Posts Tagged ‘journalism’
Lost in January Links
* Out now: Extrapolation Volume 62.3 explores the representation of cyborgs in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, care in Gen Urobuchi’s science-fiction, and the critique of Western technoscience in Welcome to Night Vale.
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: Neurodiversity and Disability. CFP: Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture.
* Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? Notes on Squeecore. Portrait of the Author As a Component of a “Punk-Or-Core” Formulation. Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed. The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.
* Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature.
* Notes on the Forum of the Simulacra.
* How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.
* How climate catastrophe has consumed popular culture. Ride or Die? Mark Bould and the Fast-and-Furiocene.
* Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock.” Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us. Coming back from a time of illness: how finance can learn from climate change fiction. Melancholy Utopianism: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We Can’t Just Grow Our Way Out of This Climate Mess.
* Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise.
* Pop culture can no longer ignore our climate reality.
* Marvel Movies Made 30% Of The Total Box Office.
* Nnedi Okorafor on SF through an African Lens.
* The Matrix Resurrections and trans life (and death). Unpacking the Hidden Meanings in The Matrix Resurrections. A Muddle instead of a Movie.
* Games Studies Studies Buddies is such a good podcast and this is an exemplary episode. Like and subscribe!
* Joss Whedon fully burns down what’s left of his career. The Joss Whedon Era: A Look Back.
* Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.
* Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
* From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry.
* California’s Forever Fire.
* California, Arizona and Nevada agree to take less water from ailing Colorado River.
* The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record. The Oceans Are Now Hotter Than At Any Point in Human History, Scientists Warn. Here’s how hot Earth has been since you were born. The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment. US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, Noaa report says.
* As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave. How Did We Go From Stimulus Checks to “Go to Work With COVID”?
* The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism. Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens.
* Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection: The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
* Ultras.
* Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump. The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here’s What Life Is Like Inside. The January 6th Republicans (from Jonah Goldberg no less). Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes charged with seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The Rise and Fall of Latinx.
* Don’t Look Up Is a Terrible Movie. Really bad. I ranted.
* The Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’. Why ‘Star Trek’ made San Francisco the center of the universe.
* A Grieving Family Wonders: What if They Had Known the Medical History of Sperm Donor 1558?
* Percentage that would visit the Moon as a tourist, if money were not a factor.
* On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism.
* The end of the pandemic? Study: Omicron associated with 91% reduction in risk of death compared to Delta. Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble. America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire. We are the 3.2%.
* School Closures Led to More Sleep and Better Quality of Life for Adolescents. After last year’s learning loss, we need a plan for students with disabilities. Ideology and school closings. Who is this gentleman, Dude?
* The Mangle of Federalism.
* Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students.
* Becoming Martian.
* Last Year’s Longest Strike Just Ended in Victory.
* Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges.
* Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others.
* This Is the Way the Humanities End.
* A professor welcomed students to class by calling them ‘vectors of disease to me.’ He has been suspended.
* These Tenured Professors Were Laid Off. Here’s How They Got Their Jobs Back.
* So you want to work in academic publishing.
* As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth.
* US inflation reached 7% in December as prices rise at rates unseen in decades.
* Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class.’
* A simple plan to solve all of America’s problem.
* Sea Power, ‘Disco Elysium’, and the importance of being miserable.
* HBO’s Station Eleven Surpasses the Novel.
* Oh boy, they’re finally rebooting Quantum Leap.
* I’d never known this: Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile.
* Wes Anderson’s next sounds like another mistake.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly.
* ‘Invincible’ Animated Series Sparks Profits Suit Against Robert Kirkman.
* What Elmo’s Viral Moment Tells Us About How Parents Watch Kids’ TV.
* A people’s history of the Beatles logo.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Is a Terrible Masterpiece.
* The Wire as copraganda.
* BEHOLD! MEGA-MANHATTAN!
* The Strange Literary Puzzle Only Four People Have Ever Solved. And welcome to the Wordle century.
Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links
* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…
* For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans. The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.
* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.
* Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.
* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.
* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.
* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.
* 8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.
* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.
* Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.
* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.
* Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.
* How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?
* There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.
* Once again: against homework.
* The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.
* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.
* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell
* U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.
* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.
* How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.
* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.
* The Racist History of Tipping.
* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.
* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.
* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
* Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.
* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.
* J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.
* The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.
* Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.
* What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.
* The fight against racism starts at home.
* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.
* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.
* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since
* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today
* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked
* always has been — always has been
* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.
* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.
* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?
* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?
* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.
* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”
* Yet another Watchmen sequel.
* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’
What? THURSDAY Links? In This Economy?
* Sneak preview: the landmark Paradoxa “climate fictions” issue, edited by the great Ali Sperling!
* The 2020 Hugo Awards: The Political Hugo.
* A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming. Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus. Most air conditioning systems don’t protect against the coronavirus. In some cases, they can actually facilitate spread. How Arizona blew it. UnitedHealth posts most profitable quarter in its history. Disney World Fully Reopens to Crowds as Florida Surpasses 300K Coronavirus Cases. 51.3 million.
* First Coronavirus Vaccine Tested in Humans Shows Early Promise. The University of Oxford candidate, led by Sarah Gilbert, might be through human trials in September.
* More Than 40 Mayors Outline Their Vision for a Green Coronavirus Recovery.
* It’s the “bring their own chairs” part that makes it art. Budget ‘Bloodbath’ at University of Akron.
* Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state.
* Giving the NYPD the power to declare journalists enemy combatants at whim seems bad actually. Biden winning by so much that maybe even Biden couldn’t blow it. The media is covering this election all wrong.
* Another Monument to White Supremacy That Should Come Down? The Electoral College.
* Doomsday Clock only ended in December, but DC is already trying to sequelize Watchmen again. And elsewhere on the Watchmen beat: The Simpsons Watchmen Parody Is As Weird As You’d Expect.
* How did they write a graverobbing Gatsby prequel and then make it about Nick Carraway? Obviously the book is Jay Gatz.
* The most interesting thing you can just barely understand: How Gödel’s Proof Works.
* What It’s Like to Be Single in Your 60s With $233,921 in Student Debt.
* All the blue checks got hacked and Twitter still wasn’t fun anymore. I did like talking the MCU with you all this morning, though. Backgrounder: Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts.
* America’s child care problem is an economic problem.
* The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
* ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born.
* And knives out for Joss Whedon. Just incredible to see his reputation transform like this.
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Wednesday Night Links!
* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.
* Shoot this post into my veins.
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.
* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!
* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.
* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.
* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.
* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!
* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.
* When rich people can’t get along.
* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.
* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.
* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.
* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.
* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.
* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).
* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.
* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.
* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!
* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’
* The things you learn on Twitter.
* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.
* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.
* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’
* And somehow I always knew it would end this way.
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Wednesday Links!
* Marquette now requires permission for on-campus protests. An Open Letter Opposed to Marquette U.’s Anti-Demonstration Policy.
* Elsewhere in academics behaving badly: Professors rally behind MIT Media Lab director after Epstein funding scandal.
* The Quantitative Easing of the Humanities.
* Most-Expensive 4-Year Private Nonprofit Institutions, 2018-19. Impressive for Harvey Mudd to be so committed to that last three dollars to tick just over $75,000/year.
* College Board Drops Its ‘Adversity Score’ For Each Student After Backlash.
* The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials.
* I just knew it would be something like this.
* This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost. A Q&A With the Man Who Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Bret Stephens’s “bedbug” meltdown, explained. Who Gets to Speak Freely? Aaron Bady goes all the way back to 2005 for a good old-fashioned blog post.
* Speaking of the mystery of free speech: Incoming Harvard Freshman Deported After Visa Revoked.
“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” he wrote. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.”
* Southern California police arrest 3 middle school students for inciting a riot.
* Photos: The Burning Amazon Rainforest. The basic premise of geoengineering is that it will be easier to get the planetary atmospheric and ecological systems to change the way they work than to get the capitalist economy to change the way it works. It is immoral to have climate change in the era of babies. Wildfires and Floods Push Russia to Revise Its Stance on Climate Change. Let’s just spray trillions of tons of snow on Antarctica?
* The Affair, climate change, and the new realism.
* Florida Marine vet teacher on leave after telling students he would ‘be the best school shooter.’
* Bigotry and hate are more linked to mass shootings than mental illness, experts say.
* Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S. (A rebuttal.) Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart. Trump Allies Reportedly Set Up Network to Smear Journalists Ahead of Election. He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
* The Entire Plane of the Milky Way Captured in a Single Photo. Keep scrolling, there’s more!
* A reading list on alcoholism.
* School Administration Reminds Female Students Bulletproof Vests Must Cover Midriff.
* Native American Lacrosse Teams Reported Racial Abuse. Then Their League Expelled Them.
* When your kids start beating you in games.
* Where the candidates campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do.
* When you’re extremely on message.
* Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, a county coroner is forced to confirm. He’s in on it.
* Johnson & Johnson must pay over $572 million for its role in Oklahoma opioid crisis, judge rules.
* Drug prices in 2019 are surging, with hikes at 5 times inflation.
* 2 California towns where chickens have free range.
* Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say.
* A growing army of ‘Airbnb’ police gets paid to expose the addresses of homeshare hosts.
* Human-guided burrito bots raise questions about the future of robo-delivery.
* More evidence of YouTube rightwing radicalization. In a study of >79 million YouTube comments, @manoelribeiro et. al. shows that a high % of people who now comment on Alt-Right videos used to comment exclusively on IDW or Alt-lite videos.
* ProPublica found that – despite the TSA saying it is committed to treating all passengers equally and fairly – five per cent of civil rights complaints against the TSA related to the treatment of trans passengers, despite trans people making up less than one per cent of the US population.
* Lots of nerds *think* they like science fiction because of the technology and perditions.
* Marvel Comics Just Retconned the Entire Vietnam War.
* There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate.
* Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time.
* “We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”
* The Campbell Award gets a new name.
* How Do We Colonize the Moon?
* And submitted for your approval: the new culture industry.
Monday Morning Links!
* Principles of inclusive teaching.
* Marquette to Add Nine Faculty in Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies.
* Alaska defunds scholarships for thousands of university students ahead of fall semester.
* Bolsonaro vs. the future of the human race.
* Immigration Officials Snatch 9-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Heading To School, Hold Her For 2 Days. “I was scared. I was completely by myself,” says sobbing fourth-grader.
* “U.S. citizens may be increasingly swept up in federal immigration custody amid new rule change.” Seems like a good reason not to do it!
* What I’ve Learned About Unemployment And Being Poor After Applying For 215 Jobs.
* How mindfulness privatizes a social problem.
* And although they’ve been writing together for years—including on a number of Bad Robot productions that never saw the light of day—the duo has never written anything that’s actually been produced in Hollywood, which seems just absolutely wild given how much money, prestige, etc. is at stake here. Amazon’s new Lord Of The Rings showrunners have never made a TV show before. Yikes.
* A common problem in long-lived modern-dance troupes is “older-dancer syndrome.”
* Journalist Misses His Deadline on Manson Article. By 20 Years.
Q: Any advice for other reporters who want to pick up the story where you left off?
A: Just move on. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
* This college dropout was bedridden for 11 years. Then he invented a surgery and cured himself. Amazing story.
* 1950s science fiction. Laughter is the best medicine. Sagametrics. AI. False humility. Mortal life is a test. Morally speaking, can you eat humans? The intrinsic value of learning. The ultimate insult. Science!
* A Quest for the Holy Grail: On D. W. Pasulka’s “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology.”
* And Disney owns all your dreams.
Saturday Morning Links!
So intelligent species burn out too quickly to make intergalactic headway—I have to ask, do you think that’s what will happen to us?
I don’t know. We used to think that the biggest threat we faced as a species was nuclear war. Now it looks like it’s global warming. If we survive that, it’d be tempting to think that it’ll smooth sailing afterwards, but any consideration of this question is primarily a reminder of how much we don’t know.
* A math equation that predicts the end of humanity.
* The struggling US media industry is facing its worst year for job layoffs in a decade as news organizations continue to cut staff and close shop, according to a new survey. And this is before the coming recession hits.
* University Of Alaska Readies For Budget Slash: ‘We May Likely Never Recover.’ Alaska Isn’t a Bellwether. It’s a Swan Song.
* Remembering the strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead.
* Defeated in the courts, Trump may issue an executive order to try to rig the Census. There are no laws in America, only power.
* The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator – though he had plenty – but an inevitable byproduct of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become. He was just a kid.
* These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 Border Security Expo—essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.”
* Former ICE Chief Counsel Gets 4 Years In Prison For Stealing Immigrants’ Identities.
* Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border.
* DHS watchdog details dangerous conditions for migrants at border centers. What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse. The Treatment of Migrants Likely ‘Meets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity.’ “The Whole Facility’s Culture Is Rotted From the Core”: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saw Inside the El Paso Camps. The department is seeking 20-year leases for most of the sites, signaling they don’t expect challenges to fade.
* Trump administration ending in-person interpreters at immigrants’ first hearings.
* The Exceptional Cruelty of a No-Hugging Policy.
* Drawings by migrant children in detention show them in cages.
* ICE Threatens Immigrant in Sanctuary in Chapel Hill With $314,000 Fine.
* “Seth Donnelly was one of the many inmates Texas prison officials use as prey for dog hunts. He died from heatstroke after collapsing on the job in Abilene.” I’m gonna need you to start from the top.
* Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy.
* Happy 4th! Here are some readings on concentration camps.
* What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
* Europe’s Bold Plan for a Moon Base Is Coming Together. How will we deal with squatters on the Moon?
* World’s most full of shit people nearly terminally full of shit.
* Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.
* If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* “Plan to ban seagulls from the sea suspended.”
* Deep-sea mining to turn oceans into ‘new industrial frontier’.
* Heatstroke warnings in Anchorage.
* How Washington’s Elite Learned to Love Policy Wonks.
* When your email spies on you.
* The arc of history is long, but.
This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.
* Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.
* Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option.
* Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isn’t a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddler’s building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, “We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.” Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.
* The Impact of a World Without The Walking Dead.
* The Harry Potter franchise is going to take another crack at a prequel.
* What’s missing in Spider-Man: Far from Home.
* Another take: Far from Home as metafiction.
* And nothing gold can stay: The end of MAD.
Just Another Saturday Night Linkdump
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic. CFP: Edited Collection, Fan Studies: Methods, Ethics, Research. CFP: Reclaiming the Tomboy: Posthumanism, Gender Representation, and Intersectionality. CFP: Special Issue on Indigenous and Sovereign Games. CFP: The Age of the Pulps: The SF magazine, 1926–1960. CFP: Productive Futures: The Political Economy of Science Fiction, Bloomsbury, London, 12-14 September 2019.
* Awesome #altac job watch: Humanities Editor at Minnesota Press.
* The second half of the Women’s Studies issue on Octavia E. Butler, featuring my article of Parable of the Trickster, is now officially out. Check it out!
* Find out when someone started crying during Endgame, and you’ll find out who they’ve lost. (Really, though, it doesn’t make any sense.) “Avengers: Endgame” is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of “cinema” by “content.” In Praise of Poorly Built Worlds. The Avengers are the heroes of ‘Endgame,’ but Disney was the villain all along. But this time, we’re talking about a tragedy beyond what could possibly be commemorated through memorial sites. It would land somewhere closer to mass suicide and total infrastructural collapse–and where Endgame is concerned, there are no tragedies, there is only Marvel. Eco-Villains: Thanos and the Night King. To put it bluntly, and in Deleuze’s terms, superhero films are action films for people who no longer believe in action, for whom the capacity to act has been overtaken by the spectacle. It’s probably the best version of what an Avengers movie can be. And even that turns out to be silly, sloppily written, and to require massive amount of suspension of disbelief. Is it really too much to hope that Marvel stops debasing its characters and stories with events that can never live up to the MCU’s individual pieces? Interview With A Local Man Returning After Thanos’ Snap.
* MCU continuity enters its “fuck you, that’s why” period.
* An analysis of both side’s tactics in the Battle of Winterfell, from a military strategist. A counterpoint.
* Hate to agree with Ross Douthat, but it really does seem to be the case that hype aside Martin is just warmed-over Tolkien, but worse in every particular. Bonus Twitter thread goodness on GoT and colonialism.
* America is a horror: on Jordan Peele’s Us.
* Vox celebrates the great James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).
* Keeping company with my Audible app over lunch, I’ve come to see it as the buddy our tech overlords have granted me in the isolation that they help to impose. I feel this way about podcasts.
* Report Realism: Tentative Notes on Contemporary Kenyan Writing.
Genres that strain realism—the gothic and neo-gothic, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, and so on—are conspicuously absent in Kenyan writing, even as they are incredibly well represented in Kenyan book consumption. We are not writing what we are reading; even the very popular Christian-themed fiction about fighting demonic forces, which is really a variation of the horror novel, remains relatively sparse in terms of what we write or, perhaps more accurately, what we choose to make public of our writing. The believable and the realistic are bounded by NGO narratives and perspectives. And too many writers believe that the only writing worth anything is the believable and the realistic: to be a “committed” writer requires adhering to report realism.
Report realism believes in the power of “truth,” whether contemporary or historical, with a faith that borders on fundamentalism. In report realism, the truth will set us free. Report realism confirms objective NGO reports and affirms what Kenyans feel to be the truth of a particular condition. In report realism, for instance, the Kenyan prostitute is always a morally degraded figure looking for a way out to a respectable moral life. This realism is celebrated and supported by the NGO organizations who fund writing competitions and publish winning entries devoted to describing the real Kenya and by mainstream publishers who have the conservative mission of producing appropriately moral literature.
* ‘It drives writers mad’: why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?
* The saddest story ever told, beating Hemingway out by one word: Esports Part-Time Online Instructor.
* Yes, you will get a job with that arts degree. With that history degree, too!
* Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university.
* 6 Majors Were Spared the Ax at Stevens Point. But the Damage Might Be Done.
* Students and (not) doing the reading.
* How to Be a Better Online Teacher.
* Getting a Game Studies PhD: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars. Game Boys: The “gamer” identity undermines the radical potential of play.
* Sexual harassment is pervasive in US physics programmes.
* The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s. Being a Black Academic in America.
* ‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus.
* Swarthmore Fraternities Disband.
* Marquette faculty, students and community members rally for unionization. Unionization effort at Marquette leaves organizers, administration in a stalemate.
* The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb. A Moral Stain on the Profession.
* “Student loan debt is crushing millions of families. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational: Universal free college and the cancellation of debt for more than 95% of Americans with student loan debt.”
* Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find.
* Stanford keeps Stanford University Press alive… for one year.
* Charles Koch gave $25m to our university. Has it become a rightwing mouthpiece? George Mason University’s Donor Problem and the Fight for Transparency.
* Grad Students at Private Colleges Were Cleared to Unionize 3 Years Ago. Here’s What’s Changed.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated.
* All Literature Is Climate Change Literature. The Green New Deal Costs Less Than Doing Nothing. Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies. ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: vast expanse of rainforest lost in 2018. Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April. ‘Decades of denial’: major report finds New Zealand’s environment is in serious trouble. Alaska’s in The Middle of a Record-Breaking Spring Melt, And It’s Killing People. The Folly of Returning to Paradise, California. Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital. Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse. “You did not act in time.” We Asked the 2020 Democrats About Climate Change (Yes, All of Them). Here Are Their Ideas. The Billionaire’s Guide to Hacking the Planet. What if air conditioners could save the planet? The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth. ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive. A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet. Between the Devil and the Green New Deal. Five years. And here comes eco-fascism.
* Down and Out in the Gig Economy: Journalism’s dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry—not to mention writers like me.
But for most of us, freelance journalism is a monetized hobby, separate from whatever real income one earns. The ideal relationship for a freelance journalist to their work becomes a kind of excited amateurism. They should hope for professional success and acceptance but always keep a backup plan or three in mind. They will likely not be welcomed past the gates of full-time employment. By year five or six, they might be rebranding themselves as “editorial consultants” or “content strategists,” realizing that any genuine fiscal opportunity lies in shepherding corporate content to life.
* ‘Two-Tiered Caste System’: The World of White-Collar Contracting in Silicon Valley. The Future of Unions Is White-Collar. We Just Remembered How to Strike.
* These five charts show how bad the student loan debt situation is.
* “I am a woman and I am fast.” The ongoing harassment of Caster Semenya is simply incredible.
* Ten years later, police lies about Oscar Grant come to light. And elsewhere on the police beat: We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records. New York City’s DAs Keep Secret Lists Of Cops With Questionable Credibility. Virginia police sergeant fired after being linked to white supremacy.
* Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes. Emails Show Trump Administration Had No Plan to Track and Reunite Separated Families. Militia in New Mexico Detains Asylum Seekers at Gunpoint.
* TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be.
* France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity. An art historian explains the tough decisions in rebuilding Notre Dame. How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral. The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy.
* Mental health minute: Researchers say there’s a simple way to reduce suicides: Increase the minimum wage. The challenge of going off psychiatric drugs. The kids are not all right.
* The Rise of Useless Health Insurance. High-Deductible Health Policies Linked To Delayed Diagnosis And Treatment. American Prescription Drug Prices Are Out of Control. One Man’s Furious Quest to Get to the Bottom of It.
* Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests.
* Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
* A new Gallup poll says that America is home to some of the most stressed people in the world, reporting extraordinary levels of anger and anxiety that could be cause for concern, say doctors.
* Workers Should Be in Charge.
* I Work With Suicidal Farmers. It’s Becoming Too Much to Bear.
* On crunch time in the games industry.
* Instagram Memers Are Unionizing.
* How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever.
* Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird.
* Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium.
* Believe them when they say they want to kill us.
* Children of the Children of Columbine.
* My parents didn’t tell me they skipped my vaccines. Then I got sick.
* How a mall dies, Milwaukee edition.
* The hunt for rocket boosters in Russia’s far north.
* Job-hunting will only get worse.
* Of course I believe in hell. I vote for Democrats.
* The gamification of fascism.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fandom, and anti-fandom.
* My feckless Googling had reaped a monstrous reality that I knew was going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I asked myself: Is there something righteous in facing reality, or would it have been better to stay ignorant? A surfeit of ugly knowledge is a feature of our age, a result of the internet carrying to our doorstep, like a tomcat with a dead rat, all manner of brutal information. How many others have flippantly Googled an old friend and discovered something ghastly? This was not knowledge as power; it was knowledge as sorrow.
* “Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats.”
* The oldest known tree in Wisconsin.
* A Video Game Developed To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Seems To Be Working.
* How “Liberal” Late-Night Talk Shows Became A Comedy Sinkhole.
* Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men. What Good Dads Get Away With.
* When Measles Arrives: Breaking Down the Anatomy of Containment.
* Despite being legally required to conduct audits since the early 90s and holding a staggering 2.2 trillion in assets, the Pentagon held its first-ever audit this week — which it, unsurprisingly, spectacularly failed.
* I have so little faith in the holders of the Star Trek IP I can’t greet any of this news with pleasure. Even the realization that Discovery is (finally) going to do something truly original in its third season just fills me with dread. And I don’t know how to feel about this at all: Star Trek: Picard Series May Not Reunite TNG Cast. Star Trek: Discovery’s Depiction of Captain Pike’s Disability is a Betrayal of Roddenberry’s Utopian Vision. My mini-tweetstorm on the subject.
* Sundown on Deadwood: David Milch, battling Alzheimer’s, finally finishes his TV Western.
* Professional obligation watch, god help me.
* Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer.
* Tolkien estate disavows forthcoming film starring Nicholas Hoult.
* John Lennon’s 15 year old report card.
* Colonizing Condiments: A (Very) Short History of Ketchup.
* The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.
* Obituary corner: Gene Wolfe Was the Proust of Science Fiction. Before the Labyrinthine Lore of ‘Dark Souls,’ There Was Gene Wolfe.
* Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention.
* Medicine is magical and magical is art / The boy in the bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart.
* Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs.
* The Great Pornwall of Britain Goes Up July 15.
* The United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan.
* what piece of cosmo sex advice most haunts your waking hours
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix ‘buys 50 literary projects in last year.’
* It was in autumn that the happy face arrived. Death of a Salesman. No mathematics, no science can ever predict the human soul. Where do you want to eat tonight?
* 2019 National Geographic Travel Photo Contest.
* And only mass surveillance can save us now! Rough news day for Oxford if you ask me.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.
* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.
* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.
* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.
* A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.
* United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.
* Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.
* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.
* Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.
* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.
* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.
Sunday Reading, A Great Idea Whose Time Has Come
* SFFTV Special Issue CFP: Global Utopian Film and TV in the Age of Dystopia.
* CFP: The Sixth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 27-29, 2019.
* CFP: 20th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe.
* Pasadena on Her Mind: Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Her Hometown.
* The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talks to the great Lisa Yaszek.
* When your stalker signs up for your class.
* When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals. To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates—has not improved over 6 years.
* US academics feel the invisible hand of politicians and big agriculture.
* Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor for using the N-word during a class discussion about a James Baldwin book in which the word appeared — and for sharing essays on the history of the word with students who complained to him about it. “Teaching & the N-word: Questions to Consider.” I have always personally abided by the use/mention distinction out of deference to black artists and what I see as an injunction not to rewrite their work for them (which has always seemed, to me, like centering whiteness too, just in a different way). But the social consensus around that is *rapidly* changing; I’m not at all sure what’s best, and it seems like a pedagogical minefield that the contemporary moment is completely unprepared to think through in a careful way.
* Fairfax was preparing to be Va. governor. Then Northam said he was staying put.
* Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet. Students Are Preparing for the First Major U.S. Climate Strike Next Month. There’s a big hole in the world’s most important glacier. Hell yeah, Upper Midwest. Climate signs.
* The Anthropocene started in 1492. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.
* How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth.
* ‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings.
* Lord of the Rings as D&D Campaign.
* Trump Allies Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Hiding or Dead. It Started on QAnon.
* The U.S. Needs to Stay Out of Venezuela.
* Snopes officially declares Facebook unfactcheckable.
* Automated background checks are deciding who’s fit for a home.
* New York Insurers Can Evaluate Your Social Media Use—If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed.
* We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole.
* As Drug Prices Rise, Is Boston’s Prosperity Based On A Moral Crime?
* Invincible has a solid voice cast, but for some reason I thought this show was going to be live action, and now I’m broken-hearted.
* Cop watch: FBI Warned Law Enforcement Agencies of Threat Posed by Non-Existent ‘Pro-Choice Extremists.’ Revealed: FBI investigated civil rights group as ‘terrorism’ threat and viewed KKK as victims. No Heat for Days at a Jail in Brooklyn Where Hundreds of Inmates Are Sick and ‘Frantic.’ Mentally Ill Prisoners Are Held Past Release Dates, Lawsuit Claims. Prison gerrymandering is distorting democracy in states across the Midwest and nationwide, leaving incarcerated people with inequitable representation—or none at all. ICE Agents Are Using Pennsylvania’s Courthouses as a Stalking Ground. The State Supreme Court Can Stop Them. One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases. The criminal justice system also has an ‘alternative facts’ problem. The FBI Has Your DNA Now.
* This was cool: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.
* Wisconsin basketball star has no plans to stop protesting racism during the national anthem.
* Breaking: everyone from uncontacted and isolated tribes is in the Bad Place.
* A new study finds Americans take the pain of girls less seriously than that of boys.
* Will Anyone Save Black Colleges?
* A spectre is haunting the 2020 Democratic primary.
* Let children be bored again. I ran this parenting suggestion by my seven year old and got a big thumbs down.
* I wish there were a different author than Jesse Singal, but the story is genuinely fascinating: How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author’s Budding Career.
* New to podcasts? Choose your genre!
* And these stamps sure are pretty.
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Thursday Noontime Links!
* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.
* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.
* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.
* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.
* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.
* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* Deported for doing journalism.
* If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.
* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.
* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.
* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.
* America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.
* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.
* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?
* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.
* Snikt!
* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…
* Money is speech. It’s better actually.
* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?
* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.
* But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.
* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.
* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.
* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
* Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.
* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.
* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.
* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.
* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?
* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.
* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.
* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.
* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.
Gerry Canavan 