Posts Tagged ‘Isaac Asimov’
Fall Break Links? In This Economy?
I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...
- A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
- I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
- A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
- Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
- CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
- The CoFutures Prizes.
- Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
- Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
- Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
- How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
- Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
- From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
- Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
- Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
- Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
- Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
- Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
- The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
- Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
- Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
- Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
- The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
- To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
- ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.
- What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
- U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.
- All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
- Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
- Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
- Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
- Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
- The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
- Legally defining Peter Parker.
- Marvel adjective chart.
- Art Is Not Therapy.
- The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
- Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
- A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
- Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
- Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.
- Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
- At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
- This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
- Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
- Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
- If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
- Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
- Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
- Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
- The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
- The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
- Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
- Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…
- “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
- Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
- Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
- Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
- What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
- Equal population mapper.
- The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
- Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
- Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”
- A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
- The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
- War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
- When Chess Gets Weird.
- Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
- America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
- From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
- The United States of Abandoned Places.
- A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
- An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
- An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
- The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
- Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
- Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
- New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
- The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
- In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
- How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
- Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
- We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
- By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
- Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
- Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
- Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
- The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
- Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
- An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
- As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
- As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
- Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
- Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
- Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
- Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
- The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
- The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
- More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
- Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
- Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
- Anthropocene Gothic.
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
- Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
- Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
- It can always get worse.
- They say time is the fire in which we burn.
- How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
- And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Closed Some Tabs Today Links
* * The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.
* Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?
* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.
* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.
* Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!
* Foundation #130 has been published.
* An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.
* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.
* Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.
* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.
* A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.
* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.
* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.
* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.
* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?
* Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.
* As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.
* White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.
* Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
* Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.
* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.
* Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.
* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.
* Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.
* What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?
* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.
* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.
* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.
* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.
* As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
* Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.
* Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.
* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!
* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.
* E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.
* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.
* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.
* In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.
* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!
* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.
* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.
* Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.
* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…
* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?
* Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.
* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).
* Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.
* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
* Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.
* Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.
* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.
* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”
* Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?
* Incompetence all the way down.
* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.
* In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.
* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.
* The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.
* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.
* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.
* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.
* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.
* We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.
* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.
* Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.
* Raising a child in a doomed world.
* The second civil war just got interesting.
* In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.
* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.
* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.
* And a plastic straw update: A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!
The Terrible Serenity of a Browser with Every Tab Closed
* What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.
* We Reversed Our Declining English Enrollments. Here’s How.
* CFP: Exhaustion: Tired Bodies, Tired Worlds. Graduate conference at the Department of English, University of Chicago, this November.
* When machine learning is astonishing – I collected some highlights from a paper on algorithmic creativity. Great Twitter thread.
* Butler Mons honours Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, and whose Xenogenesis trilogy describes humankind’s departure from Earth and subsequent return. And on the second season finale of Levar Burton reads: “Childfinder.”
* ‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages.
* Climate Change, Revolution And ‘New York 2140.’
* Dic Lit.
* Dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.
* Post-Soviet science fiction and the war in Ukraine.
* Eighty Years of the Futurians’ Vision.
* A Radical Idea about Adjuncting.
* I didn’t really understand how unjust the academic system was for career advancement for women until I had children. What It’s Like to Be a Woman in the Academy.
* Teach the controversy, Hell edition.
* What It’s Like to Watch Isle of Dogs As a Japanese Speaker. Orientalism Is Alive And Well In American Cinema.
* Junot Díaz on the legacy of childhood trauma.
* The Breakfast Club in the age of #MeToo.
* Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is not a video-game-centered dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.
* Milwaukee students of color say it’s time to talk about the school-to-prison pipeline.
* A Syrian man has been trapped in a Malaysian airport for 37 days.
* The Fog of War and the Case for Knee-jerk Anti-Interventionism.
* 15 Years. More Than 1 Million Dead. No One Held Responsible.
* America should just stop all bombing.
* ‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence.
* Justice Dept. to halt legal-advice program for immigrants in detention. Amid deportations, those in U.S. without authorization shy away from medical care. ICE Won’t Deport the Last Nazi War Criminal in America.
* This proposal, requiring worker seats on corporate boards, is commonly referred to as “codetermination.” A number of European countries require worker representatives to be included in corporate boards, or for councils of workers to be consulted in appointing board members. The emerging plan to save the American labor movement.
* There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, carers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster or slower, with ostentatious brutality or bureaucratic drag, but it will always do it. Trump is gambling that Americans will embrace the brutal version, as they’ve done so many times in the past. If they do, will we be enough to stop them? Liberals constantly rediscover the violence at the heart of their politics, but can never learn a thing from it.
* When an algorithm cuts your health care.
* How the American economy conspires to keep wages down.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Universities Use the Specter of ICE to Try to Scare Foreign Grad Students Away From Unionizing.
* Why Your Advice for Ph.D.s Leaving Academe Might Be Making Things Worse.
* The definitive explanation of why Bitcoin is stupid.
* Wisconsin in the news: Suspected White Supremacist Died Building ISIS-Style Bombs.
* I predicted this: Apple orders its most ambitious TV series yet: An adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation.
* More than half your body is not human.
* Stan Lee needs a hero. Sounds like the sooner the better.
* Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age.
* The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news. Dangerous climate tipping point is ‘about a century ahead of schedule’ warns scientist. Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting at its Fastest Rate in 400 years.
* Tony Gilroy on ‘Rogue One’ Reshoots: They Were in “Terrible Trouble.”
* Catholic Colleges and Basketball.
* A people’s history of the Undertaker.
* John Carpenter: The First Fifteen Years.
* Only young people do revolutionary mathematics.
* Political correctness strikes again! MIT cuts ties with company promising to provide digital immortality after killing you.
* The Working Person’s Guide to the Industry That Might Kill Your Company.
* I was going to watch it anyway, but: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2 Casts Tig Notaro.
* A Jar, a Blouse, a Letter: The story of Julia Kristeva.
* Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement. Mark Zuckerberg’s 15-year apology tour.
* Why several trainloads of New Yorkers’ poop has been stranded for months in Alabama.
* Unusual forms of ‘nightmare’ antibiotic-resistant bacteria detected in 27 states.
* The best news I’ve heard in years: Fireball Island is coming back.
* That’s a relief! Don’t worry, the US would win a nuclear war with Russia.
* And no one’s hands are clean.
Wednesday Links!
* People are figuring out that the “anthology” era of Star Wars was a bad idea. And a chilling report from the set of Han Solo: Ron Howard Once Defended Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Calling It “Truly Amazing.”
* Behind the Scenes of Disney’s Donald Trump ‘Hall of Presidents’ Drama.
* In the same vein, the proliferating but ever meaningless distinctions between the “bad” Uber and the “good” Lyft have obscured how destructive the rise of ride-sharing has been for workers and the cities they live in. The predatory lawlessness that prevails inside Valley workplaces scales up and out. Both companies entered their markets illegally, without regard to prevailing wages, regulations, or taxes. Like Amazon, which found a way to sell books without sales tax, this turned out to be one of the many illegal boons.
* Democrats and the working class.
* Senate postpones health care vote as critical mass of Republicans defect. Keep calling! Tens of thousands per year. Trumpcare kills.
* This chart shows the stunning trade-off at the heart of the GOP health plan.
* Democrats Help Corporate Donors Block California Health Care Measure, and Progressives Lose Again.
* Destroying the university in Illinois.
* Chaffetz calls for $2,500 legislator/month housing stipend.
* Sometimes ideology critique just writes itself.
* And Now Director Jon Watts Claims Peter Parker Was In Iron Man 2.
* Someone’s Trying to Adapt Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series Again.
* I say teach the controversy.
* As Lake Chad vanishes, seven million people are on the brink of starvation.
* The inside story of how TMZ quietly became America’s most potent pro-Trump media outlet.
* Trinity Suspends Targeted Professor. And U Delaware. Why can’t free speech advocates ever defend adjunct professors and people of color? Stop firing professors for having controversial views, says academic.
* But as the land enters its 120th year in the family, the Allens are struggling to hold on to it. Because of ambiguities surrounding the land’s title, there is no primary owner of the property; all of the heirs of the original owners—and there are more than 100 known heirs—are legally co-owners. As such, the land is classified as “heirs’ property,” a designation that makes it vulnerable to being sold without the family’s full consent. As the Allens attempt to overcome a stacked legal system—exacerbated by corrupt lawyers and predatory developers—they are at the center of a decades-long fight to retain black-owned land across the South.
* Social media won’t let toxic grudges die.
* Trump’s EPA won’t let toxic pesticides die.
* Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize.
* Amazing the stories that don’t even rate as scandals in this trainwreck administration.
* As predicted, the Super Nintendo Classic is on its way.
* The Tory-DUP Deal Proves the Magic Money Tree Is Real.
* Lynching and the sick history of the death penalty.
In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging—despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, “We’ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.” In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having “avoided” a lynching.
* Huge Star Trek: Discovery scoop: the entire series is a Holodeck program Riker is running during a commercial break.
* When you don’t want your hip retro soundtrack to be scooped.
* “Nuclear power plant faces backlash after choosing interns by way of a bikini competition.” Photos at the link, of course; this is the Internet, after all…
* The ‘i before e, except after c’ rule is a giant lie.
* The weird logic of Facebook’s hate speech algorithms.
* SF short of the night: They Will All Die in Space.
* An AI Generates the Inspirational Posters We Need Right Now.
* And because you demanded it, it’s back up at An und für sich: Why remake The Handmaid’s Tale now? Gilead as ISIS.
End of the Semester Fire Sale: Every Link Must Go
* Another galaxy is possible: Toshiro Mifune turned down Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader roles.
* CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2016.
* The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
* Huntington’s disease and engineered humanity.
* A little on-the-nose, don’t you think? USS Milwaukee breaks down at sea.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: Millennials: They’re Just Like Us!
* College Football Coaches Are Making Millions Off A Useless Metric.
* AAUP calls UI search a ‘crude exercise in naked power.’
* Report Highlights Faculty Conditions at Jesuit Colleges.
* The Marquette Tribune did a short followup on my magic and literature class, returning this spring.
* 95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue. How Will the Professors Act When Fascism Comes to America? I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here’s what they said. Understanding Trumpism the Scott Adams Way. And here’s where things get wild: GOP preparing for contested convention. Trumpism would be the perfect ideology for a third party.
* When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity.
* On English studies and ennui. Gee, I wonder why a cohort of people who have discovered too late that they have committed themselves to an imploding profession might feel a little bit depressed.
* On the plus side: More Useless Liberal Arts Majors Could Destroy ISIS.
* The College of Saint Rose has laid off a number of tenured faculty, among them Scott Lemieux.
* Another mass shooting was over. The country had moved on. But inside one house in Oregon, a family was discovering the unending extent of a wound.
* Every year, roughly 40,000 people die in Minnesota. For some, it’s weeks or months before anyone finds them. Meet the crew who comes in to clean up the mess.
* Amazing Graphics Show How Much Fruits Have Changed Since Humans Started Growing Them.
* At least five police officers present during a shooting that was captured on a video that has created a firestorm of protest in this city supported a discredited version of events told by the officer who fired the fatal shots, newly released records show. Laquan McDonald and police perjury: a way forward. The U.S. Department of Justice unit that investigates civil rights violations by police departments has only about 18 employees who work on such investigations full-time. According to a former head of the unit, a forthcoming probe into the Chicago PD could overwhelm its “ridiculously small” staff. Good luck to them! Meanwhile, Rahm tries to hold on to power despite a clear need to resign.
* Here’s how Las Vegas police halted a trend in excessive force.
* How the Democrats flubbed San Bernardino. The worst part is most them seem not to have noticed.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top 20 billionaires worth as much as half of America.
* An Isochronic Map of the World from London, c. 1914. More links after the map!
* The geography of student debt.
* UBI in Finland — though it looks a bit like stealth social safety net cuts to me.
* Does America Deserve Malala?
* Obama scandal watch: This one does seem pretty corrupt, actually.
* Abandoned America: the Hershey Chocolate Factory.
* God save Title IX from its champions: ‘Hunting Ground’ Filmmakers to Harvard Law Profs: Criticizing Our Film Could Create a ‘Hostile Climate.’ When the core belief is that accusers never lie, if any one accuser has lied, it brings into question the stability of the entire thought system, rendering uncertain all allegations of sexual assault. But this is neither sensible nor necessary: that a few claims turn out to be false does not mean that all, most, or even many claims are wrongful. The imperative to act as though every accusation must be true—when we all know some number will not be—harms the over-all credibility of sexual assault claims. Relatedly, Newsweek has an article covering “the other side” of campus rape investigations.
* Telltale will make a Batman game.
* Two strikes against the next Wes Anderson movie: “…it’s a Japanese story and I’m playing a dog.”
* Servicemen Contradict Military’s Account Of Attack On MSF Hospital In Afghanistan.
* The arc of history is long, but Red Mars is finally going to series.
* Last year carbon emissions dropped while the economy grew for the first time in history.
* Public history at UNC: tracing the history of building names.
* Reading Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Islamophobia.
* ACA collapse watch: The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.
* The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop. Don’t Let Kids Play Football. It’s Time To Take The Warriors’ Chances Of Going 73-9 Seriously. Golden State Warriors: best team in NBA history? The last team to start 20-0 like the Warriors was so good that its league folded.
* Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence.
* All The Items Of Clothing Women Have Been Told Not To Wear In 2015.
* These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe.
* Being a good looking man could hinder your career, study finds. Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds. Stonehenge may have been first erected in Wales, evidence suggests.
* Why didn’t anyone stop Doctor Hardy?
* Latinx.
* Vice got the Rachel Dolezal profile.
* Fractal Problems in Comparative Domestic Policy.
* How D.C. spent $200 million over a decade on a streetcar you still can’t ride.
* Serial‘s back y’all. UPDATE: And it’s already super irritating!
* UFO truthers want to make Roswell an issue for 2016. Meet their lobbyist.
* Ron Howard says Arrested Development season 5 is in the writing stage.
* Teach the controversy: Building the Death Star Was an Economic Catastrophe.
* Pretty grim America: Gun Rights Groups to Hold Fake Mass Shooting at UT This Weekend.
* Just another here’s-what-happens-when-you-adopt-a-chimp story.
* FDA Approves Device That Can Plug Gunshot Wounds in 15 Seconds.
* The Definitive Guide to Sci-Fi Drugs Was Produced by the Government in the 1970s.
* Why are so many toddlers being put on heavy psychiatric drugs?
* All right, I’m in: Margaret Atwood Is Writing A Part-Cat, Part-Owl, Part-Human Superhero Comic.
* xkcd explains the Three Laws of Robotics.
* And in an age without heroes, there was Matt Haughey.
Thursday Links!
* I’ll be speaking next Thursday at “Between Activism and Apocalypse: The Work of Margaret Atwood” at Indiana University. The schedule for the symposium is here.
* CFP: Stage The Future 2: The Second International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre.
* SF short-short of the day: Isaac Asimov’s “Silly Asses.”
* Here’s the calendar of events for C21 this semester.
* “Things like computer vision are starting to work; speech recognition is starting to work There’s quite a bit of acceleration in the development of AI systems,” says Bart Selman, a Cornell professor and AI ethicist who was at the event with Musk. “And that’s making it more urgent to look at this issue.” AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds.
* Of course it’s already worse than you think.
* Elsewhere in mad billionaire news: Internet! in! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
* Gender Differences in the Road to the Doctoral Degree. Less support, more debt, more time to degree.
* Forbidden Planet reviews Richard McGuire’s incredible graphic novel Here.
* Hours After State Of The Union, Senate Targets National Parks. Once again, it’s always worse than you think.
* Saul Goodman, the last difficult man.
* A smart observation from Peter Paik: “Common Core teaches students that there is only one way to read a text (to glean information) but there are many ways to solve a math problem (the target of much outrage on social media).”
* Some Colleges Are Moving Past Eve Ensler’s “Cisnormative” ‘Vagina Monologues’ — And That’s OK.
* Milestone Media rides again.
* How ‘Harry Potter’ fans won a four-year fight against child slavery.
* English professors combine areas of study for new specialization.
The department, known for its expertise in disability and LGBT studies, is looking to newer faculty to blend the two topics into a common subject area.Robert McRuer, who chairs the English department, said he was the first scholar to combine LGBT studies with disability studies and call it “crip theory.” The theory looks at the histories of and issues within the LGBT and disabled communities, which have both faced marginalization. “Crip” is a term that people with disabilities have “reclaimed,” he said.
Personally I’d send that name back for another round of workshopping, but what do I know.
* Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia.
* I actually always thought Joss should have had a David Boreanaz cameo in the background of the Firefly pilot and then never mention it again.
* Marvel is teasing a big Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths-style reboot, for the first time in its history.
* Simon Pegg is co-writing Star Trek 3. [raises one eyebrow]
* And great news for KSR fans: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project.
* Violent crime on college campuses is decreasing, but the number of sworn and armed police officers on campuses continues to rise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics… Nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities operated full law-enforcement agencies in 2012, and 94 percent of those officers are authorized to use a firearm.
* Meanwhile, on the town and gown beat: NYU decided not to report an attempted murder to the police.
* Abolish college sports watch: Before Gary Andersen goes on, he wants to make one thing clear. A part of his surprising departure from Wisconsin had to do with admission standards.
* When choosing between doing good and doing evil, don’t forget there’s always a third option.
* Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
* And a reminder that SFFTV is looking for your submission for its “Star Trek at 50″ special issue.
Wednesday Links!
* Today at Marquette! Dr. Robin Reid, “Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.”
* Tomorrow at Marquette! The English Department pop culture group geeks out over The Hunger Games.
* Solving prostitution the Swedish way.
“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 13: Engagement.
The point of engagement in this sense is not to involve the public in making decisions, but make them feel involved in decisions that others will make. That this may be done with the best of intentions is important, of course, but ultimately besides the point. Like “stakeholder,” “engagement” thrives in a moment of political alienation and offers a vocabulary of collaboration in response. So if civic engagement is in decline, one thing that is not is the ritualistic performance of civic participation. The annual election-cycle ritual in American politics is a case in point here. In one populist breath, we routinely condemn the corruption of politicians who, it is said, never listen to the average voter. And in the next, we harangue the average voter for failing to participate in a process we routinely describe as corrupted. So it’s not the “apathy” or “disengagement” of the public that we should lament or criticize—it’s the institutions that give them so many reasons to be disengaged in the first place.
* A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks.
JR: In the past you have said that you are a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Could you expand on this a bit: why are you pessimistic about the short term? What changes do you anticipate taking place between the near and far futures that change your pessimism to optimism?
IB: On a personal level, it’s damage limitation; a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we’ve got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren’t terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we’ll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia, in other words, muddling through despite ourselves.
* “Gamechanging” climate deal that seems radically insufficient to the scale of the crisis. What could go wrong?
* Think Progress has a good rundown on King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare. Eight Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About the Supreme Court’s Next Obamacare Case.
* The growth of auxiliary activities was the primary driver in spending increases by the schools, the report concludes. From 2005 to 2012, $3.4 billion was spent on instructional and research facilities. The cost for nonacademic auxiliary facilities was $3.5 billion from 2002 to 2012. Limit athletic fees, check construction to control college costs, study says.
* The State Funding Sleight-Of-Hand: Some Thoughts on UC’s Proposed Tuition Hike.
* The Vitae Adjunct Retirement Survey.
* ProQuest says it won’t sell dissertations through Amazon anymore.
* Why Wall Street Loves Hillary
* It’s a start: Massachusetts Town Proposes First Complete Ban On All Tobacco.
* Inside America’s inept nuclear corps.
* The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is under attack by critics who say academe is colluding with the mainstream media to push a feminist agenda in video games. How deep does this conspiracy go?
* When we think about the collapse of communism, we should emphasize and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy — not free enterprise.
* Can You Gentrify America’s Poorest, Most Dangerous City?
* Today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced through the New York Times that it may stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession, opting instead to issue tickets without detaining the suspect. This would feel like an important step toward reasonable weed policy if New York state hadn’t already mandated it 37 years ago.
* The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.
* One in every 8 arrests was for a drug offense last year.
* Milwaukee Public Museum’s Sci-Fi Film Fest gathers large audience.
* Running a school on $160 a year.
* Is Pre-K academically rigorous enough? That’s a real question this real article is asking.
* Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.
* Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this?
* Also on the subject of Lena Dunham: this is an extremely clickbaity headline, but the testimony from a juvenile sex offender is fascinating and horrible.
* Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.
* In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford. The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have. The result is a fearful society in which poorer parents are cast as threats to their own children.
* Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia.
* Scientists Have Finally Found The First Real Reason We Need To Sleep.
* Wes Anderson might be making another movie with puppets.
* In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation. One of these days, the crew will be dispersed. The Enterprise will be put in mothballs. Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in. But for now, their voyages continue.
* Peak Prequel: Sony Rumored to Be Prepping Aunt May Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie.
* And the best news ever: HBO Will Make Asimov’s Foundation With Interstellar‘s Jonathan Nolan. I may lose my mind over this show. I may even do a podcast. And a lot of what went wrong with Interstellar wasn’t even Jonathan Nolan’s fault!
1/2 Links
* All years are terrible years; the predicament of being human tends towards the negative. We read the news and are left feeling nothing more noble than “only I have escaped to tell thee.” A given year can be pronounced good only in a solipsistic sense.
* This headline seems like it was generated by some dystopian headline generator: Yakuza Gangsters Recruit Homeless Men for Fukushima Nuclear Clean Up.
* And then there’s this one: Climate Change Vastly Worse Than Previously Thought.
* If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
* And then there’s this: Drone Testing Sites Announced In Six States.
* “Diversity is something that’s being marketed,” Pippert says. “They’re trying to sell a campus climate, they’re trying to sell a future. Campuses are trying to say, ‘If you come here, you’ll have a good time, and you’ll fit in.’ “
* How the Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism. Waving The White Flag On Tenured Vs. Adjunct.
* At the Ivies, It’s Still White at the Top.
The drop follows two years of modest gains, but even those gains hadn’t come close to returning to the level of openings before the economic downturn hit in the fall of 2008. This year, the AHA posted 686 jobs, and the pre-recession total was 1,064.
* Handed up by an Orange County, N.C., grand jury, the indictment charged Nyang’oro with “unlawfully, willfully and feloniously” accepting payment “with the intent to cheat and defraud” the university in connection with the AFAM course — a virtually unheard-of legal accusation against a professor. It’s simply incomprehensible to me how the alleged behavior could have been accomplished by just one person acting alone.
* The philosopher posited chains and a key.
* Asimov predicts 2014 in 1964 (and 1997 in 1977).
* “In 1969 the median salary for a male worker was $35,567 (in 2012 dollars). Today it is $33,904. So for 44 years, while wages for the top 10 percent have continued to climb, most Americans have been caught in a ”Great Stagnation,” bringing into question the whole purpose of the American capitalist economy. The notion that what benefited the establishment would benefit everyone, had been thoroughly discredited.”
* Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke.
* 10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014.
* Spied On from My iPhone: NSA has “backdoor access” to iPhones.
* RIP, James “Uncle Phil” Avery.
* Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.
* And now an annual tradition: What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?
Lots of Wednesday Links
* It’s damn cold in Chicago: water is freezing to the sides of burning buildings.
* The reality of being an adjunct. MOOCs for Credit. Why We Should Talk About the Football Coach’s Salary When Faculty are Let Go. Please consider not doing a PhD.
- According to this link (which has information I cannot independently verify), the athletic budget for 2011 was $16 million, a 9.2% increase over the previous year. $9 million of that budget came from student fees.
- The reduction in faculty is expected to save $5.2 million.
* Lynda Barry’s course at the University of Wisconsin. I should be taking this.
* Liberal pundits and Republican congressmen agree: Barack Obama’s second inaugural was the most liberal speech of his presidency. They may be right. But just what kind of liberalism is this?
Obama’s speech was a far cry from the message of the modern Republican Party. But much of it would fit snugly in a handbook from Human Relations: Discrimination will not be tolerated. Active citizenship is everyone’s responsibility. Work harder.
* Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team – comprised of Airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion – standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. Would he, though? Would he really?
* Cheat to win: Virginia wants to rig the Electoral College too.
In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state…
It’s also worth noting, again, that this constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state’s electoral maps — eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength — it’s as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama’s repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.
* Brain scans performed on five former NFL players revealed images of the protein that causes football-related brain damage — the first time researchers have identified signs of the crippling disease in living players. The impending death of pro football. See also: Junior Seau’s Family Is Suing The NFL.
* There’s a gold rush going on right now. Man is breaking the earth, looking for natural gas — just as we always have. It’s a mad scene, with hucksters on every side of the issue. And that’s just on the surface. You won’t believe what’s happening underground. Thank You for Fracking.
* U.S. scientists will retire most research chimps.
* House Republican Leader Blames Gun Violence On ‘Welfare Moms.’
* Searching for Star Wars artifacts in the California desert.
* Rejected movie ideas: Age-Reversed Home Alone Reboot.
* Internet argument perfect storm: The woman who hired a hitman to murder her abusive husband.
* Happy Objectify A Man in Tech Day.
* Loyalty oaths in Arizona high schools.
* War machine decides blood is blood: Pentagon Lifts Ban on Women in Combat.
* And from the too-good-to-check file: The Fascinating Business Cards of 20 Famous People.
Weekend Links
* The Center for 21st Century Studies has announced its postdoc theme for 2013-2014: “Changing Climates.” Applications due March 1.
* What’s coming out with this UNC rape case is astounding. UNC’s Former Dean of Students Says She Was Forced to Underreport Sexual Assault Cases. And then this, from the assistant vice underprovost of sickening analogies:
“When I went to report my assault in 2007, I asked an administrator what the process would look like,” Clark said. “Instead, that person told me, ‘Rape is like a football game, Annie. If you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback and you’re in charge, is there anything that you would have done differently in that situation?’”
* Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only if They’re Male: A new study of history professors shows that married men get promoted faster than their single colleagues, while the opposite is true for women.
* The union at Kalamazoo Valley Community College launches a food drive for its own adjuncts.
* UC aims to bleed its grad students.
* “Fear and loathing in academia” and “Some historical notes on the decline of the universities,” from anthropologies issue 16: The Neoliberalized, Debt-plagued, Low Wage, Corporatized University. Also: Passing with Pills: Redefining Performance in the Pharmaceuticalized University.
* The CEO of Whole Foods is laughing at you.
* Naked Capitalism on Hayek’s Delusion: The Origins of Neoliberalism: 1, 2, 3. Via MeFi.
* As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the United States, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.
* Theater of Pain: Tom Junod on injury in the NFL.
The perspective of pain is what this story is about. For fans, injuries are like commercials, the price of watching the game as well as harrowing advertisements for the humanity of the armored giants who play it. For gamblers and fantasy-football enthusiasts, they are data, a reason to vet the arcane shorthand (knee, doubtful) of the injury report the NFL issues every week; for sportswriters they are kernels of reliable narrative. For players, though, injuries are a day-to-day reality, indeed both the central reality of their lives and an alternate reality that turns life into a theater of pain. Experienced in public and endured almost entirely in private, injuries are what players think about and try to put out of their minds; what they talk about to one another and what they make a point to suffer without complaint; what they’re proud of and what they’re ashamed by; what they are never able to count and always able to remember
* An oral history of Fringe: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Scandal in Lance-ville! Scandal in Gleetown!
* Well, it’s been a month since @dronestream started and we’re up to January 2011. Two years left.
* Claire Danes performs The Handmaid’s Tale.
* The kids are all right: Barbara Walters interviews a twelve-year-old transgender teen she first interviewed in 2007, when Jazz was six.
* A Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit.
* Rules for kids: The book, discovered by a 20-year-old Walmart employee, Raymond Flores, became an Internet sensation after Flores contacted the media to try to find its owner and its touching rules – including the rules “Don’t bite the dentist” and “If you’re going to wet your bed, wear a pull-up” – went viral.
* Two years before his death, legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov kicked off a TV pilot dedicated to exploring the faint and ever-shifting boundary separating science from science fiction.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, on robots.
The Solution to the Next Krugman Crisis
First Bill O’Reilly explained how Christianity isn’t a religion. Now Paul Krugman explains that the Foundation series isn’t science fiction.
Blast from the Past
An all-male troop of science fiction writers from 1987 predict 2012. Only Asimov really comes close:
Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.
Though Gregory Benford has his moment:
…the attitudes expressed in this collection of predictions will seem very outmoded and “twen-cen.”
Nailed it.
Gerry Canavan 