Posts Tagged ‘Indiana Jones’
Sunday Morning Links!
* 6 minutes 30 seconds. The Parkland Manifesto. Photos.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet.
* Toward an Ecologically Based Post-Capitalism: Interview With Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Star Trek: Discovery‘s tour through poorly thought-out Trek arcana looks ready to tackle Section 31 next. The biggest shock here is that they may actually be able to get Michelle Yeoh back.
* CFP: Context is for Kings – An Edited Collection on Star Trek: Discovery.
* Britain: Universities on Strike.
* Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors. Our research shows they’re biased against women. That means using them is illegal.
* Amazing how a CHE piece specifically focused on a college president’s flamboyant anti-faculty rhetoric is still totally agnostic as to whether anything he says is true or whether anything he proposes will work.
* How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students.
* In a Historic Vote, Renowned Art School Cooper Union Commits to Bringing Back Free Tuition For All.
* Why Relentless Administrative Turnover Makes It Hard for Us to Do Our Jobs.
* These Are the 100 Most Militarized Universities in America.
* The reviews for Isle of Dogs are coming in and they’re pretty mixed, with a lot of attention to the film’s aggressive cultural appropriation. Who could have predicted!
* None dare call it genocide: It’s been almost six months since Hurricane Maria, and Puerto Ricans are still dying.
* Bad Games, Broken-World Playing, and the Scholarship of Repair.
* 1977: Semiocapitalism and the Real Subsumption of Fantasy.
* Kurt Vonnegut Festival to Feature Father John Misty, Waxahatchee, and More.
* As reported by the Kansas City Star, the indictment—which you can, and should, look through for yourself right here—reads like a slowly mounting horror story, as owner Jeff Henry, park manager Tyler Miles, and ride designer John Schooley (described as lacking “any kind of technical or engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety”) apparently did everything in their power to make Verrückt a tragedy waiting to happen. Los Angeles Times correspondent Matt Pearce highlighted a number of the most chilling moments from the indictment on Twitter, including excerpts showing the ride’s rushed design and construction, secret failed bouts of testing, willful destruction of safety reports, and even an incident in which Miles allegedly sent lawyers in an effort to intimidate teenage employees from blowing the whistle on the park. Nationalize water parks.
* “If you are seeking a sentence of 3 years incarceration, state on the record that the cost to the taxpayer will be $126,000.00 (3 x $42,000.00) if not more and explain why you believe the cost is justified.” Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He’s Exceeding Expectations.
* Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash. I was completely willing to give the automated cars the benefit of the doubt before I saw the video, but it’s clear this technology is not ready and these trials should be suspended until it is.
* A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy.
* Facebook is enmeshed in another controversy, this time over accusations that the firm Cambridge Analytica abused Facebook data to help Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. But this is a big deal fundamentally because of a larger and more fundamental problem: Facebook is bad.
* White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households. Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys.
* Unarmed black man shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
* The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever. The immediate criticism of this article I saw on Twitter: the outfit requires women to get almost entirely naked to go to the bathroom, change a tampon, or nurse.
* An Arbitrary Number of Theses on Donald’s Trump.
* The United States of Amnesia, again and again. 15 Years. More Than 1 Million Dead. No One Held Responsible.
* Underground network readies homes to hide undocumented immigrants.
* Immigrant mom arrested in front of kids and accused of human smuggling is released without charges.
* ‘Where’s Mommy?’: A family fled death threats, only to face separation at the border.
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches across 617,000 square miles of the northern Pacific Ocean, based on their survey, and plastics make up 99.9 percent of the trash in the patch.
* U.S. Military Is World’s Biggest Polluter.
* Humanity’s Meat and Dairy Intake Must Be Cut in Half by 2050 to Avoid Dangerous Climate Change. Why It’s Time for America to Tax Meat.
* Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn.
* Utah just legalized what parenting was like in the 1980s.
* Behold, the famous efficiency of capitalism.
* Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism.
* Welcome to Powder Mountain – a utopian club for the millennial elite.
* My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data.
* Jack Kirby’s 1979 concept sketches for “Science Fiction World”, a proposed theme park.
* Analyzing the Crazy, Complicated Credits of Avengers: Infinity War.
* My estimates regarding the average revenue generated by major-conference football and basketball players are based on varying assumptions, ranging from very conservative to relatively liberal, regarding the effects of big-time college sports on fund raising. Yet even the low-end estimate suggests that, if players were compensated on the model employed by professional sports leagues when they divide revenue, major college football and basketball players should receive an average of $750,000 annually. Note that this figure would still result in these nonprofit — and therefore largely untaxed — universities retaining revenues generated by football and basketball that would equal their entire athletic operating budgets just a decade ago.
* Punishing Women for Being Smart.
* So in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times set out to count every officer-involved shooting in Florida during a six-year period. We learned that at least 827 people were shot by police — one every 2½ days.
* When Police Officers Use Sexual Assault to Terrorize Vulnerable Communities.
* If it’s anything like the comics, this could be really good: ‘Astro City’ TV Series Based On Comics In Works At FremantleMedia North America.
* What in God’s Name Happened to Ricky Gervais?
* I’ll certainly hear the asteroid out.
* The Fermi Paradox and the miracle of life.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And of course you had me at Dungeons and Dragons creatures, generated by neural network.
Weekend Links!
* Extrapolation 58.1 is out! With articles on Octavia Butler, Aldous Huxley, Neal Stephenson, and Celu Ambsterstone. I’ll give a special endorsement to Donawerth and Scally’s Butler article, which is not only the first article to cite my book (that I know of) but also a truly great study tracing Butler’s footsteps research Kindred in Maryland. Check it out!
* CFP: Utopia, Now!
* Jeff VanderMeer in conversation with Cory Doctorow.
The result is “Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity.
Mr. Gibson never set out to write a sequel, but the plots of “Agency” and “The Peripheral” converged unexpectedly last fall. He had spent about a year writing “Agency” when the 2016 election rendered the fictional world he had created obsolete. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. But when he tried tinkering with the draft, he realized that the world had changed too drastically for him to plausibly salvage the story. “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing,” he said.
* The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in.
* Wes Anderson’s latest, Isle Of Dogs, gets a release date and poster. Warm up your power rankings now!
* I’m Wes Anderson, and I’m Directing This FBI Investigation into Russia and the Trump Campaign.
* If the police do it, it isn’t murder: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail.
* Purdue Has Bought Kaplan — for $1. The weird fall of Burlington College. Rand Paul Stealing My Bit. When 51 Years Experience Isn’t Good Enough.
* CBS is apparently fully committed to ruining Star Trek: Discovery in every possible way.
* More on the Cal audit that reveals massive administrative blight.
* Tracking White Collar Crime Zones.
* The March for Science wasn’t.
* Charter schools as corporate perk.
* What’s the matter with Nintendo?
* Apple’s Promise to End Rare Earth Mineral Mining Is ‘100 Percent Unattainable Today.’ Haters! Apple can do anything.
* 25 percent of young Britons have lied about reading Lord Of The Rings, poll reveals. I want to know how many have said they didn’t read it when they did!
* Corbynism or barbarism. Inside Corbyn’s Office.
* We May Have Uncovered the First Ever Evidence of the Multiverse.
* Trump Wants to Send a Man to Mars During His Presidency. The next launch window isn’t until the 2030s, so this is a worrying declaration indeed. Here’s the plan.
* Record-breaking climate events all over the world are being shaped by global warming, scientists find. What will Earth look like when all the ice melts?
* I Got Hacked So You Don’t Have To.
* Artist attaches Trump’s quotes about women to sexist 1950s ads and they fit too well. Into the shadows in Trump’s America. A GOP Lawmaker Has Been Revealed As The Creator Of Reddit’s Anti-Woman ‘Red Pill’ Forum. How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump. Killing Obamacare, Again (with an asterisk). In the richest country that has ever existed. We all gonna die. And the worst news yet: US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports.
* We Asked ICE About the Prank Calls to Their Anti-Immigrant Hotline and They Kind of Lost Their Shit. 100 Days of Democratic Rage. Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again. Trump supporters are the most overrated force in American politics. The Anatomy of Liberal Melancholy. Could Your Teen’s Meme Be a Red? Texas Is The Future.
To clarify: it is perfectly possible that some collusion between Trump’s agents and Russian hackers did indeed occur. But at this point, the empirical question of whether or not it happened is secondary to the deeper psychological need for media pundits, policy wonks, and the professional-managerial strata to maintain their sense of self when the objective historical conditions in which they flourished are being actively dissolved. For liberals, the continued libidinal investment in the drama of the as-yet invisible Trump-Russia scandal actively blocks any realization that the neoliberal order they are trying to restore is already dead on its feet, and that Trump is the uniquely bizarre American expression of a visible worldwide trend: the virulent, deepening nationalist backlash against a financially-integrated global economy based on the relatively free movement of commodities and people. His ascent is a death knell for an entire era and the basic assumptions about economic and political life that shape the worldview of contemporary liberals.
* Organize. Syllabus prep. The Tenure-Track Professor. Should I Go to Grad School? Ikigai. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Against buckraking. But what does Obama’s willingness to take the money in the first place say about progressive centrism, if we stipulate (as I think MY would likely agree) that Obama is probably as good as progressive centrists are likely to get? The left neoliberal hit against standard liberal-to-left politics in the 1980s was that it fostered sleazy interest groups and tacit or not-so-tacit mutual backscratching between these interest groups and politicians. If the very best alternative that left neoliberalism has to offer is another, and arguably worse version of this (Wall Street firms, unlike unions, don’t even have the need to pretend to have the interests of ordinary people at heart), then its raison d’etre is pretty well exploded.
* Disney will just take all your money, thanks.
* Building blocks of our weird future: artificial wombs.
* Warner Brothers Might Have to Pay $900 Million If It Can’t Prove Ghosts Are Real.
* More bad press for United. It’s like they’re trying to go bankrupt.
* “Twitter” is an oversimplification. There are many twitters, which is also part of the problem: my twitter and yours are different, but they can come into contact with each other and overlap, and do. We can each think the other person is a holographic projection into our living room, and the rooms are similar enough that we can overlook the ways they are different (and then blame the other person for coming into our house and acting like an asshole). But this also means that talking about what “twitter” is or isn’t, or does, or doesn’t, is a similar exercise in polemic misunderstanding. If the underlying structure of the program is a constant, the conversational norms and practical methods we bring to it will vary, radically and dramatically. Some of the problem is the latter thing: people not only use twitter differently, but they sometimes regard other people’s use of it as illegitimate or wrong. Policing other people on twitter can become particularly heated and vicious, if a police from one jurisdiction comes into another, without knowing it, and attempts to apply one set of laws to someone who thinks they’re operating in another. It rarely ends well. And yet if we keep pretending that there is one twitter (ours), we’ll keep crashing into each other and insisting that it’s the other car that came into my lane. Twitter road rage.
* Oh, I see the problem: Americans don’t read.
* And I know things seem dark, darker than they’ve ever been, but Illinois fixed it. Kudos.
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against or What You’re For
* Saturn devours his young: President Trump.
* So weird to see Donald Trump going through all the traditional rituals of assuming the presidency, like the ceremonial settling of your $25 million fraud cases.
* When Mike Pence Went To See Hamilton. (UPDATE: God forbid me, I don’t think this is absolutely insignificant.)
* The Problem of Judas in Amos Oz’s new novel.
* Film analysis minute: Indiana Jones and the collaborators.
* Dan Berger in Jacobin: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.
* Suicide contagion in the Age of Trump. The Banality of Trump. While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. Hey, just out of curiosity, are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?
* Let me tell you a story about a major party’s nominee for President of the United States.
* I come to you now, at the turn of the tide: Finally, the MLA speaks.
* What the: Minnesota Woman Sues Her Trans Teenager for Transitioning Without Her Consent.
* Pokémon originalism is a thing now.
* What kind of New Jersey accent do you have? What’s the most New Jersey thing you can think of?
* Two days after Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the Canadian government quietly tweaked our immigration system to make it easier for many Americans to move to Canada.
Spriiiiiiiing Breaaaaaaaaak! Links
* Don’t miss the CFP for my upcoming Paradoxa special issue on “Global Weirding”!
* Of course you haven’t read Canavan until you’ve read him in the original French.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Today in the end of our lives’ work. Delaware State cuts more than a quarter of its majors. But don’t worry, we’ve finally got the solution.
* Chairing a humanities department at the end of the world.
* Trying to put a number on adjunct justice.
* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied.
* I think you’ll find every possible jaundiced, post-academic riff on this story has already been made: French woman aged 91 gets PhD after 30 years.
* All about the SF sensation of SXSW, Dead Slow Ahead. And more!
* Great moments in unenforceable contracts.
* Ten Years after the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A prison interview with the accuser.
* Reminder: NCAA Amateurism Is a Corrupt Sham, We Are All Complicit. March Madness means money – it’s time to talk about who’s getting paid. And here’s how to gamble on it.
* The trouble with people who lived in the past.
* Inside the Protest That Stopped the Trump Rally.
* How to steal a nomination from Donald Trump. The Pre-Convention. There is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party. I can’t be contrarian about Donald Trump anymore: he’s terrifying.
* Meet the Academics Who Want Donald Trump to Be President.
* I do agree that presidential term limits make little sense, though my solution would be to abolish the office entirely.
* The oldest man in the world survived Auschwitz.
* What if Daylight Saving Time never ended?
* Teach the controversy: Richard Simmons May or May Not Be Currently Held Hostage by His Maid.
* As temperatures soar, new doubts arise about holding warming to 2 degrees C.
* The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go. Game Two. Game Three. Game Five. But we got one!
* How The TV Show of Octavia Butler’s Dawn Will Stay True to Her Incredible Vision.
* Take your Baby-Sitters’ Club cosplay / fanfic blog to the next level.
* Photoshopping men out of political photos.
* Scenes from Iconic Films Hastily Rewritten So They Pass the Bechdel Test.
* Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.
* Paul Nungesser has lost his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia.
* Chris Claremont visits Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men.
* Paging Lt. Barclay: Science proves the transporter is a suicide box.
* The Untold Tragedy of Camden, NJ.
* J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish.
* Scientists discover ‘genderfluid’ lioness who looks, acts and roars like a male.
* Always a good sign: Star Trek Beyond Is Reshooting and Adding an Entirely New Cast Member. Meanwhile: Paramount lawyers call Star Trek fan film’s bluff in nerdiest lawsuit ever.
* Jacobin reviews Michael’s Moore Where to Invade Next. Jacob Brogan reviews Daniel Clowes’s Patience.
* From our family to yours, happy St. Patrick’s Day.
* Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along.
* And because you demanded it: What if James Bond Was a Chimpanzee?
Wednesday Night Links
* The Utopia symposium in the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is especially good, if I do say so myself. Featuring Raffaella Baccolini, Troy Bordun, Catherine Constable, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carl Freedman, Lisa Garforth, Dan Hassler-Forest, Veronica Hollinger, Alexis Lothian, Roger Buckhurst, Tom Moylan, Sharon Sharp, Steven Shaviro, Debra Benita Shaw, Rebekah Sheldon, Imre Szeman, Phillip E. Wegner, and Rhys Williams…
* Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes.
* Fear of an Ill Planet: On the Importance of Sickness and the Demands of Otherness.
* I think maybe every literally academic I know has been talking about this story.
* The Scalia obituaries keep coming: 1, 2, 3.
* Huge cuts to ethnic studies at SFSU.
* The Troubled Academic Job Market for History.
* Never in my worst dreams about the future of the university could I have imagined such a thing was possible: Chicago State University Cancels Spring Break.
* David Milch, the storied mind also behind ‘Deadwood,’ changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: “He’s brilliant.”
* Yay, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. Booooooo, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. In any event.
* Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime.
* “There no longer are any rules in the Supreme Court nomination process.” I’ll do you one better!
* Usually this sort of mythologizing isn’t caught fast enough to be traced: The Evolution of the Myth of the Sanders “English Only” Chant.
* Social media, the new mind control.
* Polls and Trump’s Supporters. My word.
* Elsewhere in dystopian backstory: The Virginia Senate has passed legislation that would transform all law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth into secret police, quite literally, a dangerous step in the direction of unaccountable and non-transparent government. No other state has gone as far as the Senate bill would take Virginia into the realm of secrecy where it concerns state and local police.
* When the Public Defender Says, ‘I Can’t Help.’
* Nobody, but nobody, can trip over their own feet like Obama.
* The Huntington Tumblr has a few pictures up from one of Octavia Butler’s horse stories.
* The contested legacy of Stan Lee.
* A People’s History of #CancelColbert.
* Nice work if you can get it: Rutgers president gets a $97,000 bonus.
* The Oscars Forgot to Nominate The Force Awakens For Best Picture.
* Why Professor Indiana Jones Never Published His Research.
* Ok, sold: Margaret Atwood’s Next Book Is a Prison-Bound Take on The Tempest.
* Well, that doesn’t sound so bad… Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
* Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist.
* On the plus side, we are living through a golden age of theme parks.
* Rosemary G. Feal will step down as executive director of the Modern Language Association next year after 15 years in that job, the group announced on Wednesday.
* Fermi Paradox watch: maybe life is that rare.
* But mostly Fuller House evokes a smut-free porn parody, with sexualized adult versions of characters who, in the collective psyche, are frozen in amber as children. Elsewhere on the Onion‘s Full House porn parody beat.
* “Dogs and Certain Primates May Be Able To See Magnetic Fields.” Tell no one my secret.
* Breastfeeding is probably really not that big a deal.
* Winning the lottery can also bankrupt your neighbors.
* Twilight of saying “Aycock” at Duke and UNCG.
* KSR coverage in American Literature: “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, theMars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change.”
* Why Is Inver Hills Banning Union Activist From Campus?
* The Problematic, Sexist Subtext of Laughing at Hitler’s Alleged Micropenis.
* Lev Grossman on Narnia and grief.
* The best news I’ve gotten all year: Milwaukee’s Air and Water Show postponed until 2017.
* Blade Runner 2 is an abomination that should never have been made, but I am interested to see how they deal (or don’t) with the Deckard/replicant issue.
* And Philip K. Dick is just straight-up writing our reality now.
