Posts Tagged ‘Jameson’
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Trans-Indigenous Science Fictions. CFP: Activism and Resistance at the London Science Fiction Research Community. And don’t forget about the mini-ICFA in October!
* In a lousy year, Phil Wegner’s Invoking Hope was something that made me feel really good about the work I do, and gave me hope for the possibilities of the university (despite its managers). Read my review at Ancillary Review of Books!
* On the other side of things: The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the end of The End of History.
* The New Republic has another review of the Butler LOA volume.
* Science Fiction & … Economic Crisis! with Sherryl Vint, Hugh O’Connell, and Malka Older.
* While I’m recommending stuff: my 21C students loved Zadie Smith’s 2020 mini-memoir Intimations — it was their favorite book of the semester — and I’ve had great fun playing Clank: Legacy and Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion with my third-grader lately.
* I also wanted to buy every game listed in this fun YouTube study of Tomb of Horrors, because I’m just that game-crazed right now.
* Gloomhaven sequel Frosthaven will change to address cultural bias.
* Teen Vogue: Colleges are right-wing institutions.
Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus, nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.
* new demographic cliff just dropped
* First the U. of Vermont Announced Cuts. Then Enrollment Spiked. Now What?
* North Carolina schools are re-segregating. A Wisconsin county completely loses its shit at the very idea of equality.
* The shocking MOVE bombing was part of a broader pattern of anti-Black racism.
* Can Climate Fiction Writers Reach People in Ways That Scientists Can’t?
* Cory Doctorow has been having some 🔥🔥🔥 threads on Twitter lately: 1, 2, 3…
* The Secret Life of Deesha Philyaw (or, why we need university presses).
* How Much Money Do Authors Actually Earn?
* Krakoa as libertarian haven. A Clockwork Orange and #MeToo. Fear of a Black Superhero. Putting an animated series on the blockchain seems like a Rick and Morty bit, doesn’t it? Apparently the Brontës all died so early because they spent their lives drinking graveyard water.
* For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years.’
* Ominous: Alien life looks more and more likely. Catholics are ready.
* Africans in Space: The Incredible Story of Zambia’s Afronauts.
* The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit.
* Randall Kennedy and Eugene Volokh have the case for allowing the use of the n-word and other slurs in the classroom.
* they say your first Amazon order defines your future
* When you’re cancelled, you’re cancelled.
* At only $20,000/month, you’d be a fool NOT to rent it.
* Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows.
* How the world missed more than half of all Covid-19 deaths. Is this the end?
* Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die. No, I don’t think I want to!
* Decolonization is not a metaphor. Imperialism: A Syllabus.
* But on the miracles and wonders beat: 1st Group Enrolled in Trial of uniQure’s AMT-130 Gene Therapy for Huntington’s Disease.
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21
- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
Happy Valentine’s Day Links!
* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.
* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.
* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”
* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?
* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.
* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.
KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’
The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.
* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.
* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.
* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.
* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.
* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’
* The Olympic hero for our time.
* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.
* Know your police rape loopholes.
* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.
* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.
* In the richest country in human history.
* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.
* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?
* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!
* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.
* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.
* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.
* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.
* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.
* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.
* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.
* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.
* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?
* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.
* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.
* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.
* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.
* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.
* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.
* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.
* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.
* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.
* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.
* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.
* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.
* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.
* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.
Wednesday Links!
* In case you missed it yesterday: the CFP for SFRA 2018 (7/1-7/4 at Marquette)!
* “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Rest in peace, Ursula K. Le Guin. The art of fiction. Fantastic.
* CFP: Petrocultures 2018 (Glasgow University).
* 19 Long-Lost Historical Words You Absolutely Need In Your Life.
* A new study finds an alarming rise in a novel form of psychological distress. Call it “neoliberal perfectionism.”
* But what if forty years of neoliberalism’s violently reiterated dogma that “there is no alternative” has left us incapable of imagining not only better worlds but also worse ones? On dulltopia.
* How Twitter Hooks Up Students With Ghostwriters.
* There are some things no man was meant to know: Should vegetarians assume they can eat French fries?
* U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Niles, accompanied Amer Othman Adi to immigration headquarters Tuesday morning for what they thought would be a routine meeting. Instead, Adi, 57, was jailed and told he would be held until his deportation, which was over a dispute about the validity of his first marriage to an American in 1979.
* ‘I won’t fly refugees to their deaths’: The El Al pilots resisting deportation. Same sex couple sues State Department over decision on son’s citizenship. Border patrol arrests ASU adjunct who gave food and water to immigrants. ICE deporting its own protestors.
* Stochastic terrorism watch: Man threatened to kill CNN employees.
* Tourism to U.S. under Trump is down, costing $4.6B and 40,000 jobs.
* “Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says.”
The report, commissioned under the Obama administration, was considered so explosive that it was originally marked “Secret/ No Foreign,” with the recommendation that it remain classified until June 9, 2042. The report was finished in June 2017, but it appears to have included data only through 2016, before the Trump administration took office.
* A New Jersey college fired a professor, claiming they were “immediately inundated” with complaints of “fear” after she defended a BLM event on Fox News. We sued to look at the complaints. Total number of complaints in the first 13 days: one.
* The future is not good: South Korea, gripped by suicide epidemic, criminalizes suicide-pacts.
* What I’ve learned from my tally of 757 doctor suicides.
* Illustrated thought experiments.
* Nintendo headquarters, c. 1889.
* Rate My Professor and the adjunct professorate.
* Know your ethical conundrums. Free will. Scalars vs. vectors. When God closes a door, he opens a window.
* And when they knew the Earth was doomed, they built a ship.
I Have (Not a Joke) 300 Tabs Open and This Afternoon I Am Closing Them All: Election Night Links!
I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t been able to tend to my open tabs at all. There’s over 300 — and I’m not leaving this room until I’ve closed them all. Let’s go!
* Really, I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to shamelessly self-promote: I missed announcing my trip to Atlanta for SLSA 2016 and my presentations on “Literary Studies after Blackfish” and the upcoming almost-almost-done issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding,” as well as my New Inquiry review of the (fantastic) end to Liu Cixin’s (fantastic) Three-Body trilogy. My new essay on “Geriatric Zombies” from The Walking Med was namechecked as part of a larger zombie news report in the Seattle Times. Most importantly I haven’t been able to hype my Octavia Butler book, which is printed and apparently shipping. I’ve even held one in my hands!
* Meanwhile, here’s my guess for tonight’s final results, just to get it out of the way: 340-198.
* CFP: Letters to Octavia Butler. CFP: The Comics of Alison Bechdel. CFP: English Studies in Ruins? CFP: The World of Harry Potter.
* A new issue of the Eaton Journal in Archival Research in Science Fiction is out, including a piece from Larisa Mikhaylova on Star Trek fandom in Russia.
* French town upholds law against UFOs.
* Invisible Planets / Invisible Frameworks — Assembling an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF. I’ve been reading the Invisible Planets collection and it’s great.
* Why we should lower the voting age in America.
* Žižek on the lesser evil. Jameson on fascism, but not yet. Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage For 2016 Campaign. Americans, Politics, and Social Media. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say. The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List. No, “we” are not collectively responsible for anything. Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right. Ivanka is the real threat. A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. And did someone order a Constitutional crisis with a 4-4 Supreme Court?
* What Happens if You Vote and Die Before Election Day? Too late for all of us, alas.
* In contrast to the Fordist society observed by Gramsci, power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to avoid the constraints of critical reason. Increasingly, it is non-representational codes—of software, finance, human biology—that mediate between past, present and future, allowing society to cohere. Where, for example, employee engagement cannot be achieved via cultural or psychological means, increasingly business is looking to solutions such as wearable technology, that treat the worker as an item of fixed capital to be monitored physically, rather than human capital to be employed. The key human characteristics are those that are repeated in a quasi-mechanical fashion: footsteps, nightly sleep, respiration, heartbeat. These metronomic qualities of life come to represent each passing moment as yet another one of the same. The New Neoliberalism.
* “We are all Thomas More’s children”: 500 years of Utopia. And at LARB.
* How America Outlawed Adolescence. The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child.
* Inside the NSA’s For-Sale Spy Town. The Indiana Town That Modernism Built.
* Where Ph.D.s Work. IPFW Community Shocked by Restructuring Recommendations. Last month’s strike at Harvard. And its results. A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats.’ Saudi college student in Wisconsin dies after assault. Johns Hopkins threatens to close its interdisciplinary Humanities Center, sparking outcry from students and faculty members. San Diego State University tuition, 1959. How State Budget Cuts Affect Your Education.
* The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity.
* The American Association of University Professors has launched an investigation focused on the dismissal of Nathanial Bork, who had taught philosophy courses at the college for six years before he was dismissed. The AAUP says that his dismissal raises concerns both because of the issues he raises about rigor and also because he was fired shortly after he complained about the situation to the Higher Learning Commission, the college’s accreditor. Further, Bork was active in efforts to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at the college.
* A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award. Love this.
* “University Paid for Bigfoot Expedition.”
* Starship Troopers coming back just as documentary footage of 2016. A darker, grittier Muppet Babies, for a tragic time.
* Quentin Tarantino still insists he’s going to stop at 10 movies.
* Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization.’
* “Capitalism Broke Earth, Let’s Protect Mars.”
* Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup Changing Computing Forever.
* The video for Soul Asylum’s 1993 smash hit featured real missing kids. Some eventually came home; some never did.
* Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery. Football Alters the Brains of Kids as Young as 8. Why treating diabetes keeps getting more expensive. The Other Sister: Returning Home to Care for an Autistic Sibling.
* Inmates Explain How They’d Run Prisons.
* If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women.
* Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow. Bathroom air freshener causes emergency response at nuclear site.
* Why can’t the Star Trek timeline advance?
* The Venom From This Snake Will Make Your Life a Living Hell.
* Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange.
* Why Did This Guy Collect 500 Screenshots of Soda Machines in Video Games? Because He’s a Genius. And elsewhere on the Jacob Brogan science beat: Everyone Poops. Some Animals Eat It. Why?
* Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Thumb U.N. won’t intervene.
* Now Is The Perfect Time For The Indians To Quietly Abandon Chief Wahoo.
* Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces. How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.
* The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year.
* In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history: The Pyramid at the End of the World.
* Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million in Jerry Sandusky Case.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Yellowstone’s “Zone of Death.” And I’ll take this one too: The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic.
* How Doctor Strange went from being a racist Asian caricature to a magical white savior.
* A new favorite poem:
* Animal minds: the new anthropomorphism.
* You weren’t educated, you were trained.
* Twenty-first century Victorians.
* How We Tell Campus Rape Stories After Rolling Stone.
* Native lives matter. Tribe vows to fight North Dakota pipeline through winter. The world watches. A Standing Rock Syllabus.
* Superheroes and sadness. Pixar and sadness.
* Presenting The Black Mirror Expanded Universe.
* Wildlife numbers more than halve since 1970s in mass extinction. Inside the Frozen Zoo That Could Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life.
* The secret history of Teaching with Calvin & Hobbes.
* A bad idea, but fine: The Adventures of Young Dumbledore.
* Kardashev Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist.
* And frankly you had me at LEGO, but I like the rest too: LEGO’s New Line of Female Superheroes Is the Toy We Deserve.
Jameson as Teacher
I begin my review in this conflicted, confessional mode because both Tally and Wegner do; both foreground their personal relationships with Jameson, albeit with considerably more confidence and grace than I feel able to muster, situating his writing within the context of teaching within the university system to which he has dedicated his life. Jameson’s very public profile and reputation as “America’s most famous Marxist” actually makes him something of a rare exception in this regard: he is one of the leading members on the relatively short list of scholars who have been more influential outside their classrooms than inside them. For most of us the classroom is where the lion’s share of our work happens, however much our egos might prefer things to be otherwise. For most of us the classroom is the work.
I have a short review essay (weirdly personal by academic standards, at least by mine) about Jameson as thinker and Jameson as teacher, pegged to Robert Tally and Phil Wegner’s recent books on his career: “Doktorvater.”
This paradox returns us also to the question of what it means to be Jameson’s student, whether metaphorically as his reader or literally as his dissertation advisee. Early in Tally’s book he paraphrases other critics who see Jameson as “embrac[ing] all things—but, like a python, squeezing the life out of them” (20). What resists this totalizing enclosure in Tally’s treatment is Jameson’s foregrounding of the productive tension between history as a nightmare and the future as possible utopia, located in the present as a site of struggle—a critical perspective that remains vital and alive insofar as it is always both urgent and irresolvable. Wegner’s version of this same problem comes in his conclusion, where he quotes Evan Watkins’s observation that Jameson’s work is “an ‘anomaly’ among that of the ‘masters of theory’ for the simple reason that ‘you can’t follow this act.’” (Wegner 213). “Jamesonian” has simply never caught on as an adjective in the mold of Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian, Foucauldian, even Žižekian—even as many people (some of his many former students and dissertation advisees among them!) are clearly doing “Jamesonian” analysis. Rather than unfinishable, from this perspective Jameson’s project looks too finished, too complete: he ate the whole elephant, and left nothing behind for the rest of us. Wegner’s answer is to return to the question of fidelity and betrayal: to attempt to simply do Jameson is itself a betrayal of the Jamesonian ethos, and turn him into a “discourse of the university,” another kind of too-close, python-like suffocation. The alternative is to see Jameson not as a master or a mapmaker so much as, again, a teacher, who one day leads us to the gates of the school and then hurls us out into the world to find our own way. “Maybe you can’t do this for yourself,” Wegner quotes Watkins. “It’s not exactly clear what it might mean to ‘follow Jameson’s direction.’ But it is always possible to learn from his work how to do what you do far better and in more historically responsible ways” (qtd. in Wegner 213). As a conclusion to a two-hundred page exegesis, this is perhaps somewhat deflating—you mean this was all a dead end? a road to nowhere?—but for Wegner it seems something more like a rousing call to arms, a “joyful possibility” that speaks to Jameson’s “inexhaustible richness,” resulting in an exuberant final benediction: “May we prove equal to the task!” (213). Jameson’s very irreproducibility, his singularity, can become the engine for our own critical production, so long as we betray him right.
So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!
* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”
* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”
Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?
The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.
* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.
* Marquette will pilot a J-term.
* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?
* The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.
* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.
* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.
But this one is still my favorite:
* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.
In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.
* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.
* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.
* Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.
* Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.
* The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’
* The hack that could take down New York City.
* Rethinking teaching evaluations.
* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.
* What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?
* How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.
* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.
* On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.
* It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?
* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.
* We’re All Forum Writers Now.
* Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.
* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.
* At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.
* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.
* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.
* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.
* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.
* Homeless in Seattle: five essays.
* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.
* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.
* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.
* The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!
* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”
* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.
* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.
* Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.
* The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.
* That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.
* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.
* There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.
* Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.
* Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.
* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.
* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.
It’s Been Much Too Long And Now There Are Much Too Many Links
* Job ad (probably best for Midwest-located scholars): Visiting Assistant Professor of English (3 positions), Marquette University.
* There’s a new issue of SFFTV out, all about the Strugatskiis.
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler: Celebrating Letters, Life, and Legacy – February 26-28, 2016 – Spelman College.
* Episode 238 of the Coode Street Podcast: Kim Stanley Robinson and Aurora.
* The weird worlds of African sci-fi.
* Afrofuturism and Black Panther.
* To save California, read Dune.
* Jameson’s essay on Neuromancer from Polygraph 25 (and his new book The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms) is available at Public Books.
* “My college has had five deans in the last 10 years. They want to make their mark. That’s fine, but the longer I’m in one place as a faculty chair, I see why faculty are cynical and jaded,” Dudley said. “Every time there is turnover, there is a new initiative. There is a new strategic plan. So many faculty are just at the point where they say ‘just leave us alone.’ “
* Pomp and Construction: Colleges Go on a Building Tear.
* 6 Ways Campus Cops Are Becoming More Like Regular Police.
* Diversity and the Ivy Ceiling.
* What academic freedom is not.
7) Academic freedom is not a gratuitous entitlement for privileged faculty but essential in achieving societal progressivity. Those with academic freedom are more likely to produce higher quality research and effective teaching that benefits society, if not always the ruling elites. I frequently state in class: “If I am not free, you aren’t free! For me to do my job, I must speak freely and teach outside the lines to help you expand your frame of knowledge and question your world.” There may not be “a” truth, however earnest the search, but the attempt to find it must be unfettered. Society spends billions of dollars on higher education, and the investment is more likely to reap dividends if revisionism, and not orthodoxy, prevails.
* Why Is It So Hard to Kill a College? Why do you sound so disappointed?
* An LSU associate professor has been fired for using curse words and for telling the occasional sexually-themed joke to undergraduate students, creating what university administrators describe as a “hostile learning environment” that amounted to sexual harassment.
* Josh Marshall: Here’s an (fun in a surreal, macabre way) article about a recent example of how Twitter has dramatically increased the velocity at which bullshit is able to travel at sea level and at higher altitudes. In fact, the increase is so great that Twitter has become a self-contained, frictionless bullshit perpetual motion machine capable of making an episode like this possible. This is the story of Zandria Robinson, an African-American assistant professor of sociology at the University of Memphis who made some that were both genuinely outrageous and also a peerless example of jargony academic nonsense-speak, became a target of right-wing media and twitter-hounds, then got fired by the University of Memphis because of the controversy, thus making the University a target of left-wingers on Twitter and driving Twitter to cross-partisan paroxysms of outrage and self-congratulation. Except that she wasn’t fired and actually wasn’t even an employee of the University of Memphis in the first place. Thanks, Twitter.
* Supreme Court to Consider Case That Could Upend Unions at Public Colleges.
* Adjuncting is not a career, TIAA-CREF edition.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 19: Resilience.
* Fraternities, man, I don’t know.
* Right-wing SF and the Charleston attack.
* Fusion is mapping the monuments of the Confederacy. Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.
* Tomorrow’s iconic photos today.
* There’s a dark side to everything: the secret history of gay marriage.
* Andrew Sullivan’s victory lap.
* Gay rights in America, state by state (updated 26 June 2015).
* How do you tell a person to choose between having food to eat and getting married?
* When image recognition goes rogue.
* Greece just defaulted, but the danger is only beginning.
* Now We Know Why Huge TPP Trade Deal Is Kept Secret From the Public.
Let that sink in for a moment: “[C]ompanies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals….” And they can collect not just for lost property or seized assets; they can collect if laws or regulations interfere with these giant companies’ ability to collect what they claim are “expected future profits.”
* Self-driving cars and the coming pro-driving movement.
* “I’ve been a boy for three years and I was a girl for six.” Frontline on growing up trans.
* Why are colleges investing in prisons in the first place? Don’t answer that.
* The view from over there: 38 ways college students enjoy ‘Left-wing Privilege’ on campus.
* How to Avoid Indoctrination at the Hands of ‘Your Liberal Professor.’
* You Were Right. Whole Foods Is Ripping You Off.
* “You have the wrong body for ballet.”
* The toy manufacturing sublime.
* Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history. I really don’t think going on WTF is that big a deal.
* What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama’s Legacy. [paywalled, sorry]
* Debating polygamy: aff and neg (and more).
* Alex Hern decided not to do anything for a week – unless he’d read all the terms and conditions first. Seven days and 146,000 words later, what did he learn?
* Philip K Dick’s only novel for children to be reissued in UK.
* The World Without Work. The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy.
* Keita “Katamari Damacy” Takahashi is still making the best games.
* The Assassin Who Triggered WWI Just Got His Own Monument.
* Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.
* Don Featherstone, Inventor of the Pink Flamingo (in Plastic), Dies at 79.
* A people’s history of the Slinky.
* J.K. Rowling Announces “Not a Prequel” Play About Harry Potter’s Parents. There’s just no way we’re not going to get an official “next generation” sequel series in the next few decades.
* Court Affirms It’s Completely Legal To Swear Loudly At Police.
* Oh, but we have fun, don’t we?
* They’re making a sequel to Lucy, more or less just for me.
* Kotsko flashback: Marriage and meritocracy.
If in the Mad Men era the mark of success was the ability to essentially ignore one’s family while enjoying access to a wide range of sexual experiences, now the situation has reversed: monogamy and devotion are the symbol of success. And the reason this can make sense as a symbol of elite arrival is that the trappings of a bourgeois nuclear family can no longer be taken for granted as they were in the postwar heyday of the “traditional family” — they are the exception rather than the norm. In the lower and working classes, successful marriages are increasingly difficult to sustain amid the strain and upheaval that comes from uncertain employment and financial prospects (a problem that is compounded by the systematic criminalization of young men in minority communities). While marriage is still a widely-shared goal, the situation now is similar to that with college: a relatively small elite get to really enjoy its benefits, while a growing number of aspirants are burdened with significant costs (student debt, the costs of divorce) without much to show for it.
* I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.
* When police kill the mentally ill.
* A broken bail system makes poor defendants collateral damage in modern policing strategies.
* Drug cops took a college kid’s savings and now 13 police departments want a cut.
* The 20 Best Lines From the Supreme Court Dissent Calling to End the Death Penalty.
* Someone is turning the Saved By The Bell Wiki into a thing of beauty.
* Dystopia now: “Predictive Policing.” You’re being secretly tracked with facial recognition, even in church. Air pollution and dementia. Rivers of death. The dark future of ‘Advantageous’: What happens when the difference between child-rearing and job training collapses?
* Plus, there’s this creepy shit.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Abramsverse Star Trek sequels, forever.
* And they said my English major would never be useful.
All The Wednesday Links!
* I got some really good news the other day: an NEH Summer Stipend! Here’s the full list of $22.8 million in awards and offers for 232 humanities projects.
* Two of the poems from the award-winning first collection of my partner, Jaimee Hills, are up at Waywiser Press: “Synaesthesia” and “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* I taught #GamerGate in my video game class yesterday. It wasn’t my favorite day of the semester, not by a long shot, but TNI‘s “Gaming and Feminism” post was a great help, particularly the link to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 and Playing with privilege: the invisible benefits of gaming while male. I didn’t spend that much time on it, but I’m still tickled by Why So Few Violent Games?
* Salvage-Marxism embraces the Socialist rococo, the feel-good where we can and the feel-bad where we must, the utopian and the unflinching. Salvage will bring together the work of those who share a heartbroken, furious love of the world, and our rigorous principle: Hope is precious; it must be rationed.
* An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor. It is a world which does not require a Brechtian V-effect since it is already objectively estranged. The cosmonaut, stranded for an unforeseeable period on this planet owing to faulty technology (incomprehensibility of set theory or mathemes, ignorance of computer programmes or digitality, insensibility towards hip-hop, Twitter, or bitcoins), wonders how one could ever understand what is by definition radically other; until he meets a wise old alien economist who explains that not only are the races of the two planets related, but that this one is in fact simply a later stage of his own socio-economic system (capitalism), which he was brought up to think of in two stages, whereas he has here found a third one, both different and the same. Ah, he cries, now I finally understand: this is the dialectic! Now I can write my report! Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity.”
* Terry Pratchett: “Not having battles, and doing without kings.”
* Confabulation in the humanities.
* Fantasy scholarship needs theory. Badly.
* The first African science fiction short story? Leonard Flemming’s ‘And So It Came To Pass.’
* Adam Kotsko: Notes toward an overanalysis of a failed sci-fi spin-off.
* Did the Anthropocene Begin with the Deaths of 50 Million Native Americans? Defining the Anthropocene. The Inhuman Anthropocene.
* Scars of the Anthropocene: Japan builds a sea wall.
* Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought. A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water.
* Devastating report finds humans killed almost 3 million whales last century.
* Costa Rica powered with 100% renewable energy for 75 straight days.
* It’s May 2065, and Cornell’s Dean of Nonlitigable Revelry is angry. So good.
* Welcome to Ohio State, Where Everything Is for Sale.
It’s true that some of the faculty opposed this deal (but only 84 percent,according to a survey), and it’s also true that since the Australian takeover, prices for parking permits have gone through the roof. But it is not true, as has been reported in some places, that faculty have formed hitchhiking co-ops because they can no longer afford to park on campus.
The important point here is that this deal puts the lie to the complaint we hear so often that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world. Our CFO, the guy who orchestrated this deal, has just landed a very lucrative job with the Australian firm he sold the parking to. It’s called synergy, baby! Look it up.
* UW Struggle: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Public Authority Edition. This Is What Wisconsin’s 2.5% Budget Cut Looks Like.
* Sweet Briar Alumnae Outline Legal Case Against College.
* U.Mass. Faces $3B in Debt. reclaimUC: “That’s nothing.” More links below the chart.
* New York Attorney General Is Investigating Cooper Union’s Decision to Charge Tuition.
* “Why Tenure Matters.” Holy moly.
A former administrator at Chicago State University has accused its president and other officials of firing her in part because she refused their demands that she file a false sexual-harassment charge against a faculty member critical of the leadership.
* University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation.
* Free expression and academic labor.
It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates. They had the protection of the tenure system and often the benefit of faculty unions that could agitate on their behalf. But with so many instructors in a state of minimal institutional protection or authority, lacking long-term contracts, benefits, or collective bargaining, the risk of angered students multiplies. Adjuncts don’t even need to be fired; they can just not get any classes the next semester. Grad students don’t even need to be fired; they can just have their job applications placed on the deny pile. This is why I think the problem is actually probably much larger than the high-profile anecdotes would suggest. The greatest impediment to real pedagogical and political freedom on campus is self-censorship due to labor insecurity. Discussion of contingency is almost entirely absent in Cooke’s essay.
* Academics talking about money.
* On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”
* What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place?
* Nearly a quarter century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong.
* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?
* How one dad opted out his kindergartner from standardized testing.
* Trying the 12-year-old “Slender Man” stabbers as adults is as illogical and barbaric as they are.
* Plane Safety Cards Explained.
*A University of Calgary professor has written “the first scholarly study of the Archie comic,” titled Twelve-Cent Archie. Though some of his colleagues were skeptical, his motivation, Bart Beaty explains, was “to really challenge the kind of snobbery that’s inherent in the way that comics aren’t studied.”
* Meanwhile, we live in very weird times: Archie vs. Predator.
* Ted Cruz, I think, speaks for us all: “My music tastes changed on 9/11.”
* Lead prosecutor apologizes for role in sending man to death row.
* BREAKING: your weed killer is poisonous.
* America’s race problem has been solved, and it was easier than you would have thought.
* SF Bishop Sorry Sprinklers Installed To Roust Homeless Were Discovered ‘Misunderstood.’
* Worst person in the world speaks.
* If you give a lion a CAT scan.
* This Floating McDonalds Has Sat Empty For 28 Years.
* There goes my Plan B: Business Owner Millions in Debt Arrested Two Years After Faking Death.
* “As They Lay Dying”: Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.
* 1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child’s forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world. Mustaba Snoopy.
* Texas’ brazen attempt to silence one of its most effective death penalty defense lawyers.
* The Wall Street Journal reports that the leading trade group for compound pharmacists is now discouraging its members from supplying the drugs necessary for lethal injections — in what represents the first official stance the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP) has ever taken on death penalty issues. Relatedly.
* I’m not one for tech solutions generally but they should figure out a way to put microlocal cell phone jammers in cars. Nothing else is going to stop this from happening.
* The best description of social media I’ve ever seen:
* Podcast: Government Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know FBI Agents Can See They’re Creating Terrorists.
* Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad.
* The strange things people Google in every state. The most common job in every state.
* Before Judges, the Godfathers Become Sick Old Grandfathers.
* H-Bomb Physicist Ignores Federal Order to Cut 5,000 Words From Memoir.
* The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia.
* The Second Death of Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe, no longer at ease.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Zelda TV show isn’t going to happen.
* And it’s not all death and destruction: There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined.
Monday, Monday
* The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
* The exciting return of “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional,” and friends, this one could be a doozy. Here Is What Will Happen If The Supreme Court Strikes Down Obamacare’s Subsidies. And from the archives: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.
* It’s baaaaack: A totally legal, totally shady way that Republicans could ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
* The Quest for Restoration, or, Gone Girl and Interstellar Considered as the Same Film.
* As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying – from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola, or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we’re less accustomed to consider the risks of living long – of outliving our retirement savings.
* Is Serial problematic? Serial: listeners of podcast phenomenon turn detectives – with troubling results. What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much. Alas, I listened to this this weekend and got hooked despite all my critical detachment.
* Doritos-Flavored Mountain Dew Is Real, PepsiCo Confirms. This is unfathomable. There are some lines never meant to be crossed.
* Can anyone even remember postmodernism?
* World Cup Watch: North Koreans working as ‘state-sponsored slaves’ in Qatar.
* Against spoiler alerts, in the LARoB.
The rise of spoiler-free criticism seems like a move away from criticism as art — and a move toward criticism as an arm of fandom marketing. It’s fine to not want spoilers in your criticism. But there is something distasteful about the assumption that providing spoilers is some sort of lapse in ethics or etiquette. If you don’t treat art first as a consumer product, the spoiler-free doctrine seems to suggest, you’re being cruel and unfair. But critics really are not under any obligation to like what you like or to treat art with one particular kind of reverence. In the name of preserving suspense, the command to remain spoiler-free threatens to make criticism and art more blandly uniform, and less surprising.
* On artificial intelligence in board games.
* Wikipedia’s list of deleted articles with freaky or inappropriate titles.
* Tig Notaro, national treasure.
* For example, research in economics has shown that the wage gap between lighter- and darker-skinned African Americans is nearly as large as the gap between African Americans and whites. In our analysis of data from theNational Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we found that the darkest-skinned African American girls were three times more likely to be suspended at school than their lighter-skinned counterparts — a disparity that is again roughly equal to the gap between blacks and whites. Alternatively put, while African American girls are three times more likely to be suspended than white girls, the darkest-skinned African American girls are several times more likely to experience suspension.
* A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
* Frenzied Financialization: Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer. Finance as a New Terrain for Progressive Urban Politics.
* Former Football Player Sues UNC Over Fake Courses. A University President’s Comments on Rape. Brown University Student Tests Positive For Date-Rape Drug at Frat Party.
* Occasion #7 is all about debt.
* Cloud computing: the race to zero.
* Telepathy is now possible using current technology.
* Let me pause and say here: of course I love many literary dudes. They are not, all of them, smug and condescending. But let me say something else: I thought for a while that the really terrible ones were time limited — that they were products of the 1950s, of a particular time period, and that it really was a viable strategy to just talk about snacks until they all retired. But I have now realized this is not true; new terrible smug dudes are coming up through the ranks. Hydra-like, smug dude attitude keeps springing forth from itself.
* The corals that came back from the dead.
* Billboard ads are expensive to construct, maintain and rent, but they don’t serve any functional purposes — so Michal Polacek redesigned them to house the homeless. The next best thing to just abolishing homelessness.
* In 2012, DiMaggio released the results of his own Safe Routes to School program. Child pedestrian injury rates had plummeted, falling to half their original numbers. “We showed that kids can still be kids,” says DiMaggio. “They can walk and bike to school and be safe.” The project’s federal funding expired last year, however, and no plans exist to extend the initiative to areas beyond the immediate vicinity of the selected schools.
* Obama endorses net neutrality.
* Incredibly misleading ad placement at Amazon inside the book description makes every book seem like it was an Amazon Editors’ Favorite Book of the Year.
* “But a deep look at Mars One’s plan and its finances reveals that not only is the goal a longshot, it might be a scam.” No! No! I won’t believe it!
* How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in 2014’s Close Races?
Guiltpiercer
I wanted to Storify my back-and-forth with my friend Aaron Bady (and a few other people, but mostly him) on the question of guilt and complicity in liberal politics, which was prompted by his Texas Stands With Gaza post and ultimately looped around, as all things must, to Snowpiercer.
Aaron is right that I’m using Snowpiercer (along with Pacific Rim, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and some other recent Anthropocene science fictions) in a piece of academic writing I’m working on, so I’ll hold off on doing a full reading of the film here for now. But I think the film actually figures this debate we’re having in a pretty direct way. The people on the train are all “guilty” and “complicit” with the Snowpiercer system, albeit in different ways and to different degrees; like any necropolitical survivor, they are all alive while/because someone else has died. Even on the level of character development, much of the movement of the film is directed towards making Chris Evans’s character Curtis feel as though he is worthy of great things despite the guilt he carries with him; characters frequently say this to him explicitly, even, most notably, the character he once tried to eat as a baby and who he later abandons in the name of the larger mission! In fact this guilt, in properly liberal terms, is indistinguishable from his worthiness to lead, with the final act of the film culminating in Curtis being offered the position of the Wizard of Snowpiercer. The Curtis plot in the film is more or less a familiar liberal drama about coming to terms with your own guilty complicity in the system, a process which as if by baptismal magic thereby makes you worthy to run the whole thing as if you’d never been guilty or complicit in the first place.
Aaron’s reading on the film insists that this is the only trajectory open to us, even as he repeatedly turns to Kang-ho Song’s Namgoong as the voice of alterity, rejecting his plan as nonviable. Namgoong knows the train is a horror and knows the train is doomed by its own entropic breakdown, rejects guilt or complicity as a frame, and instead works to blow open the doors and escape. (And this is the position Curtis ultimately settles into as well, having finally hit an encounter of guilt which he can’t autoredeem his way out of in the form of the children in the engine.) Here then we see one version of the Canavan position: guilt is a way of becoming re-trapped, linked back into the atrocity engine, while refusing to identify with the system and its terms opens up the horizon of the future. Neither Namgoong nor Curtis survive the derailment of the train (“there is hope, infinite hope, but not for us”), but their protégés do, and in the final shot of the film see a live polar bear moving outside the train, indicating that life of some kind persists outside the train and that therefore there is something like hope after all.
Now, Aaron rejects all of this — “it’s too cold out there! they have no skills or supplies! that polar bear will probably just eat them!” — and of course he’s right to do so on the level of cold realism; like most such apocalyptic scenarios, the situation is too far gone to allow any sort of genuine renewal. (I always think of the way the Matrix sequels had to confront this, ultimately having the heroic rebels make a truce with the monsters they were supposed to slay because the world is too far gone to actually free anyone anymore.) But this is where Aaron’s flattening of Jameson’s theory of utopia hurts him a bit — because the kernel of the Jamesonian reading of the film is not to imagine it as a practical alternative to the present so much as to figure the ongoing exist alternative in an era that, at every turn, loudly insists there isn’t one.
For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the Utopian form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things will be like after the break. (Archaeologies 232)
Snowpiercer, it seems to me, is pretty plainly about this effort of the imagination; neither the setup nor the climax is really amenable to any sort of realistic analysis about the practicalities of the situation. It’s preposterous from start to finish. The point of the film is to disrupt our guilty comfort and our comforting guilt about a system we all know is terrible (“those crooked fuckers”) but think we can’t oppose, only picket and sigh about and be more beautiful than (“oh, we guilty sinners, oh this fallen world”). So of course the film is an allegory after all; what it figures isn’t the actual situation of capitalism but the hopeless prospects for people who can’t see any way to stop the train, other than a crash, and who perhaps for that very reason have come to believe they’re the ones who are driving it.
Gerry Canavan 
Thursday Links!
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* A reminder: Marquette English has three open TT positions this year, two in rhet-comp and one in transatlantic Anglophone. The deadline is October 28.
* If I were going to encourage you to take any one class simply because it’s good for the freshman soul, I would say this: Take some introductory literature class that forces you to memorize poems, heaps and gobs and mounds of poems, old poems.
* Jameson on time travel in the LRB.
* AAUP v. LSU.
* Leftist academics need to understand they are embattled both as leftists and as academics.
* This afternoon at two o’clock the New York State Attorney General will announce the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Committee to Save Cooper Union, a group of activist students, faculty, and alumni against the Cooper Union trustees. The settlement will impose various reforms to Cooper Union governance, establish an independent financial monitor for the college, and begin the slow, difficult process of re-establishing Cooper Union as a free, healthy institution. Incredible turn of events. The tragedy of Cooper Union.
* A Proposed Heuristic for Academic Budgeting Decisions.
* NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs.
* “Thanks, UCF, for having lecture-capture courses so I don’t have to go to class ever.”
* A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself. I continue to think Democrats are completely in denial about how bad this story could get.
* Massive hurricanes striking Miami or Houston. Earthquakes leveling Los Angeles or Seattle. Deadly epidemics. Meet the “maximums of maximums” that keep emergency planners up at night.
* The Moral Panic Over Sexting. Today’s obscenity.
* The Accreditation Wars: Where are the Faculty?
* Some rules for teachers.
* Films for the feminist classroom.
* The proportion of people with intellectual disability who have been treated with psychotropic drugs far exceeds the proportion with recorded mental illness. Antipsychotics are often prescribed to people without recorded severe mental illness but who have a record of challenging behaviour. The findings suggest that changes are needed in the prescribing of psychotropics for people with intellectual disability.
* Boom shakalaka! Read an interview with the NBA Jam voiceover artist.
* Concrete Action, the Wikileaks for architects.
* I’ll take three.
* Yahoo has added commentary tracks from Dan Harmon to its Community episodes.
* Harvard will let students select their own pronouns.
* Iceland Caps Syrian Refugees at 50; More Than 10,000 People Respond With Support for Syrian Refugees.
* American Chess May Finally Emerge From The Shadow Of Bobby Fischer.
* Meet the Twitter Bot Generating Unnervingly Plausible Think Pieces.
* Another Colbert profile.
* California Uber Drivers Can Proceed With Their Class Action.
* Wow, finally: Octavia Butler’s Dawn is allegedly being developed for TV.
* Goonies forever.
* Piggy, Kermit, and domestic violence. Next up: why Elmer Fudd hunting animals out of season is actually no laughing matter…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, accreditation, administrative blight, architecture, BB-8, Bobby Fischer, boom shakalaka, cartoons, catastrophe, category errors, CEOs, chess, Colbert, come work with me, comedy, Commentary, Cooper Union, Dan Harmon, Democratic primary 2016, Department of State, disability, disaster, documentary, domestic violence, endowments, faculty, feminism, film, Florida, games, general election 2016, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Iceland, Jameson, Kermit, kids today, labor, LSU, Marquette, medicine, Miss Piggy, MOOCs, Muppets, NBA Jam, Octavia Butler, pedagogy, poetry, pronouns, psychopharmacology, refugees, sexting, Star Wars, student debt, student loans, Syria, teaching, television, tenure, The Late Show, the law, the Left, thinkpieces, time travel, toys, transgender issues, trigger warnings, tuition, Twitter, Uber, Wikileaks, Xenogenesis, Yahoo, zunguzungu