Posts Tagged ‘Isiah Lavender’
Saturday Morning Links!
* Great piece at n+1 on the late Daniel Quinn. I think this persuaded me to teach Ishmael this fall; I’ve been thinking about doing it for years and the time seems right. I really loved the book when I was 18, and think about it a lot even now.
* Kim Stanley Robinson at the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology: Science Fiction Is the Realism of our Time.
* And a bonus podcast: my friend Isiah Lavender on Minister Faust’s podcast, talking about the pan-African response to Black Panther. (Isiah’s actually in the extended edition, available for free on Faust’s Patreon.)
* The science fiction of this century is one in which great existential threats are known: they are real, and terrible. Something is terribly wrong. Will we listen?
* A decade ago, The Wire series finale aired. The show was a Marxist’s idea of what TV drama should be.
* Artificial intelligence has a hallucination problem.
* Turns out they already made a Sopranos prequel.
* There Is No Case for the Humanities.
* There Is No Campus Free Speech Crisis: An Unreasonably Long Thread.
* “‘Schools will stay closed until we get what we are asking for,’ Oklahoma teachers union president says.” And next: Arizona?
* “Foreigners could ease Japan’s labor shortage, but Tokyo prefers robots.”
* Deputy sheriff jails ex-wife after she complained on Facebook about him. This should be an automatic firing, followed by prosecution.
* Trump’s Latest Pardon Shows The Best Way To Get One: Go On Fox News.
* How do 11 people go to jail for one murder?
* New evidence the Stormy Daniels payment may have violated election law.
Wednesday Links! Some Especially Good Ones!
* Paradoxa 26, “SF Now,” is on its way, and has my essay on Snowpiercer and necrofuturism in it. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams’s introduction to the issue is online.
* Extrapolation‘s current call for reviewers.
* UCR is hiring: Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian.
* African SF: Presenting Omenana 1.1. Of particular note: “The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fan Girl.”
* Nnedi Okorafor, Ytasha Womack, Isiah Lavender, and Sigal Samuel discussion #BlackStormTrooper.
* NASA Officially Announce Plans To Put Humans On Mars With Orion Space Capsule.
* UAB shuts down its football program. Of course, the reason is austerity:
“The fiscal realities we face — both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint — are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB,” Watts said in a statement released by the university. “As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the athletic department, football is simply not sustainable.”
We just can’t afford to throw bricks at students’ heads any more — not in these tough times.
* Teaching fellows strike at the University of Oregon.
* “Hypereducated and On Welfare”: The adjunct crisis hits Elle.
* Stefan Grimm and academic precarity: 1, 2.
* Meanwhile: College Hilariously Defends Buying $219,000 Table.
* Work, the welfare state, and what counts as “dignity.”
* It really pains me to say it, because I think the consequences for anti-rape activism will be dire, but significant questions have been raised about Rolling Stone‘s UVA story that neither the journalist nor the magazine have good answers to. It’s a good day to think carefully about what Freddie deBoer says here: “…it’s an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool.”
* Imagine a World Without Prisons: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Superheroes, and Prison Abolition.
* Against New Atheism: The “New Atheists” have gained traction because they give intellectual cover to Western imperialism.
* The mass transit system Milwaukee didn’t know it needed. Now, if you could just snake another couple lines up the lake side… More links below the map.
* The Ferguson PD victory lap continues: Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a riot.
* How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street.
* How One Woman Could Hit The Reset Button In The Case Against Darren Wilson.
* Utah’s Insanely Expensive Plan To Seize Public Lands. “…a price tag that could only be paid if the state were able to increase drilling and mining.” Oh, so not insane, then, just evil.
* There are boondoggles and there are boondoggles: Federal prosecutors subpoenaed dozens of records and documents relating to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s iPad program, including emails, proposals and score sheets dealing with the bids that led to a multi-million Apple contract with the district.
* For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25…
* Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today.
* And the market for Girl Scout cookies is about to be disrupted. I gained ten pounds just reading this story.
Sunday Links!
* Did you notice my post last night? Isiah Lavender’s Black and Brown Planets is out! My essay in the book is on Samuel Delany.
* Sketching out a table of contents for Pink Planets: highlights from the history of feminist SF.
* The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism. The war is all too real. But it’s also fake. There is no clash of civilizations, no ideological battle, no grand effort on the part of the United States to defeat terrorism. As long as terrorism doesn’t threaten core US interests, American elites are content to allow it — and help it — flourish. They don’t want to win this war. It will go on forever, unless we make them end it.
* The United States and the “moderate Muslim.”
In each of these, I merely concede the Maher and Harris definition of moderation as a rhetorical act. That definition is of course loaded with assumptions and petty prejudice, and bends always in the direction of American interests. But I accept their definition here merely to demonstrate: even according to their own definition, American actions have undermined “moderation” at every turn.
* Fox News, asking the real questions. “What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?”
* The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever.
* “Social Justice Warriors” and the New Culture War.
* As selective colleges try to increase economic diversity among their undergraduates, the University of Chicago announced Wednesday that it’s embarking on an unusual effort to enroll more low-income students, including the elimination of loans in its aid packages.
* In search of an academic wife.
* “Yes Means Yes” at campuses in California and New York.
* A model state law for banning revenge porn.
* Let the children play: Homework isn’t linked to education outcomes before age 12, and not really after age 12, either.
* Enslaved Ants Regularly Rise In Rebellion, Kill Their Slavers’ Children.
* Ebola Vaccine Delay May Be Due To An Intellectual Property Dispute. This was a bit in Kim Stanle Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series: one company has the cure for cancer and the other company has the delivery mechanism, so both go out of business.
* Elsewhere in the famous efficiency of markets: Marvel will apparently cancel one of its longest-running series out of spite for Fox Studios.
* This Is The First High-Frequency Trader To Be Criminally Charged With Rigging The Market.
* Prison bankers cash in on captive customers.
* The time Larry Niven suggested spreading rumors within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs in order to lower health care costs.
* Suicide, Unemployment Increasingly Linked, Paper Suggests.
* Perfectionism: Could There Be a Downside?
* I’d be really interested to see if this use of eminent domain would survive a legal challenge.
* Data centers are wasting electricity so excessively that only “critical action” can prevent the pollution and rate hikes that some U.S. regions could eventually suffer as a result of power plant construction intended to ensure that the ravenous facilities are well-fed, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis warns.
* From the archives: Lili Loofbourow on the incredible misogyny of The Social Network.
* Moral panic watch: ‘Back-up husbands,’ ‘emotional affairs’ and the rise of digital infidelity.
* Look, a shooting star! Make a wish! Also at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Superman, why are you lying about your X-ray vision?
* Fantasy sports and the coming gambling boom.
* And this looks great for parents and kids: B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures.
Several Colors of Planets Still Available for Edited Collections
My friend Isiah Lavender’s edited collection Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction is available now at Amazon. $54 is a lot of money, but at least put in a request at your local library!
Here’s a table of contents:
Introduction: Isiah Lavender,”Coloring Science Fiction”
Part I: Black Planets
Lisa Yaszek, “The Bannekerade: Genius, Madness, and Magic in Black Science Fiction”
De Witt Douglas Kilgore, “‘The Best is Yet to Come’: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism”
Gerry Canavan, “Far Beyond the Star Pit: Samuel R. Delany”
Isiah Lavender, “Digging Deep: Ailments of Difference in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night'”
Marleen S. Barr, “The Laugh of Anansi: Why Science Fiction Is Pertinent to Black Children’s Literature Pedagogy”Part II: Brown Planets
Grace L. Dillon, “Haint Stories Rooted in Conjure Science: Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire
Patrick B. Sharp, “Questing for an Indigenous Future: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Indigenous SF”
M. Elizabeth Ginway, “Monteiro Lobato’s O presidente negro [The Black President]: Race and Gender in the Corporate State in Brazil”
Lysa M. Rivera, “Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech”
Matthew Goodwin, “Virtual Reality at the Border of Migration, Race and Labor”
Malisa Kurtz, “A Dis-(Orient)ation: Race, Technoscience, and The Windup Girl”
Edward James, “Reflections on ‘Yellow, Black, Metal, and Tentacled,’ Twenty-Two Years On”
Edward James, “Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled: the Race Question in American Science Fiction”Coda
Robin Anne Reid, “‘The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In’: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction Fandom”
Gerry Canavan 