Posts Tagged ‘Hurricane Harvey’
A Desperate Last-Ditch Mission to Close All My Tabs
* My Hamilton seminar got some nice national press last week, in both print and video flavors. Check it out!
* Call for Papers: Worlding SF! I’m scheduled to give my first conference keynote at this one.
* Electric Athenaeum: Call for Submissions! Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene!
* BookScrolling’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Written by Women. A solid list! Octavia’s Daughters: Meet the New Queens of Spec Fic. Behold, the mega thread you created with over 200 recs of books by POCs.
* I’m confident this will be the most interesting Star Trek movie of all time, whether it’s the best or worst Star Trek movie of all time.
* The Revolutionary Optimism of Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels. When Obama met Liu Cixin.
* Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork.
* Still trying not to obsess over every twist and turn of the Trump administration, but this is truly something, even by Republican standards. Proposed rule would protect employers who steal workers’ hard-earned tips. The tax cut that ate America. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lets corporations loose to do what they will—and then imposes pain to make the numbers work. ‘Death to Democrats’: How the GOP Tax Bill Whacks Liberal Tenets. 15,000 people a year. Oops. Not even CHIP can survive these people. FBI Pretty On-Brand. The rot goes all the way down. Gaming out the risk of nuclear war with North Korea. Opening the floodgates. The case for normalizing impeachment.
* The Uncounted: Jobs and Graduates. I think colleges have ignored just how much goodwill has been burned up by the rise in college costs. Graduate Students Mobilize ‘to Stop Something That Can Ruin Us.’ Universities are also to blame for the GOP’s ‘grad student tax.’ The fire next time. The case for federal universities. Student debt: something has to give. The odd case of Hillsdale College. Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a chilling vision of things to come.
* Isn’t this just a pitch for S.P.E.C.T.R.E?
* Moody’s Warns Cities to Address Climate Risks or Face Downgrades. The Texas Town That’s Been Without Clean Water for Thirty Years.
* More than 20,000 Children Have Been Homeless Since Hurricane Harvey. We don’t talk at all about Puerto Rico anymore.
* How did we survive the Cold War?
* When we think about the environmental conditions under which young Americans are developing, a lack of trust makes sense as a survival adaptation. A market that doles out success on an increasingly individual basis is not a strong foundation for high levels of social interdependence. With all youth activities centered on the production of human capital, even team sports become sole pursuits. Add this to the intensive risk aversion that characterizes contemporary parenting and the zero-tolerance risk-elimination policies that dominate the schools and the streets, and it’s a wonder Millennials can muster enough trust to walk outside their own doors.
* These Doomsday Preppers Are Starting to Switch From Gold to Bitcoin. The longer BTC persists, the worse the eventual blowout—and the more angry people there are going to be. Angry people who are currently being recruited and radicalized by neo-Nazis. Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa.
* Domestic terror: ICE tracks down immigrant who spoke to media in SW Washington: ‘You are the one from the newspaper.’
* Escalating in Afghanistan, again, without even the pretense of a strategic goal.
* Zoning laws and resistance. It’s too late for Robert Mueller to save us. All of our institutions will abet, not arrest, this disaster.
* How the Republicans broke Congress. Trump and the failure of incrementalism.
* At this, the girl adopted a stern expression. “You’re not supposed to play!” she said, commandingly. She seemed pleased that the game afforded her an opportunity to reprimand her teacher—a chance to express a different facet of her imagination. “You are not supposed to play in preschool,” she said, with conviction. “You are supposed to work.” The girl had absorbed both the explicit and the implicit lessons of the schoolroom in which she spent her days. So far, it seemed, her education was a success. Against Success Academy.
* To the extent that Jackie was aware that what she told Sabrina Erdely was not true, it was destructive and wrong, cruel and stupid. If she really was not in command of reality, that would mitigate her culpability, but it wouldn’t change the nature of what she did. It was violence. And to me, it was a betrayal — or that’s what it felt like. I knew it was irrational to feel that way, but that’s how I felt. I want to condemn it, and I do condemn it, but I also think I can guess what she was saying, or would have said, which can’t be said reasonably. It must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t you fucking dare not look. I’m going to make you look. I’m going to make you know. You’re going to know what we’ve decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to remember.
* A Timeline of Everything We Know Happened After Return of the Jedi, Up to The Last Jedi.
* American Airlines Glitch Could Strand Thousands Of Holiday Flights. Good on the pilots for signing up before anyone told management.
* What’s on the ground in The Jetsons?
* Facebook is studying your self-censorship.
* Solidarity to our brothers in arms.
* And on the pedestal these words appear:
Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!
* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!
* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…
* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.
* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.
* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.
* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.
* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.
* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.
* This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.
* Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.
* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.
* The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.
* Death at a Penn State Fraternity.
* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.
* African Science Fiction, at LARB.
* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.
* Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.
* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.
* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.
* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.
* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.
* This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.
* A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.
* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.
* “Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”
* They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
* When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.
* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.
* Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.
* How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.
* What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.
* Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.
* * ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!
* Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.
* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.
* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”
* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.
* We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!
* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’
* An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.
* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?
* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.
* Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.
* The Digital Humanities Bust.
* We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.
* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?
* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.
* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.
Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.
That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.
* Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.
* Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.
* Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.
* The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
* In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.
* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.
* Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
* The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.
* I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.
* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.
* I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”
* An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.
* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.
* The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.
* The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!
* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.
Closing All My Tabs Tuesday
* CFP: Octavia Butler Companion. CFP: MOSF Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Afrofuturism. CFP: Shakespeare and Science Fiction. CFP: Monsters and Monstrosity, A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal. CFP: Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies: New Epistemologies and Relational Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene.
* Classic “you had one job” situation: Credit giant Equifax says Social Security numbers, birth dates of 143 million consumers may have been exposed. How to Protect Yourself from that Massive Equifax Breach. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You.
* A Poem About Your University’s Brand New Institute’s Conference.
* Academe on the Auction Block.
* Adjuncting in Trump Country: What Has Not Changed.
* She Was a Rising Star at a Major University. Then a Lecherous Professor Made Her Life Hell.
* What to Do When the Nazis Are Obsessed with Your Field. J.R.R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit.
* What the Rich Won’t Tell You.
* Dreamers at Marquette. Marquette University leaders show support for students affected by DACA announcement. Why ending DACA is so unprecedented. And they tried to warn us: Immigrants Gave Their Info to Obama, Now Trump Could Use It to Deport Them. How to Support Students Facing Immigration Crises: Suggested Policies and Best Practices for UCI Departments/Faculty. The 3 bills Congress could use to protect DACA recipients. The United States Cannot Be Trusted.
* Trump’s Repeal of DACA Is the GOP’s Pathology in a Nutshell: An entire country is being held hostage by a thin slice of the Republican electorate, and they answer to no one.
* ICE Wrongly Imprisoned an American Citizen for 1,273 Days. Judges Say He’s Owed $0. Relatives of Undocumented Children Caught Up in ICE Dragnet. ICE wants to destroy records that show abuses and deaths of immigrants in custody. Dispatches from the Northwest’s immigration dystopia.
* Abandoned States: Places In Idyllic 1960s Postcards Have Transformed Into Scenes Of Abandonment.
* Urban artwork gives downtown MKE some color.
* An American Dialect Dictionary Is Dying Out. Here Are Some Of Its Best Words.
* Prisoners Face Horrifying Conditions, Limited Drinking Water After Harvey Pounds Texas. Texas Republicans Helped Chemical Plant That Exploded Lobby Against Safety Rules. The devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we’ve entered the age of climate chaos. Parts of Puerto Rico could be without power for 6 months after Irma. Tampa Bay’s Coming Storm. The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners. A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been. What Homeowners Insurance Won’t Cover If a Hurricane Hits. Floods in drought season: is this the future for parts of India? State of emergency for fire danger declared for all Washington counties. In the wake of Harvey, it’s time to treat science denial as gross negligence—and hold those who do the denying accountable. We should be naming hurricanes after Exxon and Chevron, not Harvey and Irma. The cats are all right.
* What is it with New Jersey senators?
* How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt.
* The ‘internet of things’ is creating a more connected world but there is a dark side to giving up our domestic lives to machines. You don’t say!
* The Arctic is now expected to be ice-free by 2040. But of course to the World Economic Forum “entirely preventable civilization-ending catastrophe” is just another word for “opportunity”:
On the upside, the Arctic Council foresees increased shipping once the sea-ice has disappeared. Using the route across the top of the world to sail from northern Europe to north-east Asia can cut the length of voyages by two-fifths compared with travelling via the Suez Canal.
* Gasp! House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers.
* The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
* North Korea: “All Paths Lead to Catastrophe.” What Would War with North Korea Actually Look Like?
* Spider-Man Needs to Be White and Straight, Say Leaked Sony Emails.
* A Timeline of Postapocalyptic Dystopias That Didn’t Actually Happen.
* Wole Talabi’s Compilation of 654 Works of African Speculative Fiction Should Top Your Reading List.
* Why Does High School Still Start So Early? Why a later start to the school day could pump $1 billion into Illinois’ economy.
* Traces of Crime: How New York’s DNA Techniques Became Tainted.
* Winning the white working class for criminal justice reform.
* Star Wars is falling apart. The “Star Wars” franchise officially has a director problem.
* The Defenders Are Here to Tell You All Lives Matter. What is going on at Marvel TV?
* San Junipero 2: I Told You They Were Actually in Hell.
* A(mother) Solution to the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich Manuscript “solution” rubbished by experts.
* Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake. Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost. The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools.
* Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history. End of lecture.
* The Republican Party Is Building The Electorate That Will Keep It In Power.
* The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party.
* Sexual Harassment in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Communities Survey Results.
* The onus should be on universities that rely on SET for employment decisions to provide convincing affirmative evidence that such reliance does not have disparate impact on women, underrepresented minorities, or other protected groups. Because the bias varies by course and institution, affirmative evidence needs to be specific to a given course in a given department in a given university. Absent such specific evidence, SET should not be used for personnel decisions.
* If immigration agents show up at your door. Life after love. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Hemingway called it the saddest short story ever written. Superheroes we can believe in. Statement of teaching philosophy. The child is the father of the man. Abbrs.
* Futurama is coming back again, for a single, audio-only episode.
* But at least they finally found the Savage Land.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Good year for children’s studies academic jobs: Bryn Mawr and York.
* But some researchers want to dig deeper. They want to know why quantum mechanics has the form it does, and they are engaged in an ambitious program to find out. It is called quantum reconstruction, and it amounts to trying to rebuild the theory from scratch based on a few simple principles. The simulation crashes at very large speeds and very small scales. We solved this years ago!
* These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism.
* Study: a universal basic income would grow the economy.
* College football gives conservatives their own safe space on campus.
* Well-off “helicopter” parents are super annoying, but they didn’t create economic inequality.
* Evidence of Russian Election-Data Tampering Mounts as Urgency to Investigate It Does Not.
* Trump Looks Likely to End Protections for Dreamers. Here’s What Would Happen Next. Trump’s next big play on immigration could be much worse than you think.
* ‘Willful blindness’: Deportees becoming easy prey for gangs along the U.S.-Mexico border.
* Hurricane Harvey Floods Toxic Waste Sites, With The EPA Missing In Action. Houston officials were warned they had a problem — they didn’t listen.
* Evacuations ordered in ‘largest ever’ Los Angeles wildfire. 185,000 acre Battle Complex fire burning across Eastern Montana, Northern Wyoming.
* The Incarcerated Women Who Fight California’s Wildfires.
* Donald Trump Jr. to be paid $100,000 for UNT Kuehne Series speech. Bail money?
* Months later, DOJ confirms Trump was lying when he said Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
* Quick, someone option this Twitter feed. I see at least three films.
* “Virtual Reality Settlers of Catan” seems like a joke, and yet.
* And Texas goes Full Dark Tower.
Open-carrying swords and machetes
Blades more than 5.5 inches in length are being permitted for open-carry in public places. The law, though, prohibits swords and machetes in most bars, schools, colleges, sporting events, polling places, race parks, correctional facilities, hospitals, amusement parks and places of worship.
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
First Week of School Links!
* Harvey. Hell and High Water. Houston has been hit with a 100-year flood — a rainstorm that, going by previous records, has a 1 percent chance of happening in one year — in 2015 and in 2016. Now in 2017 it’s enduring what will probably be the worst flood in the city’s history. Hurricane Harvey Probably Isn’t a 500-Year Event Anymore. The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained. 9 Trillion Tons. ProPublica’s report on how zoning made this even worse. “No one could have predicted.” Why Houston wasn’t ready for Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Harvey Could Also Be a Major Pollution Disaster. FIRST-UG 102: Critical Disaster Studies. Here’s how to help.
* CFP: “200 Years of the Fantastic: Celebrating Frankenstein and Mary Shelley,” ICFA 39, March 14-18, 2018.
* “Teaching first-years today? Here are some things my son, starting college today, was never taught.” And from the archives: Shadow Syllabus.
* Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.
* Announcing the Brittle Paper Literary Awards: The Shortlists.
* I hope someone is optioning “That 70s Suitcase” for a film trilogy. Here’s the creator’s answer. Via MeFi.
* William Gibson on living in the retrofuture.
* Gene Roddenberry, megalomaniac.
Alexander: Are there any subjects that you haven’t tackled on The Next Generation that you would like to?
Roddenberry: There are subjects, yes, but I will keep them secret, because you have to wait until a certain level of thinking permits these things to be thought about openly and in writing. I have many thoughts which, if I were to voice them now, would turn many people against me. People would think, “My God, behind this is such inequity!” [Laughter.]
Alexander: People would be surprised at how big a revolutionary you really are? [Laughter.]
* Fan fiction in the New Yorker.
* When you come at the young-adult-literature community, you best not miss.
* Because you demanded it: a Tolkien biopic.
* Try to imagine a society with no need for confinement, with no one being locked up after a brutal act, and it is difficult not to feel one has lapsed into utopianism. Yet, try to determine what socially useful purpose prisons have fulfilled, sift through the wreckage looking for a residual ‘good’ prison system, and it is hard not to feel you’re wasting your time on a pointless abstraction. For and against abolitionism.
* Well, this barely lasted a week: Why I’m glad the generals are in control in the Trump administration.
* It’s Time: Congress Needs to Open a Formal Impeachment Inquiry.
* We’ve been covering Joe Arpaio for more than 20 years. Here’s a couple of things you should know about him… Another Arpaio thread. The Joe Arpaio I knew. The year I spent in Joe Arpaio’s tent jail was hell. He should never walk free. Trump has realized that he can use his pardon power to bypass the lawyers and judges and investigators he so despises. Arpaio was a test run. Now he will know it works. Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is an Impeachable Offense. President Trump Should Be Impeached for Pardoning Joe Arpaio.
* Leaked Chats Show Charlottesville Marchers Were Planning for Violence. University officials say white supremacists are recruiting their students. Brandeis U. Is Closed After Receiving Email Threats. We’re Tracking Confederate Monuments. Tell Us What’s on Your Campus.
* Fearing Trump Administration Crackdown, Immigrants May Stay in Hurricane Harvey Zone. ICE Left 50 Immigrant Women And Kids Stranded At A Bus Station Before Hurricane Harvey Struck. ICE detains DACA-protected immigrant trying to post bail for someone else. ABQ woman jailed after ATF informant lured her into drug deals. Salvadoran asylum seeker with brain tumor seized from Texas hospital. After ICE arrests in Saratoga Springs, some migrant workers fear showing up for racing season. I’m a DACA Student and I’m Praying ICE Doesn’t Pick Up My Parents.
* After all this mere tax gimmicks seems almost innocent.
* The End of the Goldwater Rule.
* White House Sets Rules for Military Transgender Ban. All but promising to end DACA.
* Stories that already seem a thousand years ago and a million miles away: Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers. How are we ever going to find time to be angry about Mnuchin misusing public funds to get a better view of the eclipse? I’d forgotten this one even happened and it was last week.
* They’re not even pretending they think he’s competent.
* A whole lot of people with absolutely nothing to hide.
* Trump order could give immigration agents a foothold in US schools.
* An intimate history of antifa.
* Can Anyone Stop Trump From Launching Nuclear Weapons?
* In the richest country that has ever existed in human history: “She eats out of dumpsters so she can afford long-term care for her husband.”
* Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
* Fired for unexpected periods.
* The Upper Midwest is terrible for racial inequality, and Wisconsin tops the list.
* A solid B-. Not bad.
* Boomers are news-illiterate couch vegetables stuck in front of their yelling, ad-saturated TVs.
* There is no such thing as western civilisation.
* Given the enormous amount of data to support these findings, and given the field in question, one might think male scientists would use these outcomes to create a more level playing field. But a recent paper showed that in fact, male STEM faculty assessed the quality of real research that demonstrated bias against women in STEM as being low; instead the male faculty favored fake research, designed for the purposes of the study in question, which purported to demonstrate that no such bias exists.
* Stories like this one were why I thought supporters of Title IX (like myself) needed to get ahead of the problem and reform it while we still could. Almost certainly too late now.
* The water you just drank was filled with self-replicating nanobots. Understanding Noah’s Ark. Be careful what you wish for.
* We talk about broad-strokes when assessing the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but what if — alongside the racism and toxic nostalgia — there is a more intimate way people are hearing it: make my children love and respect me again, make my community a place where people don’t automatically want to leave and never come back again, make America a place where getting ahead in life isn’t synonymous with dissociating yourself from me. Right-wing media — and here I am thinking of Trump fundamentally as a media phenomenon, which is how our parents experience him — has exploited this situation in a despicable and probably unfixable way, but they didn’t create the underlying dynamic. In other words, ultimately Fox News isn’t what’s tearing families apart, but it’s profiting from the fact that they’re already being torn apart by the geographic concentration of wealth and opportunity.
* Why no one can say Trump lost the election. Democrats’ 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad.
* Nuclear missiles were once ready to launch from Milwaukee’s suburbs.
* Profiles in courage getting out ahead of the story.
* Your mandatory Game of Thrones wrap-ups: Why Game of Thrones has become so incoherent. Every city in the world is built on wildfire. 27 questions (about last week’s episode). Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story. Game of Rewrites. Maps and fantasy. I’d watch at least a few episodes of a George R.R. Martin-helmed Star Trek series. And sure to be squashed fan theories we can believe in: Is Bran Stark the Night King?
* In the wake of the Game of Thrones finale, indulge in the nostalgia of Dragonlance. Are you listening, TruTV?
Gerry Canavan 