March Links!

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— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021

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

• CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
• A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
• How to Build a World.
• How to Land on Mars.
• Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
• “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
• The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
• Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
• I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.

So my pitch for a retcon:
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

If the core of Wandavision were “everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn’t” I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

• An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
• From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
• The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
• The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’

So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.

It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx

— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021

• President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
• The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
• Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
• Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
• New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
• The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.

When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA

— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021

• ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
• When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
• English departments rethink what to call themselves.
• A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
• Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.

from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021

• Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
• What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
• Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
• More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
• The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
• ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
• Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
• Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
• Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.

NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021

I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021

• The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
• Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
• The Tyranny of Parents.
• Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
• A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
• Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
• Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
• The realest tweet.

kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century

— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021

1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021

the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances

— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021

• Chess is bad now. This is good.
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
• The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
• Finally, someone is making sense.
• Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
• Bring back the nervous breakdown!
• Is This the End of Tipping?
• The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
• I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
• All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
• And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.

During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7

— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021

Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

• My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
• Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
• Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
  
  With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’
  
• Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
• And the obvious Plan B.
• CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
• Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
• ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
• Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
• In praise of The Life Aquatic.
• Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”

As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”⁴⁶ As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”⁴⁷ In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.

In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.

• “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
• Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
• What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
• LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
• War by Other Means.
• Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
• Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
• Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
• 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

• Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
• ‘The Agile College.’
• How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
• The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

• We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
• Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
• The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

• Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
• How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
• The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
• An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
• The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
• Frozen and Queer Coding.
• California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
• Who really created the Marvel Universe?
• Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
• Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
• How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
• Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
• Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
• The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
• Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

• The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
• From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
• A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
• Behold: the megacycle!
• Okay this just seems mean.
• And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.

GSV21: PLAYER PIANO!

What’s that? There, in the back, behind the Christmas tree? Why, it’s a very special, two-hour episode of Grad School Vonnegut, guest-starring Matt Hauske & Hilary Strang from the Marooned! on Mars podcast! We talk Player Piano, automation, capitalism, revolution, utopia, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future, failsons, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, the Ghost Dance, and so much more…

It’s Been a Minute: Links!

• There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
• I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
• Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
• Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

• Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
• Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
• How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
• How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
• Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
• A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
• Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
• Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
• The Proletarian Fantastic.
• Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
• Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
• Generation C.
• National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.

Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020

Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020

• ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
• Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.

Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY

— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020

The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

• The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
• Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
• Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
• A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
• ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
• The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
• Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
• Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
• When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
• And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
• Fandom and the Future of Trek.
• In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
• If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
• Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
• implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war

Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.

— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020

• Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
• Joe Biden should do everything at once.
• Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
• In the Time of Monsters.
• The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
• How To Avoid Another Trump.
• Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
• For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

• How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
• What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
• It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
• Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
• 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
• Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
• We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
• The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.

my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020

• A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
• Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
• The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
• Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
• Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
• Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
• We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
• And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.

goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020

And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too

• ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
• How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.

One of the things I see people perpetually getting wrong about the aims of various genre categories: science fiction, whatever it’s pretensions, does not do well at predicting the future. Because that’s horror’s turf.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

If I had to speculate further, it’s because science fiction has to follow some sort of rules explicable to the readers of its time. Horror is under no such constraint, thus is better able to reflect or at least dimly mirror a future we cannot grasp + would drive us mad if we did.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

• Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
• Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.

“Liberals obsess over the polls while Republican judges throw votes in the trash” is a pretty solid explanation of how we got here and how even now two days before the end no one has learned anything

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

Trump, Biden Trade Barbs on Absentee Ballots https://t.co/N0LLGJTbq3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

• America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
• A Possible Majority.
• Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.

Marquette’s administration is now using the illegitimate, anti-demonstration policy it rammed through over student and faculty objections to punish students organizing against budget cuts. Just an outrageous abuse of their authority and complete abrogation of their duty of care.

— Our Marquette (@MarquetteUnited) October 31, 2020

This is really shameful. @PresLovell, please intervene and put a stop to this. https://t.co/7mMnIcvPHc

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2020

• Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
• Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
• U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
• KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
• Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
• White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.

A marker of how messed up American institutions are is that people are legitimately on pins and needles about the outcome of an election where one candidate is up by **12 points** https://t.co/fESg3xdi3q

— Maya Sen (@maya_sen) October 31, 2020

the ole “critical fail” https://t.co/L7ixI3eQQr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

hard to believe there’s just three days until I’m shot dead in the street during post-election civil unrest

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

there’s a HORSE loose in the HOSPITAL and tomorrow
WE
VOTE
THE
HORSE
OUT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

• Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
• Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
• Respectfully disagree.
• Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
• Dibs.
• How Long Can Gyms Survive?
• And I’m listening…

weirdly, trying to podcast about Vonnegut’s Dr. Kevorkian novelette in the midst of an impending fascist coup has put me in a somewhat dour mood

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?

This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:

• ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
• American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
• A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
• I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
• You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
• Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
• I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
• The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
• Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
• CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
• Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.

nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020

• A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
• Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
• Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
• Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
• 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.

Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020

have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t

— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020

Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020

• Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
• Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
• Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
• Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
• “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
• How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
• How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
• Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
• Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
• We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
• Glücky!
• RIP, Duke TIP.

The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020

• Miracles and wonders.
• The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
• Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
• Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
• Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
• He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
• DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
• Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
• idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
• AOC, streamer.
• Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
• Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
• Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
• Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
• Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
• Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
• What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
• “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
• The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
• The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
• The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
• Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
• How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
• Revisiting Nabokov.
• Always look on the bright side of life.
• How will 2020 end?
• And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
• Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!

the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020

pic.twitter.com/VcyJtdFq17

— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE Wants You!

I wrote a bit about Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel and ecoterrorism over at LARB:

If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? “If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,” Frank argues. “I don’t think they would countenance murder,” retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, “Of course they would!”

The Ministry for the Future is thus a novel about bureaucracy, but it’s also about the possibility of a wide diversity of tactics in the name of a livable future that include fighting both inside and outside the system. Characters in the novel contemplate targeted assassination of politicians and CEOs, industrial sabotage of coal plants, intentionally bringing down airliners in the name of destroying commercial air travel, bioterrorism against industrial slaughterhouses — and they do more than contemplate them. How does it change what’s possible when we stop worrying so much about losing in the right way, and start thinking about winning in the wrong ways?

Saturday Night Links!

• Not even the d2020 saw the last two weeks coming.

super normal system that allows the next 100,000 years of ecosystem sustainability for human life to be based on the date that a single elderly judge passes away

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 19, 2020

"hypocrisy isn’t the word…it applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to, not parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true."

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 21, 2020

Trump as the guy in the zombie movie who tries to pretend he didn’t get bit is an unexpected but fitting end for the character https://t.co/eYC38BgCOI

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 3, 2020

• Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
• IAFA 21 will be online.
• A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
• The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
• New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
• How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
• Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
• Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
• Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
• Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
• Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
• UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
• In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
• The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
• AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
• How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
• When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
• Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d

Wisconsin is hurtling toward becoming the new epicenter for coronavirus in America.

It’s also the only state where the Legislature has control over the statewide covid response.

Since gaining that control 133 days ago, the Republicans running the Legislature have done NOTHING. pic.twitter.com/d9GXzH94Is

— Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) September 23, 2020

• The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.

You can complain all you want about McConnell’s hypocrisy, shady strongarm tactics, etc, but the core issue that the Senate is a fundamentally illegitimate institution that enshrines white minority rule and nothing can fix it short of a new Constitution.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 19, 2020

That almost every election rule or norm we have is the poisoned fruit of a program of mass disenfranchisement of women, nonwhite people, and the poor that dates back to the founding is also extremely good https://t.co/zsOGE28JYi

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020

A few years ago I predicted that we were living in a historical simulation about the collapse of the American republic and I have to say I sort of nailed it

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020

• Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
• Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
• The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
• We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
• The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
• During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
• A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
• The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.

[30 years into the future]

me: you know netflix used to send films by post

my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge

me: productivity

— tef e. birbs (@tef_ebooks) October 1, 2020

• My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
• I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
• Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
• Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
• The battle over dyslexia.
• Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
• Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

• Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
• 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
• The elusive peril of space junk.
• Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
• Star Trek Tarot.
• Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
• Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
• My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
• Leftism and comics.
• I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
• Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
• My statement of teaching philosophy.
• Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday

* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…

* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”

* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).

* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!

* Octavia Butler just made the NY Times Bestseller List for the first time ever — 14 years after her death.

* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.

* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”

* A Message from Future Generations.

* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.

* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”

* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.

* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.

* Which doesn’t count the die-in.

Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette’s English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB

— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020

Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.

— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020

* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.

Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I’m not going to try and hurt them.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 29, 2020

* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.

* We are calling for a Scholar strike #Scholarstrike on September 8-9 2020 to protest ongoing police violence and murders in America.

* Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year.

Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020

* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.

* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.

* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”

* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.

If you’ve ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W

— stefanielaine🌹 (@stefanielaine) September 1, 2020

* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.

Obama is, mostly quietly and behind the scenes, the single most powerful counter-revolutionary force in 21st-century US politics https://t.co/QjAnCDOKCS

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 28, 2020

* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America’s Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.

* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin’s record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.

I think people outside the state just can’t fathom that Wisconsin’s gerrymander is real. Republicans take 60%+ majorities in the legislature no matter how many people vote for them. In 2018 they took 64% of the Assembly on 46% of the vote. https://t.co/FExUcedl4Z

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2020

* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America’s future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and ‘Triggering the Libs,’ Former Classmates Say.

* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. “When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society.” Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven’t killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission.

* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD’s Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.

Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality — including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred — in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) August 28, 2020

not sure anything has quite gotten to me the way the drive to make rittenhouse a right-wing hero of self-defense has. it is, to me, the single most ominous development of the year.

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020

Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) “order.”

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020

Looking at what's gone down in Kenosha these few days—the police shooting, the immediate crackdown, the militia shooting—is just staring off a dizzying edge into the abyss, knowing things are about to get so much worse & hoping like hell there's some way we don't take the plunge.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 26, 2020

* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.

* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after ‘rapid spread’ of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed’s Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here’s What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I’m weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I’ve got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students’ positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don’t Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.

* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We’re Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.

* University of Oregon Will Charge Students for a Full Year of Dorm Housing Even if They Can’t Enter the Classroom.

* Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here’s what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.

* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University’s Debt—And Who’s Paying for It.

* Deeply unappreciated fact: the most “impactful” person in science right now is this Kazakhstani hacker queen. She is the one-woman bridge to the largest repository of scientific knowledge ever collected.

* Biden campaign desperate for digital access to students as college campuses remain closed and students don’t know where they’ll be on Election Day.

* Legionnaire’s Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.

* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.

* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.

* Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.

Liberals hate leftists for the same reason you'd hate someone at a theater who kept yelling "These are all actors, none of this is real." Liberals are trying to enjoy a fictional performance about their side being heroic protagonists, and leftists keep disrupting the illusion.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 27, 2020

* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.

* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we’re not talking about a government shutdown, are we? ‘We shouldn’t have to beg’: Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.

* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but “pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower” actually made me wince in pain.

* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.

* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens’ anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.

* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here’s why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.

* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.

* The Literature of White Liberalism.

* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada’s COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.

* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.

* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.

* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.

* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series’ real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.

* Why Uber’s business model is doomed.

* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season.

* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.

To get a sense for how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 1, 2020

* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).

* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on ‘Black Panther’ Without Chadwick Boseman.

* All roads lead back to All My Children.

* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it’s about time.

* Stan Lee’s American pantheon.

* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.

* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.

* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.

* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you’re feeling positive enough to get through your day.

* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labor Organizing Threats.’

* Understanding Batman.

One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."

— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020

* Understanding Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.

* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).

* Development ceases on Amazon Prime’s CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.

"Money implies poverty." — an adage in The Culture, Iain M. Banks

— Michael (Noble Continuation) (@OmanReagan) April 9, 2020

* Ah dinnae ken this: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots.

I was today years old when I learned that a “buttload” is an actual measue of volume dating back to middle English, equal to two “hogsheads,” or about 126 gallons.

— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) August 20, 2020

* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season to introduce franchise’s first transgender, non-binary characters.

* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive ‘jumping’ earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.

* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!

* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.

* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.

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.

* Hold the Starships — an Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on Mars Settlement, Socialists in Space, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Immortality, and the Purpose of Science Fiction.

* 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.

what if everything being cake when you cut it open has something to do with how some many things in this moment are being pared away and revealed to made of total shit

— inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended (@PatBlanchfield) July 15, 2020

* 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.

I'm all for a new Watchmen comic about Rorschach as long as his mask doesn't have that picture of my parents having sex on it anymore.

— Paranoid Andy Edwards (@eds209) July 15, 2020

* 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.

* Know your risk.

* Today in tech.

* The important questions.

Mutant puppies and military grade hardware: who funds the Paw Patrol?

— Tade Thompson (@tadethompson) July 15, 2020

* The postal service is such an obviously beneficial and necessary public good they have no choice but to destroy it on principle.

thinking about USPS, tax day, that two-year period of complete Democratic control of government we had a while ago, and how many small and easy things they didn't fix on account of none of them being normal people with normal problems

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) July 16, 2020

there's literally no reaching people who think "repealing an obscure 2006 bill that intentionally bankrupted the post office" was too heavy a lift for a party that had merely 57 Senate votes in 2009

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) July 16, 2020

* 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.

* Abolition is not a suburb.

* If you’re sufficiently rich and sufficiently diversified you make your money on the swing, not on the value. Chaos as investment strategy.

* And knives out for Joss Whedon. Just incredible to see his reputation transform like this.

After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!

* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…

* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!

* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”

* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…

* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.

* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.

* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.

* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.

* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.

* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.

* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.

* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.

* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.

* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.

* Read it and weep, my friend.

* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”

it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX

— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020

The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.

Crime went down. Way down.

Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS

— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020

“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo

— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020

 

Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy

— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020

The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020

you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg

— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020

* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.

* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.

* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.

* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.

* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.

* When Will Capitalism End?

* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.

* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.

A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg

— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020

* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.

Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.

For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”

— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020

* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.

* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.

Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020

* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.

* The best COVID-19 response in the world.

* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.

* Žižek vs. the virus.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.

* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.

* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.

"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020

Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.

— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020

What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.

— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020

For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR

— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020

* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.

* What Is College Worth?

* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.

* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.

* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”

* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.

* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.

* Before the End.

* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.

So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?

— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020

Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm

— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020

* All the signs were there.

* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.

* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.

* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.

* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.

* The Prophecies of Q.

* Facebook researched the affect of its own platform on polarization and found that “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and then largely shelved its study, the WSJ reports.

* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.

New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B

— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019

Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020

* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.

* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.

* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.

* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.

* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.

* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!

* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.

* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.

* Rumors of Goonies 2.

* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”

* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.

* Racism and the porn industry.

* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.

* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.

* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.

* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.

* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.

* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.

* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.

* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?

* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’

* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.

* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.

* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.

* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.

* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.

* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.

* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).

*  I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.

* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.

* The Case against Mars.

* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.

* fMRIs (still) don’t work.

* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.

* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”

* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.

* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.

* Civil War ends.

* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.

* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”

* This is how you get Skynet.

* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.

Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else

* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.

* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”

* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.

* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!

* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.

* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.

— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020

Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.

— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020

Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020

* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.

* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.

* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.

* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.

* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.

* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.

* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?

* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.

* Quarantine fatigue is real.

* The COVID-19 Conjuncture.

* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.

* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.

* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.

People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020

Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK

— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020

This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm

— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020

* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.

* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.

* Four months as a private prison guard.

* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.

* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.

* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.

* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.

* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.

* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.

* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.

* Why Zoom Is Terrible.

* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.

* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?

* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.

* Flood and evacuations, including a looming environmental disaster at the Dow Chemical plant in Michigan.

* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.

* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.

* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.

* Charlie Brooker taps out.

* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.

* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.

* Take that, STEM!

* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.

* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.

* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

* How we got to Sesame Street.

* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.

* CBS All-Access gonna try again.

* Coronavirus shutdowns exposed the fragility of the comic book industry. How will those in the Pacific Northwest comics scene survive?

* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.

* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.

* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.

* 36,000 Feet Under the Sea.

* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.

[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America

— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017

* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.

* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?

* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.

* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.

* No one knows what a g looks like.

* This one cuts deep.

* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.

* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread

* society if dads went to therapy

* made a Rube Goldberg machine

* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.

* Well this is just silly.

* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.

Thursday Links!

* 15 scenarios for the fall semester. The COVID Caveat. Why We’re Exhausted By Zoom. Better Late Than Zoom. Here’s a thread of all the statements I’ve seen from colleges about what they’re planning for the pandemic’d fall semester. How College Leaders Are Planning for the Fall. Fullerton goes online. A message from President Daniels regarding fall semester: ‘If They Die, They Die.’ Universities are expecting 230,000 fewer students – that’s serious financial pain. Coronavirus pushes colleges and universities to the brink. New report on adjuncts says many make less than $3,500 per course and live in poverty. More College Students May Need Remedial Help This Fall. Can They Get It Online? Admin 101: Our Shift to Remote Fund Raising. For Would-Be Academics, Now Is the Time to Get Serious About Plan B. If you want my advice. And some rare good news: Vermont State Colleges Chancellor Withdraws Plan To Close Three Campuses.

part of my grand unified theory of why colleges are run so terribly is that their leaders are pathetically desperate to signal to the other members of the multi-multi-millionaire class that they are still in the club https://t.co/NNi7IPwo4Y

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020

If it *were* true that Harvard, an institution with both nearly infinite resources and a nearly infinite ability to generate new resources in an emergency, can’t weather an economic downturn without drastic cuts, that would be a massive scandal of truly epic mismanagement!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020

* The NCAA saved money in case of a canceled March Madness. Then it spent it. This is a wild story that gets at the heart of the NCAA: they built a rainy-day slush fund out of fear of the workers they refuse to pay, then dissolved it out of fear that the slush fund might someday find its way into the hands of the workers anyway…

* The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act recognizes that the nonprofit humanities sector is an essential component of America’s economic and civic life. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has received supplemental funding to provide emergency relief to institutions and organizations working in the humanities that have been affected by the coronavirus.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet.

* After the election, Wisconsin reports largest jump in coronavirus cases in at least two weeks. Medical College of Wisconsin model shows hospitals would fill in a month if all social distancing ended May 26. Always an angle. ‘Open the Economy’ Is the New ‘White Lives Matter.’ When working towards the führer goes wrong. Fortress Wisconsin. Republicans ask Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn extension of ‘safer at home’ order; Court could rule to block Wisconsin’s ‘Safer at Home’ order as early as April 30. Milwaukee Common Council votes to mail absentee ballot applications to city’s registered voters.

* Power Up: President Trump wants to return to ‘normal.’ That will be harder than he thinks, say scientists, doctors and Americans. Ex-FDA chief says U.S. not likely to have broad-based coronavirus testing until September. Barr Threatens Legal Action Against States Over Lockdowns. Singapore Seemed to Have Coronavirus Under Control, Until Cases Doubled.

* Very cool: A doctor says he was removed from his federal post after pressing for rigorous vetting of treatments embraced by Trump. CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating. A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity helped spread the coronavirus. Fox News falls out of love with hydroxychloroquine. Why WHO Failed. The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. We Need a New Social Contract for the Coronavirus. We Are Living in a Failed State.

seem to be hitting another instance of that limit where when you simply report what Republicans are doing people won’t accept it’s true because it’s so outrageous and reprehensible https://t.co/Og0fOiUyXH

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 19, 2020

* How to interpret a model.

* During wartime, both financial and material capital is demolished: infrastructures, factories, bridges, ports, stations, airports, buildings. But once the war is over a period of reconstruction begins, and it is this reconstruction that triggers an economic rebound. However, the current epidemic looks more like a neutrino bomb, which kills humans and leaves buildings, roads and factories intact (if empty). So, when the epidemic is over, there will be nothing to rebuild—and no consequent recovery.

absolutely, also in the short term it is an excuse for not doing anything right now to prevent job losses or support people who've lost their jobs https://t.co/FtEnx9m6ep

— flglmn (@flglmn) April 20, 2020

They are not trying to reopen the economy to save it. They know it can't be saved. They want to reopen the economy to save capitalism, because if this government was forced to distribute resources in a way that ensured our survival, they know we would never go back.

— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 23, 2020

* Poll: 43 percent of Americans have lost jobs or wages due to coronavirus outbreak. Second- and third-wave layoffs coming from COVID-19.

* Americans too scared to go to work risk losing unemployment aid, experts say.

* White House, GOP face heat after hotel and restaurant chains helped run small business program dry. The astroturf begins. Opening up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.

* The media is already pushing austerity so hard I finally think Biden might actually win.

* Coronavirus Is Hammering the News Industry. Here’s How to Save It. Twilight of the Subway. Now there’s a silver lining.

* By A 10-to-1 Margin, Americans Support Orders To Stay At Home. Something Big Is Getting Lost In The Debate Over Stay-At-Home Orders. Social distancing as act of love. And whether that can last.

Social distancing without social (communal, preferably) support is hugely miserable for people and unsustainable. /2

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020

The way social distancing has been done in the US has put the entirety of the burden for managing the epidemic on the people who have the least resources. /5

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020

* Facing the Coronavirus in Queens. Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus.

* 28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis. In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it. A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients. “Human challenge trials,” where healthy volunteers would be exposed to Covid-19, explained. The vaccine realism no one wants.

* Disney may stay closed until 2021.

* And why not: Trump Plans to Suspend Immigration to U.S.

* Let’s see what else is in the news: Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner. After the Flood: Chicago and Climate Change.

* Stay woke, liberals! You have to vote for Joe Biden no matter what Meghan McCain says. By the way, has anyone actually seen the Democrats? Seems like the stuff going on is the sort of thing they might have something to say about…

This is a real ad 100% cannot make this up pic.twitter.com/eBrvJCVXdK

— Wimstom (@KhakiJorts) April 22, 2020

* Trump’s support for right-wing protests just got more ugly and dangerous.

* Don’t put words in my mouth!

* Grandmother Paradox: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler by Nisi Shawl.

* Five Things COVID-19 has taught me about life by Nnedi Okorafor.

* Shaviro reads the Interdependency trilogy.

* The comics industry is in danger. Who can save it?

* Another think piece for my fall Watchmen class, which currently has a waitlist so long I could run a second section: Nothing Ever Ends.

* The Bigamist’s Daughter.

* Whole Foods is quietly tracking its employees with a heat map tool that ranks which stores are most at risk of unionizing.

* Trolley problem.

* And no matter how dark it is, there’s still hope.

Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links

* The 2020 Hugos!

* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).

* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”

* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.

* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.

* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.

Look, let's be real. The ultimate reason the economy "must" "reopen" is so that we everyone can once more be individually blamed for their own unemployment, desperation, etc in this coming depression. It is fundamentally dangerous to our system to have masses of people 1/2

— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020

simultaneously unable to work or make basic ends meet in a way that would suggest blame lies elsewhere than on them (whether in the virus, our leaders' failures, quarantine orders, market chicanery, etc), that is collectively experienced, and that might give them ideas. 2/3

— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020

this pandemic sharpens a divide that already existed, between those of us whose labor is "inessential" but who have the privilege of, basically, hibernating indefinitely, and those whose labor is "essential," but whose lives are treated as disposable

— Eric Weiskott (@ericweiskott) April 5, 2020

Everything we're doing – IE tokenistic "aid" (which just funnels money back to creditors and landlords) – is just the barest minimum not for survival, but to ensure that we can blame people for their own starvation and misery once things are "normal" again. That's it. 3/3

— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020

The wildcat strikes that are happening across the country now are important not just for their immediate goal of saving lives but in the long term they are the only thing we have to face down the monstrosity of austerity that this pandemic will leave it its wake.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) April 10, 2020

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wild billinair he parbly ben the las wyld billinair on Longisland any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint looking to see none agen. https://t.co/Q2xpiRAM1f

— Gregory Hays (@aristofontes) April 3, 2020

2020 is going really well. My timeline is mostly debating:
1. Would you kill a million Americans to save the economy?
2. Is it possible to save the economy by killing a million Americans?

— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) April 16, 2020

Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020

* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.

* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.

* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.

* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.

Hearing on Facebook that Zizek is uploading new chapters to his COVID book like DLC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020

* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.

* Must be nice.

* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.

* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.

* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.

* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.

* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.

Milwaukee resident Jennifer Taff requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago, never got it. She has a father dying from lung disease and then waited hours in line to vote at Washington High School. Photo from Patricia McKnight.

More: https://t.co/i7weo2xdfv pic.twitter.com/ceHb2i8zpC

— JR Radcliffe (@JRRadcliffe) April 7, 2020

The City of Milwaukee is experiencing a surge of cases on the south side, Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik says.

— Mary Spicuzza (@MSpicuzzaMJS) April 17, 2020

* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.

The United States is a failed state: Five theses. pic.twitter.com/VbtrsZajIH

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 6, 2020

By including Kentucky, we are telling Iowa and Dakotas things about themselves in a tone that only Upper Midwesterners can hear. https://t.co/aQvfAdWTSZ

— Maggie Koerth (@maggiekb1) April 16, 2020

* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.

* Vegas after the end of the world.

This is going to be one of the iconic images of the pandemic, from photographer @todseelie:

Homeless Americans sleeping in taped squares in a parking lot, while the Las Vegas strip, full of empty hotel rooms, shimmers behind them. https://t.co/Sy2Qq5rcpK pic.twitter.com/QRZHckPZrt

— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) April 15, 2020

* No running water. No electricity. On Navajo Nation, coronavirus creates worry and confusion as cases surge.

* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.

* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?

EXACTLY https://t.co/tC1Djqb5FV

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020

* Got him. We got him.

* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.

* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.

* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.

* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.

* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.

*  In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.

* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.

Opening up the economy prematurely will kill off every small and marginal business in the country even if you don’t immediately have to go into shutdown again three weeks later (which you would). People are too freaked and won’t spend at their own levels, esp. in wide gatherings.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020

oh so no more restaurants then https://t.co/DOJTeDaway

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020

Money is a social fiction, which you see in the way they can simply summon more out of the aether when they need it. But the amount of debt spending we’re all about to do is going to be hard to honor afterwards when we know perfectly well we could just say it all never happened.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 9, 2020

* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.

* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?

* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.

* Black swans vs gray rhinos.

since the world is filled with rhinos and you can’t catch them all, you need social forms that are generous, resilient, and devoted to harm reduction, elimination, and amelioration, rather than the incredibly brittle and cruel modes of social organization we use now

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020

* The memes are all right.

the coronavirus memes are extremely good pic.twitter.com/3dkZMAeFIk

— love one another (@girlziplocked) April 13, 2020

* Midwest Futures.

* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.

* The cost-of-thriving index.

* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.

* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.

* Another rare but instantly iconic shot of the Muppets being puppeteered. Apparently Sesame Street is filming at their homes.

Another rare but instantly iconic shot of the Muppets being puppeteered. Apparently Sesame Street is filming at their homes. pic.twitter.com/Fj8to2P1Wu

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020

* The case for teaching depressing books.

* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.

* When Reddit saves lives.

* The micro sublime.

* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.

* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.

* Evidence from Field Experiments in Hiring Shows Substantial Additional Racial Discrimination after the Callback.

* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.

* Being Weird Al.

* Release the butthole cut!

* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?

* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.

* why would her name be doogie too

* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.

* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?

I thought I’d predicted a PICARD-style deconstruction of the original jouissance of SAVED BY THE BELL, revealing the characters destroyed by time, but perhaps that one was just for me https://t.co/9a2vSCn7ZT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020

* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.

* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.

* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.

* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.

One way of thinking the Anthropocene is that it is when geological time starts to move more quickly than historical time.

— chica marx (@mckenziewark) April 17, 2020

* At least this Hamilton video was fun.

* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.

* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.

* We did it!

* And even in the time of coronavirus, progress marches on.

CoronaFRI!vus

* Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful. No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing. Without Urgent Action, Coronavirus Could Overwhelm U.S., Estimates Say. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed.

* David Harvey: Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. The Politics of the Pandemic. You and Your Boss Have the Same Interests Right Now. That Is a Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity. Sara Nelson Says People Are Ready for Solidarity. COVID-19 Emergency Tenant Protections. Homeless families occupy vacant homes in LA. Dealing With Coronavirus Requires Bold Action. The Democratic Leadership Won’t Take It.

💯 pic.twitter.com/4XUrxBs6th

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) March 19, 2020

* 9% of Working Americans (14 Million) So Far Have Been Laid Off As Result of Coronavirus; 1 in 4 Workers Have Had Their Hours Reduced; 2% Have Been Fired; 20% Have Postponed a Business Trip; Shock Waves Just Now Beginning to Ripple Through Once-Roaring US Economy. U.S. Jobless Claims Jump to Two-Year High Amid Closures. 2700% increase in unemployment claims in Ohio — midweek. [Calfornia] averages 2,000 unemployment applications a day. Two or three days ago, it received 40,000. On Tuesday, 80,000 applications were filed. JP Morgan is forecasting -14% RGDP growth in Q2. That’s so bad it isn’t even on the historical axis.

History is dialectical but the likelihood that the US will be operating under some version of the USSR’s command economy in a year is just next level

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

The persistent fantasy of a serious crisis that forces even the worst politicians to do the right thing

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 20, 2020

* So, It’s Bad. Free, Widespread Testing Is The Only Way America Goes Back to Normal. This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus. Coronavirus will radically alter the U.S. US sales of guns and ammunition soar amid coronavirus panic buying. The Stimulus Plan That We Need Now.

* Curb Your Enthusiasm: “The Virus.”

* I’m reminded somehow of the way you end a SimCity game by unleashing every disaster on your city as once. The Midwest Is Preparing To Get Hit With Major Floods During The Coronavirus Outbreak. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Locust crisis poses a danger to millions, forecasters warn. Earthquake in Utah. A Huge Chunk of Yellowstone Is Pulsing.

* Weeks Before Virus Panic, Intelligence Chairman Privately Raised Alarm, Sold Stocks. Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness.

weren’t you in the same meeting https://t.co/Zf4xBfAeYO

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet. Amazon Workers Shut Down Warehouse After Employee Is Infected With Coronavirus. The tech execs who don’t agree with ‘soul-stealing’ coronavirus safety measures.

This really hammers home the way in which the Uber model (like that of all “gig economy” employers) is to extract money from workers while making those workers bear all of the risk. https://t.co/2jCKfrfdNn

— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) March 19, 2020

Bellamy imagined a universal monopoly ushering in more or less communism; our version is giving control of the planet to a guy who thinks rich people need to move to outer space to escape environmental collapse https://t.co/36hkp1Ex9W

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020

* Mitt Romney’s $1,000 Isn’t Our Universal Basic Income. Americans may see first round of checks from US government by April 6. I really should have known.

The UK announced it will guarantee everyone’s wages until this thing is over, and Congress is still haggling over like, whats the income cutoff to make someone eligible for the one-time $1200 check

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) March 20, 2020

Not processing yet that we got through this week without Congress finalizing massive action on behalf of tens of millions of unemployed and desperate Americans, whose bills are piling up as we speak

— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 20, 2020

As the proposed amount of the checks vary wildly we get a fun natural experiment in how much has to be on the table before a liberal doesn’t start their analysis with “of course *I* don’t need the money.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020

* Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded. In Coronavirus Testing Ramp-Up, U.S. Called Private Sector in Late. How the CDC Botched Basic Science in Its Attempt to Make a Coronavirus Test. Don’t Let Trump Off the Hook.

* I had a lot of question about this, so perhaps it will be useful to you too: No, The World Health Organization Is Not Recommending Against Ibuprofen For Coronavirus Symptoms.

* The world’s fastest supercomputer identified chemicals that could stop coronavirus from spreading, a crucial step toward a treatment. Japanese flu drug ‘clearly effective’ in treating coronavirus, says China. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID‐19: results of an open‐label non‐randomized clinical trial.

* “I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…”: The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers. This is certainly a problem but I became attuned to the reality of coronavirus precisely through these sorts of non-experts while Trump and the CDC were still lying to everyone. I haven’t seen anything better for learning true information about this crisis than Reddit’s upvote/downvote system.

* Today in the trolley problem. Today in the simulation argument. Today in career goals. Today in Star Trek Studies. Today in Watchmen fan fiction. Weird time.

* Rikers Island inmate has contracted coronavirus: officials. How coronavirus could explode at Riker’s Island. Reducing prison population protects us all from coronavirus.

* You Need Me to Have a Mask. ‘It Feels Like a War Zone’: Doctors and Nurses Plead for Masks on Social Media. A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling. Simple math offers alarming answers.

* Rural America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic.

* This picture tells a story about America.

* As Cities Around the World Go on Lockdown, Victims of Domestic Violence Look for a Way Out.

* The COVID-19 Crisis and International Students. Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases. A Brief Letter to an Institution that Believes Extensions are the Accommodations We Need Right Now.

* ‘Panic-gogy’: Teaching Online Classes During The Coronavirus Pandemic. As Schools Look for Guidance, Educators Are Left Asking, ‘What?’ New Coronavirus Package Could Unravel Protections For Students With Disabilities. Is online school illegal? With schools closing from coronavirus, special education concerns give districts pause.

* Waaaaaay ahead of you.

All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is, like, *really* unhappy now, shit.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* GameStop claims it is ‘essential retail’ to remain open amid coronavirus shutdowns. It didn’t work.

* Minnesota and Vermont Just Classified Grocery Clerks as Emergency Workers.

* There’s plenty of food.

* The Quiet Emptiness of a World under Coronavirus.

* The desire for public sex is, of course, nothing new. In his book Tell Me What You Want, sex researcher and Kinsey Institute fellow Justin Lehmiller found it was one of the seven most common fantasies, but the way people are having it in a coronavirus-ridden world definitely is. Now, instead of treating it as nothing more than a novel thrill to “spice things up,” some people are using it as an act of resistance against the virus-induced lockdowns that have squashed so many of the liberties we hold dear. Sex etiquette during the coronavirus.

* Kim Stanley Robinson releases a chapter from his latest novel, though weirdly it’s listed as “news.”

* I spent four months pretending to live on Mars. Here’s what I learned about staying sane and passing time.

* I’m beginning to think you just can’t trust billionaires: When he joined the race last year, the billionaire said he would employ his campaign staff through the November election, even if he weren’t the nominee. But Bloomberg dropped out after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, and he has since fired staffers in multiple waves. His campaign had announced earlier in March that it would launch an independent expenditure group to take on Trump that would employ former campaign staffers in swing states.

* The Sanders worldview wins even as Bernie loses.

we're in a national pandemic with a looming Depression and I believe this is the last we saw of the leading Democratic candidate, over 60 hours agopic.twitter.com/fHoD8UB5TS

— jack allison (@jackallisonLOL) March 20, 2020

Biden beating Bernie and then immediately giving up is an even worse scenario than I expected

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* You know it’s bad when politicians are leaving elected office to join the priesthood.

* A false accusation nightmare in the Times.

* Moffat leaving Doctor Who seemed like a good exit ramp for me, so I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — but wow, this latest retcon looks like a mess, as well as a pretty clear “find some way to tie this off and wrap it up” directive from the BBC.

* Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto.

* Octavia Butler gave us a few rules for predicting the future.

* An “Extinction Event” for the Comic Shop or “Too Stupid to Quit, Too Dumb to Die”?

* The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Revisited.

* Star Wars in ruins: The Most Problematic ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ Plot Twist Ruined Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy. Disney has embarrassed itself issuing Episode 9 retcons but it really ought to explain why it’s being so elliptical about this one issue for no apparent reason.

* And Star Wars resurgent: The Mandalorian Casts Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano.

* Because you demanded it: A new Disney Princess historical fiction series finds Belle in the French Revolution.

* And they were nearly almost done, too! I swear!

* Hey, it’s me, the first sign of civilization in a culture.

* Coming soon: The Collapsing Empire, Book 3. A Cixin Liu story collection. And some free coronavirus reading: Short Changes, a story collection by Adrian Tchaikovsky.