Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

• A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
• I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
• A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
• Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
• CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
• The CoFutures Prizes.
• Building a New Framework of Values for the University.

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

• Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
• Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
• How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
• Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
• From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
• Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
• Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
• Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
• Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
• Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
• The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
• Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
• Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
• Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
• The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.

That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2021

Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY

— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022

another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI

— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
• To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
• ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.

I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022

• What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
• U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.

I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 30, 2022

look I don’t think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022

• All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
• Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
• Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
• Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler’s old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel

— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022

• Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
• The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
• Legally defining Peter Parker.
• Marvel adjective chart.

this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022

The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of “fantasy,” “adventure,” “frontier,” and “tomorrow,” with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you’ll find anywhere.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022

science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 20, 2022

• Art Is Not Therapy.
• The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
• Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
• The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
• A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
• Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
• Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.

🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.

For one: more sequels & comic book movies.

In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu

— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022

• Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
• At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
• This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
• Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
• Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
• If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
• Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
• Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
• Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
• The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
• The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
• Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
• Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…

good morning
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F

— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022

oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 27, 2022

• “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
• Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
• Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
• Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
• What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
• Equal population mapper.
• The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
• Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
• Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”

This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022

The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2022

the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD

— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022

• A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
• The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
• War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
• When Chess Gets Weird.
• Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
• America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
• From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
• The United States of Abandoned Places.
• A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
• An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
• An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
• The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
• Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
• Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
• New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
• The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
• In a Parallel Universe, Another You.

I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.

It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022

pic.twitter.com/V0tmZsNfrA

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022

We're a modest company with modest goals:
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god

— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014

• How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
• Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
• We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
• By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
• Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
• Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
• Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
• The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
• Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
• An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
• As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
• As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
• Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
• Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
• Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
• Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
• The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
• ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
• The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
• More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
• Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
• Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
• Anthropocene Gothic.
• Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
• Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
• Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
• It can always get worse.
• They say time is the fire in which we burn.
• How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
• And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.

if you don’t oppose nuclear war when you’re 25, you have no heart. if you’re not in favor of nuclear war by the time you’re 35, you have no head

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2022

This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022

The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels

— ᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟ (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022

from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022

Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week

* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.

* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!

* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.

* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.

* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.

* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.

* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?

* Why are there so many staircases in space?

* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.

* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.

* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.

* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.

* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.

* When you’re the only person in your department.

* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.

* Teaching in a red county after Trump.

* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.

* I get it.

* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.

* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.

* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.

* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.

* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.

* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.

* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.

* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018

17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP

— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018

* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.

* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.

* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.

* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.

* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.

* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.

* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.

* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.

* The over-under on the Supreme Court’s liberal minority cohort all continuing to draw breath is about five years.

* Imagine being a Democratic senator & actually telling yourself you are “playing the long game” by not doing everything you can to stop a lifetime Supreme Court appointment that will shift the entire American judicial system for the rest of everyone’s lives.

* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.

* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.

* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.

* Gasp! A New Zealand company that tried 4-day workweeks says people were more creative, more punctual, and more energetic — and they want to keep it going.

* Quiet Skies: Air Marshals are following thousands of random Americans through airports and on planes, for no articulatable purpose.

* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.

* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.

* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.

In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.

* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.

* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.

* Understanding “Kokomo.”

* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.

* The fracking of America.

* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.

* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.

* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.

* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.

* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.

If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:

2C of warming doesn’t mean “like now, but 2C warmer”.

— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018

In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy

— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 28, 2018

Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever

— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018

* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.

* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.

* The Hacking of America.

* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.

* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.

* Libertarianism and white supremacy.

* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.

* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.

* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.

* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.

* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.

* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.

* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.

* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.

* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.

* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.

* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?

* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.

* The latest in the stadium scam.

* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?

* Bet it’s still a bit long.

* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?

* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.

* You don’t know me, computer!

* They’re real good at memes though.

* The anarchist roots of writing.

* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.

* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.

* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.

* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?

* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.

* WorldCon is crisis (again).

* Twilight of James Gunn.

* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.

* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.

* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”

* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.

* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage.  Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.

* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.

* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.

Spartacus (1960)
Plot hole

In the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.

— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018

* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.

* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.

* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.

* When factchecking backfires.

* History in an Age of Fake News.

* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.

* Orwell knew.

* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.

* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.

* And you may ask yourself.

* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.

* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.

* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.

* Behold, the thagomizer.

* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.

* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.

* Did… did a cat write this?

* The new astrology.

* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…

February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28

* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…

* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.

* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.

* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.

* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.

* Presenting the Nebula finalists.

* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.

* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.

* Comics studies comes of age.

* The Capitalocene.

* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.

* NEH, NEA, Americorps.

* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?

* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.

* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.

REPUBLICANS: Hi, we’re ethnic cleansers!

DEMOCRATS: And *we’re* the loyal opposition!

BOTH: And together we’re [INHUMAN SCREECHING]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2017

* Donald Trump is unpopular enough that Republicans could lose the House, but there’s a lot of uncertainty.

* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.

* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.

Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.

The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.

* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.

* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!

* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.

* Preserving video games.

* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.

* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.

* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.

* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.

* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.

* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!

* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.

* Why facts don’t change our minds.

* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.

* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.

* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.

* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.

* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.

* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.

* The last days of Standing Rock.

* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.

* Grad student Zachary Turpin discovers a long lost Walt Whitman novel, about a year after he discovered a long lost Whitman self-help treatie.

* “For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings.”

* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.

* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!

* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.

* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.

* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.

* Radical feminism finds a way.

* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.

* Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists.

* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.

* Andrew Cuomo is so obviously the worst possible Democrat for 2020 I don’t see how they can possibly do anything else.

Republicans seek however many votes they need to relegalize slavery.

Democrats seek one vote less than they would need to ever do anything.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2017

* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.

* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.

* The kids are all right.

* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!

* This one’s okay.

* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!

* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.

* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.

* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.

* Uber is doomed.

* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.

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.

Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag

* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.

* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.

Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU

— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016

* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.

* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.

* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.

* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.

* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.

* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.

* On Utopia and Reaction.

* Poetry and Class Struggle.

* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.

* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.

* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.

* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.

7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.

— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016

* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.

* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.

* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.

* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.

* Quebec’s massive student strikes emerged from an organizing model that constantly trains new generations of activists.

* Retirement Plan Roulette.

* The First Trans*Studies Conference.

* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

A bit more here.

* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.

* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.

* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.

* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.

* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.

* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.

* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?

* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.

* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.

* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.

* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.

Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016

* Raymond Chandler and Totality.

* Writing Like a State.

* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.

* Capitalist Saboteurs.

* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.

* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.

* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.

* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.

* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.

* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.

* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.

* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.

* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.

* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?

* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.

* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.

* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.

* Being Nadja Spiegelman.

* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.

* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.

* Defining Unarmed.

* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.

* Against Theory.

Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.

* The largest strike in world history?

* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.

* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.

* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”

* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.

* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.

* The clash of eschatologies.

* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.

* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.

Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016

* Atwood and comics.

* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?

* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.

* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.

* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.

*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.

* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.

* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.

* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.

* Yes, Here Comes Trump TV.

* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.

* Black Teachers Matter.

* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.

* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.

* Understanding Hellboy.

* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.

* What’s the Matter with Liberals?

* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.

* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.

* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.

* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.

* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!

* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.

* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.

* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.

* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.

* Mike Konczal on Eviction.

* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.

* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.

* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.

* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.

* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.

* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.

* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.

* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.

* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.

* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.

* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.

* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.

* Earth First: The Musical.

* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.

* Hitchens wept.

* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.

* Finally.

* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.

* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.

Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!

* ICYMI: My new syllabi for the fall! Infinite Jest and Alternate History. There’s also a new version of my “Video Game Culture” class, set for a new eleven-meeting schedule and with a “Capitalism” week added centered on Pokémon Go (what? oh, that thing). Relatedly: Milwaukee County Parks are trying to remove Pokemon Go from Lake Park.

* The NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities can unionize. How letting grad students unionize could change the labor movement and college sports. The NLRB Columbia Decision and the Future of Academic Labor Struggles. The Union Libel: On the Argument against Collective Bargaining in Higher Ed. But elsewhere in academic labor news: Adjuncts in Religious Studies May Be Excluded From Religious College Unions.

* Are PhD Students Irrational? Well, you don’t have to be, but it helps…

The point, then, is that a rational choice theory of PhD pursuit is self-sealing: by allowing the job market, and the job market only, to police our understanding of what’s rational, we’re ignoring that doctoral study is a way of accomplishing what the market typically cannot — a long-term, self-directed research project.

* Colleges hire more minority and female professors, but most jobs filled are adjunct, not tenure track, study finds.

* This morning everyone’s fighting about academic freedom and trigger warnings at the University of Chicago.

A trigger warning compromises academic freedom in the same way that shouting "Fore!" compromises the game of golf.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) August 24, 2016

* I thought I was the only prof who didn’t really care about deadlines. But apparently there are dozens of us!

* That’ll solve it: Replace college instruction with Ken Burns movies.

* A New Academic Year Brings Fresh Anxiety at Illinois’s Public Colleges.

* Poor and Uneducated: The South’s Cycle of Failing Higher Education.

* Actually, I’m teaching these kids way more than they’re teaching me.

* I’ve dreamed about this since I was a kid: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star. Time to teach The Sparrow again…

* Philosophical SF.

* CFP: Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, University of Florida.

* Cuban science-fiction redefines the future in the ruins of a socialist utopia.

* Puppies, Slates, and the Leftover Shape of “Victory.” On that Rabid Puppies thing and my Hugo Award-winning novella Binti.

Summary of Harry Potter pic.twitter.com/13m1lc40Nb

— Harry Potter World (@PotterWorldUK) August 20, 2016

* It was a long time before anyone realized there was something not the same about her.

* From all indications, the next X-Men movie will hew closer to Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix story than the previous cinematic effort. But any sense of authenticity it achieves will only arouse and prolong the desire for closure of the loss not only of a treasured character who might have lived endlessly in the floating timeline, but also of the very narrative finitude in which this loss could only happen once. Comic Book Melancholia.

* Bingewatching vs. plot.

* A new book series at Rowman and Littlefield explores Remakes, Reboots, and Adaptations.

* Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi.

* Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.

* The real questions: How Long Would It Actually Take to Fall Through the Earth?

* How did an EpiPen get to costing $600? Earned every penny. A Case Study in Health System Dysfunction. But, you know, it’s all better now.

* Amazing study at Duke: Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds.

* The Epidemic Archives Of The Future Will Be Born Digital.

* How One Professor Will Turn Wisconsin’s Higher-Ed Philosophy Into a Seminar.

* Becoming Eleven. Concept Art Reveals Barb’s Original Stranger Things Fate and It Will Depress You. We Will Get ‘Justice for Barb’ in a Second Season of Stranger Things. This Stranger Things fan theory changes the game.

* Arkansas City Accused Of Jailing Poor People For Bouncing Checks As Small As $15. An Arkansas Judge Sent A Cancer Patient To ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Over A Few Bounced Checks.

* And elsewhere: Drug Court Participants Allegedly Forced To Become Police Informers.

* The times of year you’re most likely to get divorced. Keep scrolling! We’re not done yet.

* Are these the best films of the 21st century? I’m not sure I enjoyed or still think about any film on this list more than I enjoyed and think about The Grand Budapest Hotel, though There Will Be Blood, Memento, Caché, and Children of Men might all be close.

* CBS is bound and determined to make sure Star Trek: Discovery bombs.

* Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.

* An Instagram account can index depression.

* After neoliberalism?

* Parenting and moral panic.

* How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains.

* The technical language obscured an arresting truth: Basis, which I had ordered online without a prescription, paying $60 for a month’s supply, was either the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work.

* Nazis were even creeps about their horses.

* The Republicans were right!

* Mapping the Stephen King meganarrative.

* Good news for Dr. Strange: Dan Harmon wrote on the reshoots.

* My colleague Jodi Melamed writes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on white Milwaukee’s responsibility.

* The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Translated from the Icelandic.

* Saddest postjournalism story yet: “Vote on the topic for a future Washington Post editorial.”

* Katherine Johnson, the human computer.

* I arrived at my friend’s party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.

* Uber loses a mere 1.2 billion dollars in the first half of 2016. Can there be any doubt they are just a stalking horse for the robots?

* It’s been interesting watching this one circulate virally: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.

* William Shatner Is Sorry Paramount Didn’t Stop Him From Ruining Star Trek V. Apology not accepted.

* Hillary Clinton will likely have a unique chance to remake the federal judiciary. How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America.

* Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State. You don’t say… 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling.

* Does he want a few of mine? Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of His Own Book.

* Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump. Hey, that was my bit!

Trumpism: first as tragedy, then as farce https://t.co/Ww70LOq5wc

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2016

* Oh, so now the imperial presidency is bad.

* Good news, everyone!

* At least Democrats are currently on track to retake the Senate.

* Scenes from the richest country in the history of the world: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. Raw sewage has been leaking into Baltimore’s harbor for five days, city says. It appears aquatic life — the moss that grows on rocks, the bacteria that live in the water and the bugs that hatch there — are the unexpected victims of Americans’ struggle with drug addiction. Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds.

* No Man’s Sky is like real space exploration: dull, except when it’s sublime.

* A.J. Daulerio, bloodied but unbowed. How Peter Thiel Killed Gawker. Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself. Gawker Was Killed by Gaslight. And if you want a vision of the future: A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker.

* Greenlit for five seasons and a spinoff: The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates from Miami came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars — one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.

* Also greenlighting this one.

Sword-wielding robber discovers that the store clerk he's robbing also has sword https://t.co/iMelWS1hKT

— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) August 24, 2016

* The legacy board games revolution.

* 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks.

* The millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income because of climate change. The children of millennials will lose tens of trillions.

* When Icon fought Superman.

* Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks.

* An Exciting History of Drywall.

* Title IX: still under serious threat.

* And it’s not a competition, but Some Turtles See Red Better Than You Do.

Close Every Tab from the Semester or Die Trying Links

* Some nice conference acceptance news: My semester of David Foster Wallace will end with a panel on “Infinite Jest at Twenty” with Lee Konstantinou, Carrie Shanafelt, and Kate Hayles at MLA 2017. I’ve put the full panel description in the comments for anyone interested…

* David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen. Guest appearance from my friend from grad school, Meredith Farmer!

* It’s been such a busy week I haven’t had time to crow about Jaimee’s poem appearing on Verse Daily.

* An obituary for my friend and Marquette colleague Diane Long Hoeveler.

* CFPs from Foundation: The Essay Prize (for graduate students and adjuncts) and a special issue on SF theater.

* Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor.

* For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER: Nigerian players dominate tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible.

* Want to See Hamilton in a City Near You? Buy a Subscription and Wait Two Years. Okay, maybe I will!

* How Hamilton Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda Is Building A Brand For The Ages.

* google d&d player’s handbook truth: The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist.

* Burlington College Will Close, Citing Longstanding Financial Woes. What Killed Burlington College?

* Ending HBCUs in North Carolina.

* Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. And on the Harry Potter Social Justice Wizard beat: a genderqueer student comes to hogwarts and…

* How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth.

* More data on learning and laptops — but you’ll never convince me that students benefit more from pen-and-paper notes than from a searchable, permanent archive of their entire academic career Spotlight can access and retrieve instantly.

* Many public universities now rely heavily on parents—particularly those with money, time, and connections—to meet their basic needs.

* Big-Time College Sports Neglect Academics, Deflect Blame.

* Huge, if true: In other words, the rush to embrace entrepreneurship is ideological rather than practical.

* Tenure as earned property.

* Diversity defunded in Tennessee.

* UW English Chair Caroline Levine: Enough with Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m leaving.

* Texas School District Votes to Build Totally Tasteful $62 Million High School Football Stadium.

* A new documentary, Agents of Change, describes the five-month SF State protest and a similar strike at Cornell University through the voices of former students like Tascoe who were involved. The film is a gripping case study of the meticulous organizing, community engagement, and careful planning that went into two of the most effective student strikes in American history. Black Studies Matter.

* I was seriously thisclose to writing a #TeamCap blog post to comicsplain Civil War to the confused, but Mightygodking got there first.

* Milwaukee in the ne — oh for fuck’s sake.

* Wisconsin communities dominate “Drunkest Cities” report.

* Wisconsin woman has confirmed case of Zika virus.

* “Rare detailed personal memory a burden, and ultimately a gift.”

* “This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager.”

* “Why do all old statues have such small penises?”

* Probably the most honest thing ever said about this election: 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead. Meanwhile, this is just totally bananas: Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself.

* What Would It Take for Donald Trump to Deport 11 Million and Build a Wall?

* A First-Person Account of a Texas Artist’s Deportation.

* From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent “burn it down” turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I’ve seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it’s not clear that this time we have any countervailing force – adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.

* Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election.

http://mobile.twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/732583842175975428

* Almost starting to see a pattern here, Disney: Shane Black reveals Iron Man 3 scrapped a female villain because of toy sales. Why Disney needs a gay princess.

* From cooperation to black operation: A Conversation with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on The Undercommons.

* A brief history of the giraffe.

* “When you have a child with a life-threatening illness, you have an irrevocably altered existence,” Barbara Sourkes had told the Levys, and Esther feels that is true. She had always felt in control of her fate, but now she believes this to be a fiction. She finds it difficult to reconcile bitterness over the blight of Andrew’s illness with gratitude for the reprieve. “We are the luckiest of the unluckiest people in the world,” she says. “I truly believe that.”

* With playdates replacing free childhood play, it’s upper-class families who set the social norms — and working-class families who pay the price.

* Can Graduate Students Unionize? The Government Can’t Decide.

* TSA forever and ever amen.

* After all this time, who can say really who sent whom to Robben Island for 27 years.

* I too like to live dangerously: Uber Says Riders Will Pay the Most When Their Phone Battery Is Dying.

* Small Beer Press to Publish 400-Year-Old SF Novel.

* On Kim Stanley Robinson and “solarpunk.”

* Nate Moore, 37, is the lone African-American producer in the film division at Marvel Studios. And elsewhere in Marvel news: Agents of SHIELD Star Says Marvel Doesn’t Care Enough About Its Own TV Show.

* DC has, to all reports, done something utterly crazy. Big shakeup in their film division to boot. Can Booster Gold save the DC Cinematic Universe?

* Not even $100 million can make Daniel Craig give a fuck about James Bond.

* World-famous ethicist isn’t.

* What terrible luck! The CIA has “mistakenly” destroyed the sole copy of a massive Senate torture report in the custody of the agency’s internal watchdog group, Yahoo News reported Monday.

* Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions.

* University title and salary generator.

* Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals.

* The Sochi hoax.

* Attempt no landings etc: Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected.

* Outrageous slander: The Warriors Still Aren’t the Best Team Ever.

* Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets. Bruenighazi.

* Against the Crowdfunding Economy.

* In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.

* What Kinds of Difference Do Superheroes Make?: An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz. Part Two.

* NCDOT tries something new to thwart Durham’s Can Opener bridge.

* The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut.

* The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.

* Ted Chiang vs. Chinese logograms.

* Fracking comes to England.

* An unorthodox anthropologist goes face to face with ISIS. Is the payoff worth the peril?

* CBS All-Access gets a second show. And that’s why The Good Wife had a terrible ending!

* Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen.

* I’m feeling pretty on board with Luke Cage, I have to say.

* As with the comic before it, the film version of The Dark Tower will likely detail a different, later iteration of the series’s defining time loop.

* “Perfect” Donkey Kong score achieved.

* The only Twitter account you need: @LegoSpaceBot.

* No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before. Get with the program, Great Lakes!

* What drought? Nestle plans $35 million plant to bottle water in Phoenix.

* Alas, Venezuela: There has never been a country that should have been so rich but ended up this poor.

* Project Earth is leaving beta.

* In the back room of the morgue.

* But it’s not all bad news: Our Solar System Could Remain Habitable Long After Earth Is Destroyed.

Happy graduation day, Marquette!

Tuesday Afternoon Links

* A new page at Marquette: a $96 million residence hall development.

* And then there’s that old page.

* There’s more than one way to brand a college. Like at least three or four.

* No-confidence vote by UW faculty passes overwhelmingly.

* Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines Living There.

* “Why Is Westeros So Fucked Up?” “In conclusion, Game of Thrones is a franchise of contrasts.”

For the television series, it’s more complicated. The crucial question is this: How do you take a story that’s written as a deliberate repudiation of 1990s fantasy norms and make it work, twenty years later, with an audience that didn’t necessarily grow up with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan novels? The story is generally strong enough that it’s managed to survive and thrive; the failures of the Starks are not just reversals of fantasy convention but overall storytelling convention. But the longer the series goes, the less able it is to draw upon such clear subversions.

GAME OF THRONES never seems more Tolkienesque than when listening to the HARDCORE GAME OF THRONES podcast.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 3, 2016

* Don DeLillo’s back and I’m pretty excited about Zero K.

* Hamilton, the musical you may be tired of hearing about because it is literally impossible to get tickets to see it until 2047, made Tony history Tuesday morning, scoring a record-breaking 16 nominations.

* It’s Illegal to Possess or Distribute This Huge Number.

* ‘I Just Don’t Find American Literature Interesting’: Lit-Blog Pioneer Jessa Crispin Closes Bookslut, Does Not Bite Tongue.

* Photo Essay: Fracking Communities.

* Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920. More Evidence for Lead Poisoning as Key Crime Driver.

* Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus.

* Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data.

* Rebooting Stephen Colbert.

* google it should have been steph curry truth

"Justin Lin to direct a LOONEY TUNES movie" is the way I've chosen to selectively hear/understand today's film news.

— Tom Elrod (@tbelrod) May 2, 2016

* Jessica Jones season two is doomed watch: Trouble On The Set Of Jessica Jones Season One Was Calmed By David Tennant.

* You just can’t win: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight.

* High school football player faces 70 criminal charges for yearbook picture prank.

* “Poet & Vagabond”: Roberto Bolaño’s business card.

* Like the lady said: the goal should be a society without classes! Fights on planes 400% more likely when there’s a first class section.

* Here’s yet another surprise David Bowie left for us on Backstar.

* Famous last words watch: Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

* Society of synthetic linguists explain to court, in Klingon, why Klingon shouldn’t be copyrightable.

* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly disappointing Star Trek (2009) sequels every three years, forever.

No One Ever Expects Wednesday Links

* Nearly one-third of public college presidents serve on corporate boards. Most of those companies exist in far-flung industries, and the issues at play are different: Why should college presidents involve themselves with shipping, with search engines, with banking?

* Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more.

* President of Ireland Affirms Value of the Humanities. Ireland, you’re not so bad yourself!

*  Management Bloat at UC.

* Against gainful employment.

* Reprints and British Comics.

* This crazy space-age Satellite Hotel could’ve put Milwaukee on the map.

* “I am on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones.”

* Cincinnatus watch: Paul Ryan just said he would not accept the GOP presidential nomination at the convention.

* The First Year of Teaching Can Feel Like a Fraternity Hazing.

* Liberalism and fracking.

* Guns on campus; adjuncts hardest hit.

* 4 big questions about the race to Mars. Under Obama, NASA finds itself in a familiar place: Big goals but inadequate funds.

* Stephen Hawking’s Starshot.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Doctor Strange. Some commentary.

* LARoB reviews The New Mutants : Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.

* Music to my ears: Why Story of Your Life May Be the Year’s Breakout Sci-fi Movie.

* Torchwood is back!

* Television without Pity is coming back!

* Homestuck is over!

* A list of games that Buddha would not play.

* Bloc by Bloc: A cooperative board game of revolutionary strategy, hidden agendas & 21st century urban rebellion.

* The sheep look up: Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048.

* Perpetual Present: The Strange Case of the Woman Who Can’t Remember Her Past—Or Imagine Her Future.

* Any sufficiently advanced non-Newtonian fluid pool is indistinguishable from magic.

* The Guardian read the comments.

* Navy Officer Rescued 3 From Remote Pacific Island After Seeing Sign For Help.

This photo provided by U.S. Navy released April 7, 2016 shows two men waving life jackets and look on as a U.S. Navy P-8A maritime surveillance aircraft discovers them on the uninhabited island of Fanadik. The three men were back to safety on Thursday, April 7, 2016, three days after going missing. (U.S. Navy/Ensign John Knight via AP)

Wednesday Links!

* Call for Papers, UWM/Marquette Graduate Student Humanities Conference: “Conflict and Liberation.”

* Call for Papers: Posthuman Futures.

* Your SF short film of the week: “Stealing Time.”

* Fifty years ago today, the United States of America dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain. It was an accident.

Fail safe systems in the weapons mostly worked

Uh, mostly?

and none of the four bombs experienced a nuclear reaction upon impact, sparing the region and its hundreds of inhabitants from multiple nuclear blasts that would’ve dwarfed the explosion over Hiroshima. “Only a fortunate stroke of luck saved the Spanish population of the area from catastrophe,” a Soviet official said at the time.

well that’s good

But the conventional high explosives on two of the bombs did detonate, essentially turning those weapons into dirty bombs that blasted plutonium radiation across the countryside.

oh

* Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis.

Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”

* Detroit’s Teachers Want You to See These Disturbing Photos of Their Toxic Schools.

* The Color of Surveillance: What an infamous abuse of power teaches us about the modern spy era.

* This is the exam from a class that MLK taught at Morehouse in the early 1960s.

* So you want to read Infinite Jest.

* These 11 laws are what keep space from becoming the wild west.

* America’s Other Original Sin.

* How the shining architectural optimism of the 1960s and 70s has ultimately produced buildings such as supermarkets, open-plan offices and other spaces of control.

* The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

* Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds. ‘I Am Drowning.’ The Voices of People With Medical Debt.

* The Nation: Bernie Sanders for President.

* And in anti-endorsements: Sanders and Reparations. Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism.

* When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her.

* Jay Edidin on his recent top surgery.

* The University of Victoria, in Canada, has announced the establishment of what it says is the world’s first endowed chair in transgender studies.

* HBO to air the rarely seen Godfather Epic cutting Parts I and II together.

* Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed.

* “Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’”

* “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Weird! Kooky! Zany!

* After Oil.

* Sick Woman Theory.

* “In Oklahoma, now the country’s earthquake capital…”

* Steven Moffat reveals the BBC almost canceled Doctor Who in 2009.

* Young People Used These Absurd Little Cards to Get Laid in the 19th Century.

* Shocking study reveals physics teachers give girls lower grades than boys – for the exact same answers.

* A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam.

* Former Nazi Medical Orderly to Stand Trial for Deaths of 3,681 People at Auschwitz.

* Writing is hard: “Shut up, Wesley!” did irreparable damage to Wesley Crusher’s role in TNG.

* WHAT YEAR IS IT

* Unbreakable! They alive, damnit!

* Why Is Sperm So Damn Expensive?

* A 120,000-Piece Lego Model of the Titanic Breaking in Half.

* The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne.

Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.

* I don’t know why I’ll watch basically anything involving Pee Wee Herman, but.

* ‘Man flu’ is real. I’m taking the month off.

* Synergy killed the Fantastic Four.

* The Weird Way That Standing (Not Walking) on Escalators Helps Move People More Quickly.

* Race and gifted and talented programs.

* News you can use from the Financial Post: Here’s how to crush student activists once they become your employee.

* The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained.

* Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

* And for real though this is aliens.

Reading® for Sunday™

* From the archives: Vonnegut on hearing the voice of God on Armistice Day. Image from @watsdn.

* Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers.

* Diversity Is Magic: A Roundtable on Children’s Literature and Speculative Fiction.

* The Humanities Must Unite or Die. “And.”

* Gasp: High Pay for Presidents Is Not Shown to Yield Any Fund-Raising Payoff.

* Novelist Marilynne Robinson warns Stanford audience against utilitarian trends in higher education.

* English departments and original sin, continued.

* Campus Cops: Authority Without Accountability.

* The seasons come, the seasons go, / The earth is green or white with snow, / But time and change shall naught avail / To break the friendships formed at Yale.

* Academic Journals: The Most Profitable Obsolete Technology in History.

* Academic CVs: 10 irritating mistakes.

* So You’re Getting a Ph.D.: Welcome to the worst job market in America.

* A mind-bending, award-winning science fiction trilogy that expertly investigates the way we live now. I’m quite late, but I’ve been looking forward to reading these. Perhaps I’ll start tonight!

* “My beef with Hillary is mainly that she is an enemy of the poor.”

* Chile admits Pablo Neruda might have been murdered by Pinochet regime.

* The life and slow death of a former Pennsylvania steel town.

* ‘I’m praying for you’: MSF posts grim details from Afghan hospital strike. U.S. Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring it an “Accident.”

* Kinder Without God: Kids Who Grow Up In A Religious Home Less Altruistic Than Those Without Religion. Relatedly: Atheism contain multitudes.

* As it turns out, the non-profit co-op model for health insurance turns out to be unsustainable without government subsidies. More than half of the co-ops have been shut down this year, and nine of the 12 have shut down since October 1, either by HHS or by the states in which they operate.

* Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair.

* Welcome to Heaven.

* Critical Algorithm Studies: A Reading List.

* The man who killed the SAT essay.

* Politics is really confusing.

“We are excited to reward the Larry David with $5,000 cash for ‘standing up’ to Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live and speaking the truth about his anti-Latino racism, even though he was joking,” Deport Racism campaign director Luke Montgomery said in the statement.

* The Keystone defeat. Happy version. Unhappy version.

* Apocalypse watch: The Future of Climate Change Is Widespread Civil War.

* How did this ever get out of beta to begin with? Elon Musk Admits Humans Can’t Be Trusted with Tesla’s Autopilot Feature.

* And Sorry, Alien Hunters: No Signs of Life From KIC 8462852. I want to believe! Also this is aliens too.

It's not a UFO, it's just the military testing missiles in case we have to fight a nuclear war with Russia. So, don't worry.

— mat honan⭐️ (@mat) November 8, 2015

Weekend Links!

* Coming soon in DC: Anthony Thwaite and Jaimee Hills.

* The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The MetaFilter thread is almost always the best resource for these things. And here she is on Chernobyl.

* Please, though, don’t champion work. That is, not a sense of academic life as just work. Work is everywhere in the age of neoliberalism. Advocate for something bigger. Push for community.

* Don’t believe what you read at the Wiki or at the Chronicle: there are basically zero fake searches.

* CFP: Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.”

* Who Speaks at Meetings? Find Out with GenderTimer.

* Third Annual MLA Subconference: Between the Public and Its Privates.

* Coming this month to the Milwaukee Ballet: Dracula.

* …the incarcerated population, if viewed as a single community, would be the fourth-largest city in the United States.

* You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization.”

* How gentrifiers gentrify.

* Wisconsin legislature takes its eye off the dumpster fire that is the regional economy to focus on the real problems.

* This isn’t a fairy tale. Economic historians call the post-war years, 1950 to 1973, the Golden Age because those were the years the US and world economy grew faster than ever before or since. Neoliberalism’s dirty secret is that its policies don’t work that well. It isn’t just since the financial crisis that growth has been stagnant. Even the boom was mediocre. The best year since the election of Ronald Reagan was 1999, when the economy grew an impressive 4.8 percent. Sounds good until you realize that economic growth was higher in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Even the 1970s, a byword for stagflation and economic turmoil, saw better growth than any decade since.

* Miserablism and Resistance at the American Studies Association.

* Great story for my Lives of Animals class: Uplift, Inc.

* Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer.

* The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.

* Matt Yglesias: Hillary Clinton Is Our Cheney, and That’s Okay. More on this subject here. In some sense I don’t even disagree with him; American democracy really is doomed, and the project of the liberal-left at this moment (as I’ve said before!) should be actively and deliberately seeking to build its replacement through the construction of a new constitution.

* The problem with the Old Republic was the lack of a strong minority party. No, the problem with the Old Republic was the Jedi.

* What Does My Brain Tumor Mean for My Life as a Mother?

* Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York inmates.

* Rick Moranis Isn’t Retired (He Just Doesn’t Know How to Change His Wikipedia Page).

* Beautiful study of UFO sightings from ancient history.

* Jacobin: Want to improve animal welfare? Focus on bettering the conditions of the people who work with them.

* She was checking on her sons — then ages 11, 9 and 5 — by looking out the window every 10 minutes, she said. But when a passer-by saw the Felix kids, along with a 9-year-old cousin, she assumed they were unsupervised and called the state’s Department of Children and Family Services hotline.

* Class action lawsuit filed against DraftKings and FanDuel. How Daily Fantasy Is Changing the Game. You Aren’t Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football. Why I’m Quitting Fantasy Baseball.

* Playing in the Dark: On Gaming’s Blind Protagonists.

* Unsung songs of the Golden Age of Television: Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

* Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies.

* How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports.

* I want to believe: Fargo season two.

* New Civilization: Beyond Earth Expansion Finally Feels Like Sciene Fiction.

* What financializing pensions hath wrought: California Teachers Have Been Financing Evictions.

* And forever and ever amen.

At this point it might just be easier to get rid of schools than guns.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) October 9, 2015

Tuesday Links!

* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.

* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:

Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”

* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:

October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction

October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)

October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference

* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.

* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).

* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?

* The Humanities at the End of the World.

* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.

* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.

* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.

* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.

* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.

* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.

* The Uses of Orphans.

* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.

* Reading Lolita at 12.

* A Centre for Laziness Studies.

* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.

* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.

* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.

* The politics of the campaign mixtape.

* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.

* The return on the tontine.

* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”

* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.

* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?

* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.

* First, they came for my assault rifle.

* Nihilistic password security questions.

* The end of the Perkins loan.

* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”

* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.

* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.

* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.

* The end of Moore’s Law?

* The end of UNC?

* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.

* If it’s good enough for Zappos…

* Generation Debt.

* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.

* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.

* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.

* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.

* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.

* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.

* Marquette v. Cosby.

* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.

* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?

* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”

* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.

* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.

* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.

* Hydrofracking ruins everything.

* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”

* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.

* Research shows that in Pennsylvania’s public schools skin color, not economics, determines how much money districts get.

* End zero-tolerance school discipline.

* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.

* The law, in its majestic finality…

* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.

* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.

* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?

* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.

* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.

* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.

* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.

* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”

* As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us.

* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.

* What’s the most American ______ ever made?

* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”

* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…

Weekend Links! Catch Them All!

* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”

* Pluto, everybody!

* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.

* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.

* Against TurnItIn.

* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.

* Innovation leaves structures intact, developing new processes to monetize the dysfunctional systems we already have.

* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.

* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.

* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.

* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.

* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?

* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.

* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.

* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.

* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”

* A Radical Vatican?

* The paradox of the underperforming professor.

* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.

* Student debt and crisis.

* On Spinsters.

* If you want a vision of the future.

* If you want a vision of the future.

* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.

* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.

“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”

And this used to be a free country.

* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.

* A study from the New York Federal Reserve claims that for every new dollar in federal student loans, tuition goes up 65 cents.

* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.

* The end of Greece.

* Hope from Brazil.

* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.

* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.

* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”

* “Police subpoenaed the Title IX records of the hearing and were able to use that as evidence against the student.”

* This ain’t good either.

* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.

* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.

* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.

* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.

* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”

* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.

* Point: “The green case for fracking.”

* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.

* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.

* Some rare good news.

* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.

* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.

* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.

* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?

* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.

* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.

* Punishment Park is on YouTube.

* The end of Seattle.

* How privilege became a provocation.

* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.

* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.

* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.

* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.

* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.

* And they all lived happily ever after.

Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!

TGIF RT @iycrtylph: Capital's final victory is to have produced a humanity unworthy of liberation.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2015

* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!

* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.

* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.

* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.

* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.

* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.

* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.

* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!

* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.

* Rich Kids Study English.

* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.

* Towards a New Common Sense.

* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.

* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?

* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.

* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”

* The Verdict on Charter Schools?

* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.

* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?

* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.” 

* Social networking and the majority illusion.

* Reddit in chaos.

* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!

* Is Bail Unconstitutional?

* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.

* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”

* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?

* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.

* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.

* Dear Alice Sheldon.

* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.

* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.

* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.

* Shadow work and academia.

* Art and the wage.

* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.

* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].

* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.

* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.

* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.

* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.

* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.

* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.

* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.

* At least it’s an ethos!

* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.

* Salaita, one year later.

* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.

* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.

* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.

* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.

* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.

* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.

* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.

* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.

* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)

* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.

* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.

* When adjuncts go union.

* So you want to announce for the WWE.

* When I Was White.

* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.

* I’m not happy about this either.

* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.

* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”

* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.

* Another round of the polygamy debate.

* RISK: Game of Thrones.

* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.

* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.

* And then there’s Whitesboro.

* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.

* Armed police in England and Wales only fired their weapons twice over the course of 14,864 operations that took place from 2013-2014.

* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.

* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.

* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.

* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.

* A gendered history of LEGO.

* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!

* And there’s nothing sweet in life.