First Day of School Links!

* Some late but very nice press for my Octavia Butler book: I was on an episode of the nationally syndicated radio show Viewpoints Radio this week, and the book had a lovely review in LARB!

* CFP: Artificial Life: Debating Medical Modernity (April 19-21, UC Riverside).

* $75 million dollars to philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

* And on the pedestal these words appear.

* 12 People Face Misdemeanor Charges for Giving Food to The Homeless in El Cajon.

* A girl-power moment for Medieval Times, where a woman has the lead for the first time. I have wanted to take my kids to Medieval Times ever since listening to the Doughboys episode about it a few months ago.

* Like the story about the sexual assaults of the US gymnastics team, there is something about Eliza Dushku’s story of being abused as a child by adults who were trusted with her care that is just so heartbreaking.

* Meanwhile, McKayla Maroney is facing a $100,000 for violating her NDA with USA Gymnastics.

* A list of the teen-sex movies that I grew up on in the late 1970s/ 1980s. Keep in mind: Every one of these was considered a *comedy.*

* ‘Every day I am crushed’: the stateless man held without trial by Australia for eight years.

* ICE Keeps Raiding Hospitals and Mistreating Disabled Children. Feds planning massive Northern California immigration sweep to strike against sanctuary laws. DHS and DOJ Want to Arrest Mayors of Sanctuary Cities.

The deepest problem, as I see it, is the underlying assumption that things like the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution are the things that stop tyranny and authoritarianism in this country.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 15, 2018

Tyrannies in America—especially the most durable and dangerous—are built on the rule of law, the courts, and on constitutionalism.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 15, 2018

* How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’ and caused a wave of panic. America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era. These are fascinating but I still have every confidence that the explanation we have been given for this event is bullshit and that the truth will come out in a decade or so. Pandemonium and Rage in Hawaii.

* “Wisconsin school apologizes for slavery homework assignment.”

* Foxconn boondoggle nearing $4.5 billion.

* “Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn. It has haunted her ever since.”

* Activists charged with Confederate statue toppling no longer face felonies.

* Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland.

* The True History of Luke Skywalker’s Monastic Retreat.

* Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea.

* How the Female Stars of The Breakfast ClubFought to Remove a Sexist Scene, and Won.

* Tired of winning. So tired.

oh, like obama didn't cheat on his pregnant 3rd wife w/a porn star, grab numerous women by the pussy, call actual nazis “very fine people,” lie over 2700 times in his first year in office, pass a tax bill to massively enrich himself, endorse a pedophile for the United States Sena

— Ben Wexler (@mrbenwexler) January 16, 2018

* And of course you had me at “Gorgeous Images of the Planet Jupiter.”

Thursday Morning Links!

* At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.

* If you got a call offering a free cruise, you might be entitled to at least $300. I did! Check your numbers.

* Artist’s Statement, by Kara Walker.

* The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.

* President Of Charlottesville Synagogue Recounts Scene During Weekend Rally. More Witnesses. More. Documentary.

"I'd rather have my child, but by golly if I gotta give her up we're gonna make it count." —Heather Heyer's mom.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) August 16, 2017

* Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist. All the President’s Klansmen. Goodbye, Pepe.

* Here are all the Republican members of Congress who have called out the president. Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity.’ Gwen Moore Calls for Trump’s Removal.

I signed up to fight Nazis 73 years ago and I'll do it again if I have to.

Hatred, bigotry, & fascism should have no place in this country.

— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) August 12, 2017

If you refuse to denounce these animals, you stand with them. If your elected officials won't call this what it is, they are unfit to serve.

— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) August 16, 2017

* Durham protester charged in Confederate statue vandalism. Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue. Virginia. Richmond! The Capitol. Even Robert E. Lee didn’t think Americans needed all those Confederate statues. Leave the Durham memorial on the ground. News you can use. Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost. Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely. Trump Blasts Critics Who Judge Neo-Nazi Groups By Most Extreme Members. Now you’ve gone and made Ron Johnson ‘not entirely’ comfortable. Poor guys.

* Do your duty.

* Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed. White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him. Disgusted Robert Mueller Eats 2 20-Piece Chicken McNugget Meals In One Sitting In Attempt To Get Into Trump’s Mind.

White House staffers, Cabinet members reported to be stunned and disheartened. But not one resignation. Not. One.

— Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) August 16, 2017

I can't help but marvel it's the other guys who believe their every action will be judged at the end of days by an all-knowing god of love.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2017

* They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported.

* The curious case of a man detained by ICE who can’t stay, but can’t be sent back either.

* Today in Millennials killing things.

* White racists and genetic testing. Doxxing White Supremacists Is Making Them Terrified.

* Today, Cloudflare reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and booted The Daily Stormer out from behind its DDoS protection service.

* Never Say Never Again.

* ‘Elder Orphans’ Facebook Group Creates Community For Adults Aging Alone.

* THE COURT: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

JUROR NO. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

* The Voter Purge Crusade That Preceded Trump’s Sketchy Elections Commission.

* A good year for television adaptations of black SF!

* The Patterns Around Octavia Butler.

* Superhero Comics’ Long History of Beating Up Nazis.

* WSU grad student designs map of precinct-level election results.

* Free Speech Year at Berkeley! I bet it goes great.

* Sonic Mania has a great mechanic for playing with a five-year-old, but I swear Sonic used to be faster.

* In an age without heroes.

* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?

* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.

Start Monday Off Right with Monday Links, Half-Price for the Entire Month of August with Offer Code CANAVAN

* Things are bad all over: No new novel cracked the top 20 print bestsellers in the first half of 2016.

* Stranger Things thinkpiece roundup! The Solution to Our Political Problems Lies in ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Homophobia Is the Real Monster in Stranger Things. The Problem of Barb. This Stranger Things supercut shows how meticulous the show’s ’80s references really are. And the inevitable remix.

Also, halfway thru S1 I’m skeptical of need for a second, but if there is one I’d like it to be life story of bully El makes pee his pants.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 8, 2016

* Elsewhere in 80s nostalgia: a brief history of The Thing.

* Teach the controversy: Was Philip K. Dick a Bad Writer? Meanwhile, it turns out there is no Man in the High Castle!

* Reports: 2 Professors at American U Afghanistan Abducted.

* Several private universities are boosting stipends and benefits ahead of a federal ruling that could clear the way for graduate students to form unions. To some grad students, it’s an attempt to persuade them that they don’t need collective bargaining to get a raise.

* Curated by Mohammad Salemy and a team of researchers from The New Centre for Research & Practice, Artificial Cinema is a large collaborative effort which explores the history of science fiction cinema and its potentials for arriving at a synthesized vision for the future of art. The exhibition traces a trajectory away from “Anthropocinema” — human-centered cinema — towards more open and complex collaborations between humans and machines.

* Online fandom isn’t all smiles and rainbows.

* How Katie Ledecky became better at swimming than anyone is at anything.

I think every Olympic event should include a normal person trying to compete just so we can fully appreciate how superhuman the athletes are

— Aoife (@aoiph) August 7, 2016

* Abandoned Olympic venues from around the world.

* One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth.

* A start-up’s race to harvest the moon’s treasures.

* The American Psychiatric Association issues a warning: No psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. They’re working for Putin too! And so is George P., looking for the Bush family’s revenge some dark day a decade from now.

* Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump.

* Trump’s shrinking electoral map.

* Send First-Gen Students to Grad School.

* Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university.

* The last word on cargo shorts and neoliberalism.

Cargo shorts are neoliberalism applied to shorts, plain and simple. By maximizing the amount of pocket space, they seek to turn men (1/57)

— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) August 5, 2016

* Can Brazil Be Saved?

* It’s George R.R. Martin’s media ecology, we just live in it.

* The fight over H.M.’s brain.

* Teaching in the Age of Trump.

* Suicide Squad Sets Box Office Record Because We Don’t Deserve Better Movies. Allow me to recommend Improv4Humans #251, Mattman v. SupArmen, which is better than anything this incarnation of the DC Universe has put out so far.

* Six years ago, the world’s biggest library decided to archive every single tweet. Turns out that’s pretty hard to do.

* Where are the Natives in Hamilton?

* Ideology disguises itself as common sense, as what everybody already knows.

* Academic Olympics.

* And a helpful questionnaire.

31. Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won’t otherwise get done?
32. Do you take on extra work because you do not believe other people can do it as well?
33. Do you underestimate how long a project will take and then rush to complete it?
34. Do you delay beginning a project and experience a surge of adrenaline as you prepare at the last minute or go forward unprepared?
35. Do you believe that it is okay to work long hours if you work for justice?
36. Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?
37. Are you afraid that if you don’t work hard you will be a failure?
38. Is the future a constant worry for you even when things are going well?
39. Do you feel that others are not doing enough?
40. Do you feel that you are not doing enough?

Wednesday Links!

* Cura personalis: Whereas Arnold hoped culture would replace religion, Deresiewicz, though not religious himself, wonders if religion might rescue culture: Students are no longer “equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose … that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.”

* Catholic Colleges Greet an Unchurched Generation.

* Alien vs. Predator: Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices.

Harvard could put out every academic journal in the country for free and wouldn’t notice the money was missing.

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

“If we don’t work to cut costs now, in 200,000 years Harvard might be forced to make some cuts.” -Harvard trustee

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

It is the year 3,000,000. All life on Earth is extinct. The only monument left to Homo sapiens is Harvard’s endowment, currently valued at

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

* Video Gamers Are Having A Bizarre Debate Over Whether Sending Death Threats To Women Is A Serious Issue Or Not. #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group. The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate. Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a planned talk at Utah State University after university officials refused to secure the venue following a mass shooting threat. In which gamers yell at a dumb chat bot from 1966 that someone wired up to twitter, because they think it’s a woman.

* Another Obama triumph: Since 2008, the District’s homeless population has increased 73%.

* The Americas in 1491. 9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel. The Real Christopher Columbus. And it gets worse: The Sopranos only ever made one bad episode and it was all Christopher Columbus’s fault.

* It’s Columbus Day. Let’s talk about geography (and Ebola).

* Ebola threatens world chocolate supply.

* What if Columbus had sailed off the edge of the world? How would that have affected U.S. history and economic growth?

* White People Are Unironically Talking About the White Experience in New PBS Documentary.

* For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.

* Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants?

* Quick, everybody switch positions about civility and academic freedom.

* The Gates Foundation has a plan to save higher education through creating artificial enrollment crises exciting new efficiency metrics!

* The For-Profit College That’s Too Big to Fail.

* George Mason Grad Students Release Adjunct Study.

* The National Science Foundation has awarded grants of $4.8 million to several prominent research universities to advance the use of Big Data in the schools. Your dystopian term of art is “LearnSphere.”

* Uber Calls Woman’s 20-Mile Nightmare Abduction an “Inefficient Route.”

* What Do We Do With All These Empty Prisons? Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.

* Cops Charge 10-Year-Old Boy as Adult in Slaying of 90-Year-Old Woman. Accused of Stealing a Backpack, High School Student Jailed for Nearly Three Years Without Trial. South Carolina Prosecutors Say Stand Your Ground Doesn’t Apply To Victims Of Domestic Violence. Why Are Police Using Military-Grade Weapons in High Schools?

* There’s always money for murder and torture, but we need to crowdfund Ebola research.

* Jimmy John’s has noncompete clauses. Jimmy John’s.

* Comic Books Are Still Made By Men, For Men And About Men.

* SF short of the night: Forever War.

* The Kids These Days Know More Than You Probably Think. The meat of the post is about a bogus “declining vocabulary” test that is used to fuel critics of schools.

* The nation’s largest union of flight attendants took the Federal Aviation Administration to court on Friday, arguing that the agency should have upheld a ban on the use of smartphones and tablets during takeoff and landing. Lawyers for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA argued that the devices distracted passengers from safety instructions and could fly out of their hands, becoming dangerous projectiles, the Wall Street Journal reports.

* Freddie de Boer against carceral feminism: The burden of expanding the police state’s power to prosecute sex crimes will fall on the poor and the black.

* Meanwhile, in utterly inexplicable results that will probably always be a mystery: Income is more predictive than race for early college success.

* We don’t even know which way solar panels should be facing.

* Naughty Marvel: It’s Tragic and Disappointing That Marvel Is Canceling Fantastic Four.

* Nice Marvel: And with Robert Downey Jr. signing on it sounds like Captain America 3 will be Civil War. I’d never have guessed that the Captain America movies would be the ones that really connected with me, but here we go…

* David Lynch’s Los Angeles.

* We are become old.

* Milwaukee’s incredible shrinking art scene.

* Karen Russell on the greatness of The Martian Chronicles.

[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?

KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.

SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.

KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.

* And being the indispensable shining city on the hill is confusing. If you ask me we should just let the biker gangs handle this.

A Headline Writer Lives for a Story Like This

Choose your poison: “Kidnapper Sues Victims Who Escaped for Breach of Contract” or “Man Sues Couple He Kidnapped After They Got Him to Fall Asleep While Watching ‘Patch Adams.'” There’s no wrong answer here.

Kidnapped at Birth

Another link from the increasingly essential longform.org: One day Nejdra Nance realized the woman she had called Mom for 23 years may have been at the center of one of the most harrowing kidnappings in decades—hers.