that he came to believe he was immune from prosecution.

* On crafting a nonwhite Spider-Man. Spider-Man execs kill our dreams of seeing Miles Morales on the big screen. They must really hate money.

* To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand.

* Want to Go to Mars? It’s Not That Expensive.

* Vulture: Is television art yet?

* Path to student loan debt relief for adjuncts just got a little easier–but still a long way to go.

* Ross Douthat hates your loose libertine morals so much he’ll even become a communist to oppose them.

* Gun That Can Only Be Fired By Owner Exists but No One Will Sell It Because of New Jersey.

* How Much Source Material Does HBO’s Game of Thrones Have Left to Work With? The worst news is: it seems like it’s all Jon Snow stuff…

* For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role.

* The secret history of White Coke.

* Louis C.K. versus the Common Core.

* The Ocean Floor Is Littered with Humanity’s Garbage.

* “Let It Go” was inspired by Prince, who also contributed its most memorable line.

* Should we be teaching him civics at such a young age?

* The oldest man on earth lives on the Upper West Side. Take that, Okinawa!

* Fanwanking a reason why there doesn’t seem to be many women in the Star Wars universe.

* Presenting the Wes Anderson cruise.

* And Slate celebrates the world’s best statues.

Big Monday Links

(some links stolen from the great zunguzungu)

* It’s bad enough that I’ll never be asked to reboot Back to the Future—but it’d be utterly intolerable if the gig goes to two guys I went to high school with. Jon says it’s all a big misunderstanding but you know he’s just trying to throw me off the scent.

* There is no fresh start: The Return of Mad Men and the End of TV’s Golden Age. A metafictional reading of the series. And for fun: The Foreign Language of Mad Men: Do the characters really talk like people from the ’60s?

* Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.

* Arundhati Roy: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

* In his novel “2066: Red Star Over America,” Han, China’s premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike. The seas around New York rise, the Twin Towers crumble and the U.S. is plunged into pandemonium. You had me at “Go.” Via io9.

* Do professors get paid too much for too little work? Obviously. More here.

* Related: “College Professors Demand Right to Be Mean.”

* Facebook asserts trademark on word “Book.” Can’t see that being controversial.

* It must be an election year, because suddenly the Obama administration is talking about the environment.

* Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday. “Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming,” Reuters reports. “It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. Why didn’t anybody warn us!

* Government spending is good in a recession? Why didn’t anyone tell us!

* Why is horseracing even allowed? Via MeFi.

* Rules: This is a very specific contest. Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.

* If They Directed It: The Hunger Games. I don’t think anything I’ve written on Twitter has gotten as many retweets as my brief reading of series as a utopia.

* Imagining The Wire Season Six.

* On not calling Rich Santorum “crazy.”

* Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes up his visit to the wonderful conference I was at last weekend, ICFA 2012.

A highlight of ICFA was China Miéville’s talk “On Monsters.” I am a fan of Miéville’s work; The City and the City is one of my favorite books. His narratives are always beautifully written as well as philosophically challenging. Besides possessing an astonishing vocabulary (he sends me to the dictionary, and makes me wonder how they ever gave me a PhD), he is a writer widely read in theory — though his books never turn into allegories for lit crit. They always trace problems, and stay away from anything easy. Miéville brought up Quentin Meillassoux and speculative realism, for example, during his paper (dismissively: he is not a fan of SR or object oriented philosophy, which surprised me). China’s presentation started off as straightforward account of how the uncanny might be broken into various subcategories: the ab-canny, the sur-canny, the sub-canny, the post-canny, the para-canny, and onwards. His account began seriously but spiralled into a proliferative joke. His point was that classification is not analysis, and that such a “taxonomic frenzy” (as he called it) mortifies: “the drive to translate useful constructs into foundations for analysis is deadly,” because it violently takes away the potency and possibility of the terms it organizes. What was interesting to me, though, is that China’s talk performed something, um, para-canny (right beside itself, there but unseen) that I’ve also learned from studying medieval encyclopedists: taxonomic frenzy might produce a desiccated system of emplacement in which everything gets filed into a cabinet and drained of its vitality. Or it might actually be so creative in its proliferative energy and so limned by the necessity of its own failure that it undermines its own rigidity in the very process of articulation, becoming an envitalizing and innovative act — an act of writing — rather than a system of deadening inscription. China’s multiplication of canniness had a power that he walked away from, I think: why abandon your monster like that?

* Honoring the 20th anniversary of Apollo 18 the only possible way: interactive fiction.

* This American Life: What kind of ideology?

* “He Was a Crook”: Longform.org remembers Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.

* Haiti: Where did the money go?

* Support for Afghan War falls. Support for NC anti-gay amendment rises.

A recent Elon University poll found that 58 percent of North Carolinians oppose the amendment, with 38 in favor of it. That poll surveys adults statewide, while the WRAL News poll includes the results only of likely voters.

Despite the broad amendment support in the WRAL News poll, only 37 percent of voters said same-sex couples deserve no legal recognition in North Carolina, according to the poll.

So you have no idea what you’re voting for and won’t bother to find out. Got it.

* Because the 2012 campaign hasn’t been tedious enough: 2016.

* Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching. The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin’s Killer Go Free. On Trayvon Martin as innocent victim.

* Why Obama’s Healthcare Law Is Constitutional. Absolutely everything you need to know about health reform’s Supreme Court debut. What the Supreme Court Could Do About Obamacare, Explained. Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare.’

* If I didn’t know better I’d say this little video has some sort of message.

* MLA Job Information List data back to 1965.

* Infographic of the night: Doomsday Predictions Debunked.

* The headline reads, “UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters.” Huh! I really thought they’d give themselves hell.

Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: “A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes.”

You’re a university, for Christ’s sake. My god.

* What could possibly go wrong? Has Obama put us on a permanent war footing, even in peacetime?

* And what could possibly go wrong? Tacocopter could be the unmanned future of food delivery. Some should have read more Jenny Rhee.

Gonzo Journalism

Everyone can go home early today. This image already won the night.

Great Moments in Rejection Letters

…at the Atlantic.