Posts Tagged ‘Iceland’
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
* And imagine going back in time.
Monday Afternoon Links!
* At a time when the United States is in the grip of an opioid epidemic, many insurers are limiting access to pain medications that carry a lower risk of addiction or dependence, even as they provide comparatively easy access to generic opioid medications.
* An inside look at the hunt for fentanyl, the deadly opioid driving the overdose crisis.
* America’s slow-motion military coup.
* Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer.
* And the trend appears to be continuing. “Every new cohort made less in median lifetime income than the previous one,” Mr. Guvenen said.
* Paging China Miéville: Instead of Trump’s Wall, Why Not a Binational Border City?
* Everything old is still old.
* RIP, Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.
* I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like what’s happening in Iceland.
* Beyond the grave. Outsourcing. Specifically bad. Animal intelligence. Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. Imagine a world with people like him in charge. Quorf. Thanks, Literature! This sucks.
Monday Morning Links!
* In Milwaukee, I lived two lives. On the East Side was the liberal Catholic school I attended for nine years; on the North Side was everything else. Dateline Milwaukee: Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation. Some Lesser Known Justice Facts about Milwaukee and Wisconsin. And a more positive Milwaukee profile: How Milwaukee Shook Off the Rust: The Midwestern hub reclaimed some of its industrial glory by doing a surprising thing. It cleaned up.
* Google’s response to inquiries was chilling: “Google News Archive no longer has permission to display this content.” Entire Google archive of more than a century of stories is gone. Why?
* A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
* Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse. Special congratulations to N.K. Jemisin, whose The Fifth Season I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and to Nnedi Okorafar, whose “Binti” I have read already and is fantastic. Relatedly, Abigail Nussbaum asks: Do the Hugos actually need saving?
* In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.
* This seems like a pretty big deal: Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail.
* U.S. Army only fudged its accounts by mere trillions of dollars, auditor finds.
* An Indiana City Is Poised To Become The Next Flint.
* Another late-summer syllabus: Problems in Posthumanism. #WelfareReformSyllabus. And a study guide for a world without police.
* “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world. I may have half my squad there for hours.”
* Ranking the Most (and Least) Diverse Colleges in America. Marquette sneaks in at #86, while my alma mater Case Western is a surprisingly high #40 and Duke gets #32.
* The strangeness of deep time.
* “The jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. In other words, only the best-educated humans will compete with machines,” Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist, told Pew. “And education systems in the US and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what is told to them, preparing them for life in a 20th century factory.” Nothing can stop Judgment Day, but with the liberal arts you just might have a chance of surviving it…
* 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you.
* Hot.
* Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’saislados, as isolated people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of his tribe.
* The poet and activist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
* Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore.
* Pittsburgh and the birth of the self-driving car.
While people around the world will no doubt continue to project various fantasies onto the tiny island republic, the fact remains that Iceland has yet to see any surge in left mobilization comparable to that in Portugal and Greece — or even the more modest adjustments being made inside the two trans-Atlantic establishment left-liberal parties in the form of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns.
* This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP.
* 88 College Taglines, Arranged as a Poem.
Lang will reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch, Avatar’s villain who appeared definitively dead at the end of the film after taking several huge Na’vi arrows through his chest. Despite that setback, Quaritch is expected to be resurrected in some way and will appear in all the remaining sequels.
Eywa* save us all.
* Reader, I googled it.
* Lovecraft and suburbia and Stranger Things.
* Anyway, the point I’d like you to take away from this is that while it’s really hard to say “sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible”, the smart money says that it’s extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We’d need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances … and that’s for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.
* I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
* My new favorite Twitter bot: @dungeon_junk.
* Viacom is hemorrhaging money, in part on the basis of the struggling Star Trek (and Ninja Turtles, and Ben Hur) reboot franchises.
* Friend acquires a lot of cheese. What to do with it?
* And of course you had me at Historic Midcentury Modernist Motels of the New Jersey Coast.
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic!
* Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose. Having done so, it now can leave. Whether it will, and how much it will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen. Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll.
* Virginia GOP Delegate Files Suit To Get Out Of Voting For Trump At Convention.
* All agree that we have entered an era in which “peace” coexists uncomfortably with interminable global violence (for those non-state actors that risk committing it or those state actors powerful enough to do so and avoid condemnation). All agree that executives have pushed the boundaries of national and international legality and redefined the scope and timeline of legal violence with little apparent constraint — except, theoretically, a wayward public, which has not done much to push back yet.
* “Protestors on both sides of the fray were stabbed.”
* I wouldn’t say this is great news, given the franchise’s recent experiments in that direction: The New Star Trek Series Can Feature All the Sex, Blood, and Profanity It Wants.
* Scremain, or Scoveto? I’m sticking with my gut: Brexit May Well Never Happen. “Bracksies.” All told, quite an achievement.
* How to Prep for Your PhD If You’re Poor.
* Study Links 6.5 Million Deaths Each Year to Air Pollution.
* This amount of rain in such a short time is likely a “one-in-a-thousand-year event,” the weather service said. A zunguzungu flashback.
* Texas Gun Rights Advocates Fatally Shoots Her Two Daughters.
* They call it the seagullypse.
* A New League Of ‘Barefoot Lawyers’ Will Transform Justice In The Next 15 Years.
* Strange days: The Icelandic translator of Stephen King will likely be the country’s next president.
* This tweet seems sweet but is actually ice cold. Truly chilling.
* And it Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean. Last one in is a rotten egg…
Get June Started Right with June Links
* CFP for the first issue of Fantastika Journal.
* David Higgins reviews Paradoxa 27: The Futures Industry.
* This Is What Extinction Sounds Like.
* “Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian.”
* So here’s my question: if this is all so “common sense” and “modest” then why do you have to lie so much about process and intentions? Why are people who drone on about “accountability” for others allowed to act without any accountability to the institutions they are supposed to represent?
Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgments made by particular historical observers. For instance, adjectives of size (“huge,” “gigantic,” but also “tiny”) are among the most reliable textual clues that a book will be called science fiction. Few people would define science fiction as a meditation on size, but it turns out that works categorized as science fiction (by certain sources) do spend a lot of time talking about the topic.
[whispers] Well, my dissertation and book-when-I-finally-get-around-to-massively-revising-it does define science fiction as a meditation on size…
* Bonus Ted Underwood content! The Real Problem with Distant Reading.
* In response to McGurl’s call we intend to create a digital database along with a visualization tool that can be used to map the professional itineraries and social networks of everyone who ever studied or taught creative writing at Iowa since the Workshop’s inception to the present date.
* Duke University enters hotel business with $62 million project. You know, nonprofit for educational purposes.
* University Of Akron President Resigns After Financial Controversies.
* Is It Time for Universities to Get Out of the Hospital Business?
* …if you take up these old positions about what a higher education in the humanities should involve, you end up dancing with some very conservative people. I found myself in very strange company when I began to hold out for education, not as a credentialising process, but what I think of as encouragement for the revolutionary force of individual curiosity–pursued without limit.
* On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.
* Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape.
* Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel.
* Which City Has the Most Unpredictable Weather? Of course Milwaukee makes the top-ten for major metropolitan areas.
* It’s 2016. Why is anyone still keeping elephants in circuses?
* How rich does a black criminal have to be to get treated like a white one?
* Vindicated! A new meta analysis in Perspectives in Psychological Science looked at 33 studies on the relationship between deliberate practice and athletic achievement, and found that practice just doesn’t matter that much.
* 11 History Books You Should Read Before Writing Your Military SF Novel.
* On Early Science Fiction and the Medieval.
* Careerism and totalitarianism.
Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Progressive racism is how racism is enacted by being denied: how racism is heard as a blow to the reputation of an organisation as being progressive. We can detect the same mechanism happening in political movements: when anti-racism becomes part of an identity for progressive whites, racism is either re-located in a body over there (the racist) or understood as a blow to self-reputation of individuals for being progressive. This term “progressive whites” comes from Ruth Frankenberg important work on whiteness studies. She argues that focusing on whiteness purely in negative terms can “leaves progressive whites apparently without any genealogy” (1993, 232). Kincheloe and Steinberg in their work on whiteness studies write of “the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive antiracist white identity” (1998, 34). Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this list of adjectives (positive, proud, attractive, antiracist) is that antiracism then becomes just another white attribute in a chain: indeed, anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.
* When we peel back its progressive pedagogical covering, the teaching-tool defense is embodied in unequal reasoning. It is embodied in racist logic: our national inability to value the same, to reason the same, to think the same for different racial groups.
* What effects has “ban the box” had so far? Two new working papers suggest that, as economic theory predicts, “ban the box” policies increase racial disparities in employment outcomes. So disheartening.
* Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth. No! I won’t believe it!
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* Well, the establishment’s also pretty bored by literary work that deals with our treatment of the rest of being — you know, other animals, the rest of life on Earth, the creatures beyond the man-apes. Like the tragedy of how our men treat our women, the tragic way humans treat nonhumans is still, to many U.S. fiction arbiters, also irrelevant as a conversation, often dismissed as a boutique topic that’s the fodder of cranks and tree huggers. Women and the rest of species in existence: two flaming badges of uncool.
* Harambe launches a thousand thinkpieces.
* The Black Film Canon: The 50 greatest movies by black directors.
* Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object.’
* How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges.
* Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school. All told, over that same 14-year stretch, Chicago’s black population decreased by an estimated 200,000 residents, or nearly 19 percent. Illinois now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.
* AP FACT CHECK: Clinton misstates key facts in email episode. Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States.
* After Being Called Out, Trump Hastily Donates the Veterans’ Aid Money He Said He’d Already Donated. Meet David French: the random dude off the street Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump.
* This is good fun but pretty seriously slanders Magneto and the Joker.
* The Republicans’ Military Budget Could Make Every Homeless Person In America A Millionaire.
* The Male Gaze in a Math Book.
* Coming from Pixar, 2022: Swarm of bees follows woman’s car for two days to rescue their queen.
* The paralogisms of pure dismissal.
* Fandom Is Broken. A Retort. I’m mostly just impressed with how hard I nailed it.
* Baby abandoned at SF State now one of its grads.
* Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit.
* Hyperattention and hyperdistraction.
* Not a Review of Neoreaction a Basilisk. I for one welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted writer and educator, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground zinc caves.
* Make Bayesianism Work for You.
* A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf.
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
* A Fascinating Video Essay Explores the Key Reason Why Calvin and Hobbes Remains So Beloved Today.
* This is a little old, but DC has basically gone ahead and made it real, so…
* David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.
* Algorithms: The Future That Already Happened.
* Judith Butler on the Value of the Humanities and Why We Read.
* Time to panic about Rogue One.
* I still can’t believe The Cursed Child is a real thing. Even photographs can’t convince me.
* [somberly drags FerrisBueller.privilege.Salon.docx to the trash can]
* Business Of Disaster: Insurance Firms Profited $400 Million After Sandy.
* Over a third of coral is dead in parts of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.
* And to imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever.
Weekend Links! Piping Hot!
* Don’t forget! The deadline for the SFFTV special issue on the Mad Max franchise is February 1.
* The local beat! The day Milwaukee almost killed the NFL.
* Expert says Michigan officials changed a Flint lead report to avoid federal action. Bernie calls on Snyder to resign. This is how toxic Flint’s water really is.
* A Bonus Keyword for the Age of Austerity this week: Meritocracy.
* The end of Al Jazeera America.
* NYPD Demands a Mere $36,000 “Copying Fee” for Access to Cops’ Body Cam Footage.
* I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their jobs, but this seems sacrilegious to me.
What a time to be alive.
* Rickman, Bowie, and class mobility.
* Teach the controversy: thebeatlesneverexisted.com
* The latest from KSR: What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
* The game’s afoot! Something Is Killing Off America’s Orange Supply.
* The incredible tale of irresponsible chocolate milk research at the University of Maryland.
* Girl Suspended for 30 Days Because She Lent Her Inhaler to a Gasping Classmate.
* Throw a save against narcissistic self-regard: “Role-playing Gamers Have More Empathy Than Non-Gamers.”
* Retired Art Teacher Leaves $1.7 Million to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
* 2016 pessimism watch: Democrats are in more trouble than they think. And changing demographics won’t save them.
* My people? 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world, new poll reveals.
* And “Late stage capitalism” is the new “Christ, what an asshole.”
Thursday Links!
* A reminder: Marquette English has three open TT positions this year, two in rhet-comp and one in transatlantic Anglophone. The deadline is October 28.
* Jameson on time travel in the LRB.
* Leftist academics need to understand they are embattled both as leftists and as academics.
* This afternoon at two o’clock the New York State Attorney General will announce the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Committee to Save Cooper Union, a group of activist students, faculty, and alumni against the Cooper Union trustees. The settlement will impose various reforms to Cooper Union governance, establish an independent financial monitor for the college, and begin the slow, difficult process of re-establishing Cooper Union as a free, healthy institution. Incredible turn of events. The tragedy of Cooper Union.
* A Proposed Heuristic for Academic Budgeting Decisions.
* NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs.
* “Thanks, UCF, for having lecture-capture courses so I don’t have to go to class ever.”
* A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself. I continue to think Democrats are completely in denial about how bad this story could get.
* Massive hurricanes striking Miami or Houston. Earthquakes leveling Los Angeles or Seattle. Deadly epidemics. Meet the “maximums of maximums” that keep emergency planners up at night.
* The Moral Panic Over Sexting. Today’s obscenity.
* The Accreditation Wars: Where are the Faculty?
* Films for the feminist classroom.
* The proportion of people with intellectual disability who have been treated with psychotropic drugs far exceeds the proportion with recorded mental illness. Antipsychotics are often prescribed to people without recorded severe mental illness but who have a record of challenging behaviour. The findings suggest that changes are needed in the prescribing of psychotropics for people with intellectual disability.
* Boom shakalaka! Read an interview with the NBA Jam voiceover artist.
* Concrete Action, the Wikileaks for architects.
* Yahoo has added commentary tracks from Dan Harmon to its Community episodes.
* Harvard will let students select their own pronouns.
* American Chess May Finally Emerge From The Shadow Of Bobby Fischer.
* Meet the Twitter Bot Generating Unnervingly Plausible Think Pieces.
* California Uber Drivers Can Proceed With Their Class Action.
* Wow, finally: Octavia Butler’s Dawn is allegedly being developed for TV.
* Piggy, Kermit, and domestic violence. Next up: why Elmer Fudd hunting animals out of season is actually no laughing matter…
Wednesday Links!
* Fans aren’t the irrational ones. They know how to seize pleasure from the world and hold tight even as it hurts them. If fandom is simply an obedient response to the signals of the consumer market, it is an obedience which threatens to overrun its master while saying yes.
* Another “I’m a professor” essay.
What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.
* Tenure, Fairness, and Fear(lessness).
But that is not really something that makes professors special. Rather, it is good for people to make their lives less fearsome and their minds less fearful. Those of us who have some of that privilege in our working lives should hold our heads high and try to be allies to others who are working to get their share of it. There’s no shame in having security, only in keeping other people from it.
* In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure,” System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.
* Can the University of Wisconsin Survive Governor Walker?
* Unless you are in highly unusual circumstances, really, do not think of adjuncting as a long-term career.
* What different colleges could do with $400 million.
* In Heated State-Budget Fights, Students Strive to Be Heard.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union: Five Trustees, Including Daniel Libeskind, Abruptly Resign.
* The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.
* But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.
* And then there was Rand, scooping the Democrats again.
* Concerned that kindergarten has become overly academic in recent years, this suburban school district south of Baltimore is introducing a new curriculum in the fall for 5-year-olds. Chief among its features is a most old-fashioned concept: play.
* From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.
* How Utah Became A Bizarre, Blissful Epicenter For Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.
* New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.
* Apple is finally fixing the reason your Mac and iPhone’s Wi-Fi sucks.
* The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.
* Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies.
* music is inefficient beep bop boop
* Why Franklin Richards Is The Most Ridiculous Character In All Of Comics.
* Information wants to be free! With regard to the pornographic material Osama Bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in the operational files. The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA. To the extent that this material exists, the CIA would be prohibited by 18 USC Section 1461 from mailing obscene matter.
* Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.
* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.
Sunday Links!
* Don’t miss my flash review of The Avengers: Age of Ultron! As I say in the update, thanks to my friend Ryan Vu for priming the pump (and look for his brilliant review of Captain America 2 in a few months in SFFTV).
* Why Avengers: Age of Ultron Fills This Buffy Fan With Despair. Nerd Plus Ultron: There Has to Be More to ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Than Printing More Money.
* Notes on the coming DC disaster: In the early going, some in Hollywood are questioning whether Warners has acted too much in haste without having fleshed out the world on which so much hinges.
* These Imaginative Worlds and Parallel Universes Will Forever Change How You Think About Africa.
* 2030 is set largely in the titular year, 100 kilometers south of Ho Chi Minh City. The initial title card establishes that 80% of the population has been evacuated due to the rising sea level as an effect of global warming.
* Great university boondoggle reporting from Freddie deBoer.
* Late last week, using the hashtag #talkpay, people began tweeting about how much money they make—a radical thing to do in a culture that treats disclosing your salary as the ultimate taboo.
* Dear Superprofessors: The experiment is over.
* I’ve been buried in final book manuscript revisions, and have been noticing that I’m increasingly using the term “management” rather than “administration” in my analyses of university governance. Part of the reason is that my employer, the University of California, uses Senior Management Group as a formal employment classification. But it’s also because the friendlier aspects of the term “administration” seem decreasingly part of everyday academic life. Friendliness was administration as support structure, as collaborator, as partner, as the entity that did not take orders from obnoxious egocentric faculty prima donnas the way that frontline staff often had to do, but that accepted balanced power relations and a certain mutual respect that could make decisions move relatively quickly and equitably. It would avoid command and control of the kind that prevailed in the army and in most corporations, where executive authority consisted of direct rule over subordinates.
* Pay hike at McMaster University for female faculty.
* Lawmakers back away from increased course loads for UNC professors.
* Fewer professors, more managers work on Cal State campuses.
* Horrifying, literally unbelievable story of peer review gone awry. More here.
* Well, I guess that settles it: In 50-49 vote, US Senate says climate change not caused by humans.
* Study: Climate Change Threatens One in Six Species With Extinction.
* Babies born 3 miles apart in New York have a 9-year life expectancy gap. 15 Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea.
* The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Protest, 1965-1975.
* Rikers Island meatloaf did have rat poison.
* An Empty Stadium in Baltimore. A Brief History of Pro Sports Played in Empty Stadiums.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18: Descending into Violence.
* ‘Rough Rides’ and the Challenges of Improving Police Culture.
* New ACLU Cellphone App Automatically Preserves Video of Police Encounters.
* The particularity of white supremacy.
* It’s hard out there for a gifted kid.
* “No one has walked on the moon in my lifetime,” I told them. “Yet you try to tell me that it’s my generation who has lost their wonder? That it’s the young people of today who have let everything slip and fall into ruin? You don’t understand. You had the dream and the potential and the opportunities, and you messed it all up. You got hope and moon landings and that bright, glorious future. I got only the disasters.”
* In some ways Ex Machina may be considered a feminist film by sheer dint of our low standards, the scarcity of stories that explore female desire beyond the realm of sex and romance.
* Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’ to Be Developed as TV Series By IM Global.
* The Secret Mountain Our Spies Will Hide In When Washington Is Destroyed.
* A 7-Year-Old Girl Got A New 3D-Printed Left Hand For The Wonderful Price Of $50.
* This 5-year-old girl knows a lot more about presidents than you do. At this point I say put her in charge.
* If you’re 33 or older, you will never listen to new music again—at least, that’s more or less what a new online study says. The study, which is based mainly on data from U.S. Spotify users, concludes that age 33 is when, on average, people stop discovering new music and begin the official march to the grave.
* How Old Is Old? Centenarians Say It Starts in Your 80s; Kids Say Your 40s.
* “How Does a Stand-Up Comedian Work?”
* Whiteness and the Apple Watch.
* The arc of history is long, but Cheez-Its is finally going to sell a box of just the burned ones.
* The same joke but with this Iceland law allowing anyone to murder any Basque on sight.
* “NASA has trialled an engine that would take us to Mars in 10 weeks.”
* The most racist places in America.
* Daddy, there’s a monster under the bed.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine James Cameron directing Avatar sequels, forever.
* And the same joke but with 21 Jump Street sequels.
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
Sunday Links!
* “Are your parents upset by your liberal-arts degree? Show them this chart.”
* Weird, wild coincidence: Darren Wilson’s first job was on a troubled police force disbanded by authorities.
* Exactly the headline you want to wake up to when you’ve got a transatlantic flight in a few hours: Eruption under ice-cap sparks red alert. Luckily I seem to have snuck out of Europe in time…
* If they don’t shape up soon they could have a blue-ribbon commission on their hands: Jolted by images of protesters clashing with heavily armed police officers in Missouri, President Obama has ordered a comprehensive review of the government’s decade-old strategy of outfitting local police departmentswith military-grade body armor, mine-resistant trucks, silencers and automatic rifles, senior officials say.
* Ferguson’s Schools Are Just as Troubling as Its Police Force. Of course the wealth transfer dreams behind “school choice” politics miraculously get “waived” when it comes time to apply it to nonwhite and urban poor populations:
Michael Brown graduated from Normandy High School, which was located, until recently, in the Normandy School District. The facts here are a bit complex, but note that I said “until recently.” That is because the Normandy School district lost its accreditation in 2012 due to dismal standardized test scores. (Normandy was one of only three out of 500 school districts in Missouri to lose its accreditation.) The state school board took over the Normandy School District and renamed it the “Normandy School Collaborative.” By 2013, though, the new district also had lost its accreditation. Missouri law allows students of failed districts to transfer to higher-performing schools in surrounding suburbs, but the failing school district has to pay tuition and transportation costs to get the kids to their new schools. The 1,000 transfer students of Normandy obviously had no desire to remain in the “new” failed district, but the cost was high, so, incredibly, the state board voted to waive accreditation of the Collaborative rather than classify the new district as unaccredited. Ferguson’s teenagers were therefore trapped in a failed school because state politicians didn’t want to pay for them to transfer out.
* ‘Normal birth’ and ‘breast is best’: the neoliberalisation of reproduction.
* Pay It Forward is dead in Oregon.
* ‘Sex Box,’ a reality show where people have sex in a box on TV, is a real thing for 2015.
* How Do We Get Our Students to Become Cops?, asks the Chronicle. How? How?
* This Soviet spy created the US-led global economic system.
* Where were the people who live in your state born?
* And Massachusetts man fears his horns, ’666′ forehead tattoo will make a fair trial impossible.
Gerry Canavan 
Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!
leave a comment »
* 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…
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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!
* 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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, adaptations, adjunctification, adjuncts, Agustín de Rojas, alcohol, allergies, Alpha Centauri, alternate history, America, Arkansas, artificial intelligence, assisted suicide, austerity, automation, Baltimore, binge watching, Binti, books, cancer, capitalism, CBS, CFPs, children, climate change, Clinton Foundation, college sports, color, Columbia, comics, commentary tracks, content notes, content warnings, crystal meth, Cuba, Curt Schilling, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, DEA, deadlines, debt, Democrats, depression, disability, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, drugs, drywall, Duke, DVDs, dystopia, ecology, EpiPen, euthanasia, extrasolar planets, fantasy, films, first as tragedy then as farce, fountains of youth, futurity, games, Gandalf, Gawker, graduate student movements, Harry Potter, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, horses, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, Ian McKellan, Iceland, Icon, ideology, if you want a vision of the future, Illinois, imperial presidency, Infinite Jest, infrastructure, Instagram, Jean Gray, Jodi Melamed, journamalism, Katherine Johnson, Ken Burns, legacy board games, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, meganarratives, melancholy, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, mortality, my pedagogical empire, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, NLRB, Nnedi Okorafor, No Man's Sky, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, philosophy, places to invade next, plot, Pokémon Go, polls, post journalism, prison, private college, Proxima Centauri, Rabid Puppies, race, racism, ramen, rape, rape culture, rationality, raw sewage, reboots, religious studies, remakes, Republicans, robots, Ron Johnson, Sad Puppies, science, science fiction, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, siblings, slavery, sobriety, space travel, Star Trek, Star Trek V, Star Trek: Discovery, Stephen King, Stranger Things, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, swords, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, the South, the sublime, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, Title IX, transgender issues, trigger warnings, true crime, turtles, Uber, University of Chicago, University of Florida, Utopia, Vox Day, war on drugs, Washington Post, water, Wes Anderson, white people, William Shatner, Wisconsin, writing, X-Men, Yale, Yoss, you and I are gonna live forever