Posts Tagged ‘J.J. Abrams’
March Links!
- SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
- My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
- I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
- My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
- Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
- And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.

- CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
- A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
- How to Build a World.
- How to Land on Mars.
- Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
- “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
- The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
- Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
- I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
- An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
- From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
- The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
- The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’
- President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
- The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
- Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
- Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
- New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
- The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.
- ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
- When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
- English departments rethink what to call themselves.
- A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
- Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
- Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
- What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
- Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
- More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
- The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
- ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
- Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
- Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
- Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.
- The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
- Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
- The Tyranny of Parents.
- Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
- A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
- Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
- Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
- The realest tweet.
- Chess is bad now. This is good.
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
- The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
- Finally, someone is making sense.
- Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
- Bring back the nervous breakdown!
- Is This the End of Tipping?
- The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
- I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
- All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
- And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.
Happy Star Wars Eve, One… Last… Time
* Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place. A dismal farewell to the trilogy. Even Solo got a better reception. The Rise of Skywalker—and the Fall of Fun. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up. ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is A Convoluted And Clumsy End To The Star Wars Saga. The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse. The Most Incoherent Star Wars Movie Ever Made. watching the rise of skywalker is like telling an acquaintance you ate potato salad once and enjoyed it, and then having that acquaintance break into your home in the middle of the night, tie you to a chair, and mash potato salad into your face and eyes for 2+ hours
* Of course the real content of Episode 9 discourse is The Last Jedi nostalgia.
* How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.
* Don’t Hold Your Breath for That Quentin Tarantino Star Trek Movie. “In a strange way, it seems like [‘Hollywood’] would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement,” Tarantino told Consequence of Sound. “I mean to such a degree there was a moment when I was writing and went, ‘Should I do this now? Should I do something else? Is this the 10th one?’ No, no don’t stop the planets from aligning, what are you, Galactus? If the Earth is saying do it, do it…But in a weird way, it actually kind of freed me up. I mean, I have no idea what the story of the next one’s going to be. I don’t even have a clue.” Kill Bill 3 confirmed.
* Netflix and the monoculture.
* Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets.
* Living through the era of school shootings, one drill at a time.
* Why did my sweet 5-year-old become so stormy when she started kindergarten? The Miseducation of the American Boy.
* A New (Jesuit) Model for Community Colleges.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Be Good at Your Job.
* The World The Economist Made.
* Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.
* The Oil Age Is Coming to a Close.
* A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health.
Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks.
* The 2010s Killed Off the Polite Climate Change Conversation.
* Trump’s Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape. Police officer admits he told homeless man to lick public urinal to avoid arrest.
* How Families Cope with the Hidden Costs of Incarceration for the Holidays.
* Devin Nunes lives on a congressman’s salary. How is he funding so many lawsuits?
* Memo: the Senate is an irredeemable institution.
* Insulin prices double since 2012.
* Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver. For an extra $50,000 it’ll kill a poor person every time you turn it on just because.
* 15 major cities around the world that are starting to ban cars.
* America is still innovating.
* An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad.
* John Mulaney Made a Kids’ Special. We Sent a 10-Year-Old to Interview Him About It.
* ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress Delusion: How strategy games have held on to one of colonialism’s most toxic narratives, and how they might finally be letting it go.
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
Tuesday Afternoon Links
* A new page at Marquette: a $96 million residence hall development.
* And then there’s that old page.
* There’s more than one way to brand a college. Like at least three or four.
* No-confidence vote by UW faculty passes overwhelmingly.
* Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines Living There.
* “Why Is Westeros So Fucked Up?” “In conclusion, Game of Thrones is a franchise of contrasts.”
For the television series, it’s more complicated. The crucial question is this: How do you take a story that’s written as a deliberate repudiation of 1990s fantasy norms and make it work, twenty years later, with an audience that didn’t necessarily grow up with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan novels? The story is generally strong enough that it’s managed to survive and thrive; the failures of the Starks are not just reversals of fantasy convention but overall storytelling convention. But the longer the series goes, the less able it is to draw upon such clear subversions.
* Don DeLillo’s back and I’m pretty excited about Zero K.
* Hamilton, the musical you may be tired of hearing about because it is literally impossible to get tickets to see it until 2047, made Tony history Tuesday morning, scoring a record-breaking 16 nominations.
* It’s Illegal to Possess or Distribute This Huge Number.
* Photo Essay: Fracking Communities.
* Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920. More Evidence for Lead Poisoning as Key Crime Driver.
* Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus.
* Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data.
* google it should have been steph curry truth
* Jessica Jones season two is doomed watch: Trouble On The Set Of Jessica Jones Season One Was Calmed By David Tennant.
* You just can’t win: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight.
* High school football player faces 70 criminal charges for yearbook picture prank.
* “Poet & Vagabond”: Roberto Bolaño’s business card.
* Like the lady said: the goal should be a society without classes! Fights on planes 400% more likely when there’s a first class section.
* Here’s yet another surprise David Bowie left for us on Backstar.
* Famous last words watch: Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
* Society of synthetic linguists explain to court, in Klingon, why Klingon shouldn’t be copyrightable.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly disappointing Star Trek (2009) sequels every three years, forever.
Watching THE FORCE AWAKENS as the Father of a Three-and-a-Half-Year-Old Girl (No Spoilers)
There’s still plenty of weird plot holes in the movie to complain about — and, of course, call no trilogy happy until it is concluded — and the man simply doesn’t get Star Trek at a basic and fundamental level — but J.J. Abrams achieves something in a sequence of shots near the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that I hope I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. My daughter is three and a half right now, and she’s still piecing together the world. We’ve raised her, somewhat accidentally, without much concept of gender; it’s only recently that she’s even come to really understand that some people are boys and other people are girls. And it’s broken my heart a bit, as this process has come into focus for her, to see her recognize that nearly all the protagonists in nearly all the stories she loves are boys. She sometimes announces, as we play, that she gets to be the boy — by which she means that she gets to be the hero, the star. I’m the boy, daddy; you’re the dragon. I’m the boy, daddy; you’re the witch.
And as I watched this one particular, truly perfect scene, at the climax of The Force Awakens, I really felt like I could see the whole thing through her eyes, and imagined the moment she watches it a few months or years from now and how it might undo a bit of the toxic lessons she’s already started to learn about boys and girls. I cried. I’m crying now, just writing about it. And however else The Force Awakens is received and whatever its reputation winds up being, however badly 8 and 9 screw it all up (or don’t), Abrams has given little girls like mine a tremendous and very special gift. That bit lives forever, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ll write a longer and more spoiler-y post once more people have seen it, I think, but for now I wanted to say just that much.
Star Wars Day! Yay! Episode III Procrastination of the Procrastination
(episode one, the procrastination menace) (episode two, attack of the procrastination)
* Secrets of a lonely childhood revealed!
* A Brief Visual History of People Waiting in Line for Star Wars.
* The Tides of Lust: Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977. In the Butler archives there’s a ton of her thoughts on the Star Wars franchise, including her class notes for the Clarion classes where she discussed it. Really interesting stuff.
* And speaking of which: a CFP for a Butler essay collection.
* Evacuate? In my moment of triumph? J.J. Abrams also apologizes for Star Trek Into Darkness.
* Apropos of this New Yorker cartoon, this profile of Ahmed Best is one of the best things I’ve read about Phantom Menace.
* People are still arguing in the mentions of this Tumblr post on jury nullification, over two years later.
* There’s No College P.C. Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters.
* Rewind: How the U.S. Military Turned Santa Claus Into a Cold War Icon.
* Out today: Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself.
* Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight Of The Adjunct Professor.
* I expected to find at least a couple prisons within a mile of a toxic site — after all 89 percent of all New Jersey residents live within a mile of a toxic site. What I didn’t expect is that over half of New Jersey’s state prisons would be toxic sites. The WNYC map, using information from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection website, identifies seven out of the 13 New Jersey state prisons as toxic sites. Plus, these toxic prison sites are often surrounded by more contaminated sites.
* In US, poverty dampens genetic influence on IQ.
* The Silent Collapse Of The Death Penalty In The United States.
* The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing.
* The Disaster Most Likely to Cause Global Famine Is Not an Earthquake, Storm, Tsunami, or Flood. I knew it, it’s capitali–oh, no, drought, it’s drought.
* And Streaming TV Isn’t Just a New Way to Watch. It’s a New Genre.
Wednesday Links: Part 2: The Return
* Someone needs to check their Save the Cat: Video shows CEO kicking puppy in elevator.
* Elites spent months arguing we should attack Syria to dislodge Assad. Now these same elites want to intervene in the war on his behalf. “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?”
* Poverty Capitalism. Campus Safety Capitalism.
* The 14 Best National Universities According To Washington Monthly has Case at #9 and UC Riverside at #2. Arbitrary college ranking systems forever!
* How to Game the College Rankings.
* Brian Leiter on the Salaita case: 1, 2, 3.
In addition to his constitutional claims, Salaita has an almost textbook version of a contract law claim under the doctrine of “promissory estoppel” (the classic case on the subject is Red Owl). The basic idea is simple: even if there is no formal contract between two parties (my expectation, as noted, is the court will find no contract between Salaita and Illinois), if one party reasonably relies on the promises and representations of the other, and then the other reneges, the injured party is entitled to compensation to the extent of his reasonable reliance. It was clearly reasonable for Salaita to rely on an offer letter from the Dean–an offer letter that specifically mentioned the academic freedom protections the University of Illinois affords faculty!–even with a clause saying the appointment was subject to approval by the Board of Trustees (after all, there does not appear to be a case in the last half-century in which the Board failed to approve a tenured appointment that went through the normal university channels, as Salaita’s did). Indeed, the reasonableness of Salaita’s reliance is enhanced by the fact that the University scheduled his classes this fall and even referred to him in public as a faculty member.
The harder question will be Salaita’s damages. At a minimum, he should recover for the costs of relocation, his housing costs this year (since he rented his prior home), the cost of insurance and related expenses, and his salary for this academic year; but he has a strong claim for asking for compensation for having relinquished tenure and his job and salary at Virginia Tech, i.e., for several decades worth of salary and benefits. In other words, I would expect Salaita’s lawyers to ask for several million dollars in lost wages and benefits extending over a career. Now there is always a duty in contract cases to “mitigate” damages–to take steps to prevent the unnecessary growth of damages–which here would mean seeking other academic employment. If Salaita can not secure such appointment–and given the smear campaign against him, aided and abetted now by the University of Illinois, it is hard to see a public university, vulnerable to the same political pressures, being able to hire him–then he has a claim for his lost wages and benefits as a professor for the next (roughly) thirty-plus years.
* I was on the front lines of the violence in Ferguson. Militarized police caused the chaos.
* The Parable of the Unjust Judge.
That respectability politics is the narrative of the oppressor digested and regurgitated by the oppressed is obvious. But we shouldn’t dismiss it without understanding its allure and durability: it reframes the terms of power, restoring agency into black hands. For the black upper class, it is the parable that allows them to rationalize their privilege as a sign of their own worthiness, while simultaneously giving them cover to righteously withdraw concern from the plight of the less fortunate of their race. It’s no coincidence that the black people advocating for blacks to somehow be cleansed of their blackness by bathing in the waters of post-racial healing are many of the same complaining that “we” don’t pay attention to “black on black crime”. For the black middle class, respectability becomes an aspirational fable, a promise that they, too can be free of racism if they become successful enough to transcend their race. For the black underclass, it becomes a morality tale that explains their own destruction. Respectability politics is a false narrative, but it maintains its power because, like so many powerful lies, it sits adjacent to the truth and set slightly askew: they are looking for a way to turn you into a nigger, and if necessary, they will find one. You will never leave a body pure enough to not be judged complicit in its own destruction.
* MA Police Apologize After Accusing Man Of Faking Photo Of Trooper’s Racist Bumper Sticker. Police trampled the makeshift memorial built by Michael Brown’s mom. That is to say: Police Drove Over Michael Brown Memorial, Let Dog Piss on It.
* Meanwhile: Ben Stein has awful opinions and should be ashamed.
* There is no way this is true: Milwaukee, Madison drivers among the nation’s safest. Real talk: Milwaukee drivers are some of the absolute worst drivers I have ever encountered.
* More scenes from the struggle between Uber and Lyft.
* Obscure Words and Phrases Everyone Suddenly Becomes Very Familiar With, 1995-2040.
* Did Tony die at the end of The Sopranos? Yes, and David Chase knows it.
* Elsewhere on the front lines of culture: Is Hello Kitty a cat? How dare you. How dare you.
* LEGO really, really letting down its fans. I knew I should have loaded up on the female scientist sets when I had the chance.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Americans strongly agree: You shouldn’t stop people from reclining on planes.
* New Discovery Cuts Brainwashing Time in Half.
* Ohio lawmakers want to limit the teaching of the scientific process.
* When J.J. Abrams set out to make the absolute worst Superman movie possible. It would have been amazing.
* And/but/so Warner Brothers simply does not understand the superhero business at all.
All Your Weekend Links at No Cost to You
* The great Gabriel García Márquez has died. The Paris Review interview. Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
* Earthseed as New-Age transreligion.
* I asked William Pannapacker how to responsibly advise students who want to go to graduate school in the humanities. He said you can’t.
* UNC’s New Grading System Could Show What That ‘A’ Is Really Worth. Tentatively, this seems like a good improvement on the existing system, though I’m not in love with the administration’s “now we can finally catch unscrupulous faculty!” line.
* Supposedly we’re supposed to be outraged by Snowden not infiltrating the Putin government and leaking details about his massive surveillance state apparatus. Or something. I can’t make heads or tails of it to be honest.
* In defense of edited collections.
* Harvard Accused Of Retaliating Against Professor Who Defended Sexual Assault Survivors.
* Rape culture and athletics at FSU.
* The #AskEmmert Q&A Is Going Poorly.
* The theology of ethical consumerism.
* After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing. The zero point of most liberal (as opposed to leftist) interventions in poverty is that “merit” broadly defined is structured (a little) by genetic lottery and (a lot) by class position, which means that strategies for equality that are filtered through education and achievement will always just wind up replicating existing structures of power and existing privileges rather than disrupting them. I don’t see any answer for this problem beyond deliberate redistribution of wealth.
* The failure of desegregation.
* Study: People of color breathe air that is 38 percent more polluted than white people’s.
* The Nation reviews The Years of Living Dangerously.
* New York Times Admits It Agreed to ‘Gag Orders’ in Israel.
* A huge part of the function of Western media is producing and distributing state propaganda. Freddie has just a short recent list.
* American politics is a cesspool, New Jersey politics doubly so.
* Q will visit the Abramsverse.
* Here’s How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink. But what’s 38 million gallons between friends?
* On writing disabilities in SF and fantasy. Doctor Who and the Women.
In the moments that follow, both the Doctor and his companion ask River why she didn’t just say her wrist was broken, and she explains – in this horrible, horrible moment – that the Doctor must be protected from knowing how much it hurts people to be around him; that humans must hide their weakness from him so that he will not feel upset.
* Third child as status symbol.
* Grad students unionize at UConn.
* Monsters walk among us: People who think they’re attractive tend to be more comfortable with economic inequality.
* The Last Golden Days of Marijuana Smuggling.
* They have come to the conclusion that God, / Requiring a heaven and a hell, didn’t need to / Plan two establishments: ‘X-Men’ Director Bryan Singer Accused of Sexually Assaulting Underage Boy. More details on the case at Boing Boing.
* I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards grandfather clauses that allow obscenities to continue for decades after they are banned.
* Inmates to strike in Alabama, declare prison is “running a slave empire.”
* The New York Times profiles the great Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black.
* Actors laughing between takes.
* And let’s go ahead and put Krypton at the top of the list of places to invade next.