Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Kindred

Thanksgiving Links!

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* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday

* I’m giving the last “Tolkien Tuesdays” talk at the Haggerty on next Tuesday, November 28, on Tolkien and pop culture.

* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.

* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.

* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.

* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.

* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.

* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.

* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.

* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.

* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.

* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…

* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.

* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.

* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.

* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.

* ‘A World Cup Built on Modern Slavery’: Stadium Workers Blow the Whistle on Qatar’s ‘Coverup’ of Migrant Deaths and Suffering.

* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

* Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

* ‘I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to be there’: Milwaukee student’s poetry takes her to the White House.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.

* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.

* what is the crime for which the turkey was sentenced to death & the sentence nullified by the US President? & what guarantee do we have that the turkey won’t be executed anyway, as soon as the cameras are gone.

* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.

* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

* Yes, but: the comic.

* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 22, 2022 at 11:35 am

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Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

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I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 24, 2022 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

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Written by gerrycanavan

August 10, 2021 at 7:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet

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Friday Links!

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Thursday Links!

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* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

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.

* 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…

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.

Weekend Links!

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* Extrapolation 58.1 is out! With articles on Octavia Butler, Aldous Huxley, Neal Stephenson, and Celu Ambsterstone. I’ll give a special endorsement to  Donawerth and Scally’s Butler article, which is not only the first article to cite my book (that I know of) but also a truly great study tracing Butler’s footsteps research Kindred in Maryland. Check it out!

* CFP: Utopia, Now!

* Jeff VanderMeer in conversation with Cory Doctorow.

* William Gibson after Trump.

The result is “Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity.

Mr. Gibson never set out to write a sequel, but the plots of “Agency” and “The Peripheral” converged unexpectedly last fall. He had spent about a year writing “Agency” when the 2016 election rendered the fictional world he had created obsolete. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. But when he tried tinkering with the draft, he realized that the world had changed too drastically for him to plausibly salvage the story. “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing,” he said.

The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in.

Wes Anderson’s latest, Isle Of Dogs, gets a release date and poster. Warm up your power rankings now!

* I’m Wes Anderson, and I’m Directing This FBI Investigation into Russia and the Trump Campaign.

* If the police do it, it isn’t murder: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail.

* Purdue Has Bought Kaplan — for $1. The weird fall of Burlington College. Rand Paul Stealing My Bit. When 51 Years Experience Isn’t Good Enough.

* CBS is apparently fully committed to ruining Star Trek: Discovery in every possible way.

* More on the Cal audit that reveals massive administrative blight.

* Tracking White Collar Crime Zones.

* The March for Science wasn’t.

* Charter schools as corporate perk.

* What’s the matter with Nintendo?

* Apple’s Promise to End Rare Earth Mineral Mining Is ‘100 Percent Unattainable Today.’ Haters! Apple can do anything.

25 percent of young Britons have lied about reading Lord Of The Rings, poll reveals. I want to know how many have said they didn’t read it when they did!

Corbynism or barbarism. Inside Corbyn’s Office.

We May Have Uncovered the First Ever Evidence of the Multiverse.

* Trump Wants to Send a Man to Mars During His Presidency. The next launch window isn’t until the 2030s, so this is a worrying declaration indeed. Here’s the plan.

Record-breaking climate events all over the world are being shaped by global warming, scientists find. What will Earth look like when all the ice melts?

* I Got Hacked So You Don’t Have To.

Artist attaches Trump’s quotes about women to sexist 1950s ads and they fit too well. Into the shadows in Trump’s America. A GOP Lawmaker Has Been Revealed As The Creator Of Reddit’s Anti-Woman ‘Red Pill’ Forum. How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump. Killing Obamacare, Again (with an asterisk). In the richest country that has ever existed. We all gonna die. And the worst news yet: US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports.

We Asked ICE About the Prank Calls to Their Anti-Immigrant Hotline and They Kind of Lost Their Shit. 100 Days of Democratic Rage. Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again. Trump supporters are the most overrated force in American politics. The Anatomy of Liberal Melancholy. Could Your Teen’s Meme Be a Red? Texas Is The Future.

To clarify: it is perfectly possible that some collusion between Trump’s agents and Russian hackers did indeed occur. But at this point, the empirical question of whether or not it happened is secondary to the deeper psychological need for media pundits, policy wonks, and the professional-managerial strata to maintain their sense of self when the objective historical conditions in which they flourished are being actively dissolved. For liberals, the continued libidinal investment in the drama of the as-yet invisible Trump-Russia scandal actively blocks any realization that the neoliberal order they are trying to restore is already dead on its feet, and that Trump is the uniquely bizarre American expression of a visible worldwide trend: the virulent, deepening nationalist backlash against a financially-integrated global economy based on the relatively free movement of commodities and people. His ascent is a death knell for an entire era and the basic assumptions about economic and political life that shape the worldview of contemporary liberals.

* Organize. Syllabus prep. The Tenure-Track Professor. Should I Go to Grad School? Ikigai. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?

* Against buckraking. But what does Obama’s willingness to take the money in the first place say about progressive centrism, if we stipulate (as I think MY would likely agree) that Obama is probably as good as progressive centrists are likely to get? The left neoliberal hit against standard liberal-to-left politics in the 1980s was that it fostered sleazy interest groups and tacit or not-so-tacit mutual backscratching between these interest groups and politicians. If the very best alternative that left neoliberalism has to offer is another, and arguably worse version of this (Wall Street firms, unlike unions, don’t even have the need to pretend to have the interests of ordinary people at heart), then its raison d’etre is pretty well exploded.

* Disney will just take all your money, thanks.

* How Marvel Killed Marvel.

* Building blocks of our weird future: artificial wombs.

* Warner Brothers Might Have to Pay $900 Million If It Can’t Prove Ghosts Are Real.

* The AI Cargo Cult.

* More bad press for United. It’s like they’re trying to go bankrupt.

* “Twitter” is an oversimplification. There are many twitters, which is also part of the problem: my twitter and yours are different, but they can come into contact with each other and overlap, and do. We can each think the other person is a holographic projection into our living room, and the rooms are similar enough that we can overlook the ways they are different (and then blame the other person for coming into our house and acting like an asshole). But this also means that talking about what “twitter” is or isn’t, or does, or doesn’t, is a similar exercise in polemic misunderstanding. If the underlying structure of the program is a constant, the conversational norms and practical methods we bring to it will vary, radically and dramatically. Some of the problem is the latter thing: people not only use twitter differently, but they sometimes regard other people’s use of it as illegitimate or wrong. Policing other people on twitter can become particularly heated and vicious, if a police from one jurisdiction comes into another, without knowing it, and attempts to apply one set of laws to someone who thinks they’re operating in another. It rarely ends well. And yet if we keep pretending that there is one twitter (ours), we’ll keep crashing into each other and insisting that it’s the other car that came into my lane. Twitter road rage.

* Great Artists at 8.

* Oh, I see the problem: Americans don’t read.

* And I know things seem dark, darker than they’ve ever been, but Illinois fixed it. Kudos.

Written by gerrycanavan

April 28, 2017 at 2:26 pm

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Weekend Links!

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tumblr_ol5we0t6ty1romv9co1_500* Are you at AWP? Or in DC generally? Jaimee is! She’ll be doing a book signing at the Waywiser Table at 12:30 Saturday and then reading at the Waywiser reading at 7:30 PM at the Den.

* I’ll be giving a short workshop on Octavia Butler and Kindred at the Stanford Humanities Center next Thursday, if that’s convenient to you!

This is so outrageous. 21 years in the US, arrived at 14, two US citizen children, arrested at a scheduled check-in with ICE. You could hardly find more compelling proof that this is entirely and exclusively about cruelty.

* “Pentagon journal explores what could happen if a president called for Muslim internment camps.” Gee, I wonder.

Meanwhile, in another classic authoritarian maneuver, the outsized ego at the heart of the Trumpist seizure of power has surrounded himself with an obliging retinue of enablers and quisling yes-men. Trump likes to divide people between “haters and losers”—a cheap shot that is actually a fairly useful way to categorize his own team. It’s Already Happened Here. How to Stop an Autocracy. Profiles in Courage: Rand Paul, Civil Libertarian.

* Every day. Something crazy happens every day.

* The history of this era is going to be so, so unbelievable.

* Neither Nordstrom nor Ivanka but International Socialism.

* Of course…

* It’s getting to the point where you can’t even call for the wanton slaughter of students without some PC SJW raising a stink about it.

tumblr_ol51udr3fd1romv9co1_500How Political Fear Works. Beware of Self-Censorship. Who Benefits From Trump’s Chaos? What’s in it For The Collaborators? There Are No Good Reasons Not To Fight.

* Obama’s Lost Army: When Obama Killed OFA.

* I liked this: The Meitheal Manifesto: Thirteen Agreements to Save the World.

* Some rare good news on the climate.

* Darkest thing I’ve ever seen, first for one the one reason and then for the other.

* The arc of history is long, but Mac malware is slowly catching up to its Windows rivals.

Solitary Confinement Is a Great American Shame.

* Remembering Richard Rorty on Trump (and the reformist left) (again).

* No one is reading those reference letters. “Truly, this is the single easiest fix in academic culture.”

* Science education in the time of Trump.

2m8vd28

* You can’t argue with facts, little brother.

* Bees aren’t endangered anymore! Surprisingly easy fix actually.

Everything is hot now and getting hotter. Everything seems off or wrong and it is hard to get your bearings because so few of the old landmarks remain. It is hard to believe that some things ever happened, that certain places ever existed. Sometimes I am convinced my memory is wrong or fooling me. The idea that there might be a United States. The idea that this vast and unruly countryside, these ruined cities, these endless refugee camps, might have once been something else. If no one invades us now and only some countries send food and aid, it is only because they too are under stress. Or because we are so fucked up and so many of us have so many weapons. Somewhere in the lost places, there are still nukes, too. Jeff VanderMeer’s “Trump Land.”

* SF Cities Beyond Blade Runner.

* Graverobbing the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

* Source map from the first great comic book crossover.

* TGIF!

* Oh, this was so brutal to read. There but for the grace of God go I at least for now.

Here are my vitals: I have more than $200,000 in student loans and $46,000 in credit card debt—all accumulated during my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., and then search for a tenure-track job. My annual salary translates to a little more than $3,000 in monthly take-home pay. I pay $800 a month in rent, $1,100 in credit card bills (paying only the monthly minimums), $350 in student loans, and have $285 a month car payment. I also pay the usual insurances, utilities, groceries, gas, et al. I don’t have cable. Or a kitchen table. Or blinds on any of my windows. I’ve cancelled all magazine and newspaper subscriptions—an actual dilemma for a journalism professor. For my first year in Bangor I didn’t even have a bed. Instead I slept on a Target air mattress until it lost its breath; then I moved to the couch (which I had purchased on credit), until my back finally demanded I buy a bed (credit, again).

* And of course you had me at A New Deep Space Nine Documentary Reveals What Would Have Happened in Season Eight. Here’s another good writeup.

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New Year’s Links!

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* A nice endorsement of Octavia E. Butler from Steve Shaviro. Some bonus Shaviro content: his favorite SF of 2016. I think Death’s End was the best SF I read this year too, though I really liked New York 2140 a lot too (technically that’s 2017, I suppose). I’d also single out Invisible Planets and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, both of which had some really good short stories. In comics, I think The Vision was the best new thing I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot I bought this year and didn’t have time to look at yet, though, so maybe check back with me in 2019 and I can tell you what was the best thing from 2016.

* Kindred: The Graphic Novel.

* Introducing the David Foster Wallace Society, including a CFP for the inaugural issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.

Call for Papers: The Poverty of Academia.

* Oh, fuck this terrible year.

30 essential tips for succeeding in graduate school.

* The University in the Time of Trump.

Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme.

* Who’s Afraid of the Student Debt Crisis?

Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right. Some Michigan and Denver faculty members have received similar emails but from different source.

* The age of humanism is ending.

The New Year and the Bend of the Arc.

* The Front of the Classroom.

Marina Abramović and Kim Stanley Robinson perform “The Hard Problem.”

Osvaldo Oyola reads Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.

* Leia Organa Solo: A Critical Obituary.

* Trump’s Arrival.

* Let them drink blood.

* BREAKING: There Is No Such Thing as “White Genocide.” Academic Freedom, Again. Buffalo skulls.

* I don’t think Children of Men was ever actually “overlooked” — and I’m shocked it was considered a flop at a time — but it certainly looks prescient now.

From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck. Remembering Caravan of Courage, the Ewok Adventure Star Wars Would Rather You’d Forget. Anti-fascism vs. nostalgia: Rogue One. How to See Star Wars For What It Really Is. And a new headcanon regarding the Empire and its chronic design problems.

Good News! Humans No Longer Caused Climate Change, According to the State of Wisconsin.

* How did A&E let this happen?

* On fighting like Republicans, or, the end of America.

* Scenes from the class struggle in Berkeley. And in Chillicothe, Ohio.

The seduction of technocratic government—that a best answer will overcome division, whether sown in the nature of man or ineluctable in capitalist society—slides into the seduction in the campaign that algorithms will render rote the task of human persuasion, that canvassers are just cogs for a plan built by machine. And so the error to treat data as holy writ, when it’s both easier and harder than that. Data are fragile; algorithms, especially when they aggregate preferences, fall apart. Always, always, power lurks. The technocrats have to believe in mass politics, believe for real that ordinary people, when they organize, can change their own destinies. Whether that happens depends on the party that gets built, and the forces behind it.

Four Cabinet nominations that could blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump: New Strategies, New Alliances. Why Donald Trump Might Not Be All That Good for Art. How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler. This all certainly seems on the up-and-up. And today in teaching the controversy: Nuclear diplomacy via Twitter is a bad idea.

* Democrats: Time to Win! Why the Democrats’ 2017 comeback dream is like nothing we’ve seen before.

The Russia Conundrum: How Can Democrats Avoid Getting Entangled in a Losing Issue?

House Republicans will ring in the new year with a plan to permanently cripple government.

Characters Are Not A Coloring Book Or, Why the Black Hermione is a Poor Apology for the Ingrained Racism of Harry Potter.

The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.

* Against jobs.

* Against Batman.

The UBI already exists for the 1%.

* The arc of history is long, but Google Search will not longer return Holocaust-denying websites at the top of page one.

* Same joke but about not being allowed to ban plastic bags in Michigan anymore.

The Champions of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started.

* “It was a pleasure to cull.”

* Geoengineering could ruin astronomy.

* Haiti and the Age of Revolution.

* A Utopia for the Deaf in Martha’s Vineyard.

Why the ‘Ghost Ship’ Was Invisible in Oakland, Until 36 Died.

Nine charts that show how white women are drinking themselves to death.

* The American bison is the new U.S. national mammal, but its slaughter was once seen as a way to starve Native Americans into submission.

* It wasn’t just your imagination: more famous people did die in 2016.

* How long can Twitter go on like this?

* The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think it Is. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn.

* Special ed and the war on education.

My Little Free Library war: How our suburban front-yard lending box made me hate books and fear my neighbors.

* Becoming Ugly.

* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.

Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.

* And the scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

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Written by gerrycanavan

January 3, 2017 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Octavia E. Butler Archives – Resources

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A sporadically updated list of materials I’ve either written or used or enjoyed on the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington Library, hopefully useful for other researchers:

* Octavia E. Butler Collection Finding Aid (500+ pages!);

* my general guide:  “The Octavia E. Butler Papers.” (Eaton Journal of Science Fiction);

* The Huntington’s landing page on Butler, including many images of manuscript documents;

Tracing Octavia Butler’s Footsteps: An Interview with Dr. Ayana A. H. Jamieson (a tremendous read!);

Inside The Octavia Butler Archives With L.A. Writer Lynell George; Butler’s notes from writing Kindred; Celebrating Octavia Butler at the Huntington; So Be It! See To It!; #VisitOctaviaButler tag on the Huntington’s Tumblr; “Archives” category at the OEB Legacy Network; Radio Imagination;

* Audio from the June 2017 Octavia E. Butler: Convergences of an Expanding Field conference at the Huntington (as well as a write-up from the organizers, a description of the associated exhibition, and a Storify of tweets from the event);

* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith;

* Pasadena on Her Mind: Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Her Hometown;

* me on Parable of the Trickster“’There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables.” (LARB);

* me (briefly) on the Fledgling sequel(s): Archives Reveal What Octavia Butler’s Next Books Would Have Been Like. (io9);

* me on Reagan in Dawn, Talents, and Paraclete“Making America Great Again with Octavia Butler.” (University of Illinois Press blog);

* and of course the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle: Octavia E. Butler (Modern Masters of Science Fiction, University of Illinois Press);

* and a kind of “deleted scene” from my book in a recent issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.”

octavia-butler

Monday Night Links!

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* I had two short pieces come out this weekend: a review essay on Star Trek: Beyond at LARB and a flash review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child right here at WordPress.

* CFP: Vector Special Issue: Science Fiction and Music. The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.

* Point: Earwolf has a new Hamilton podcast, seemingly along the lines of The Incomparable’s but with higher profile guests. Counterpoint: You Should Be Terrified That People Who Enjoy “Hamilton” Run Our Country.

To Learn About ‘Hamilton’ Ticket Bots, We Wrote Our Own Bot.

* “So Below”: A Comic about Understanding Land.

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* Peak Thinkpiece? “Centuries ago, explorers like Columbus and Vasco da Gama played a real-life version of Pokémon Go.” When colonialism is a game. Pokémon Go: Who owns the virtual space around your home? Werner Herzog: Would You Die for the Pokémons? Would You Kill?

A new genre of leftist literature arose between the wars, urging the young to build a brave new world. In the first of two articles, a forgotten dream is remembered. Here’s part two.

* The Huntington has put up some of Butler’s notes on writing Kindred.

Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction.

The modern research university has unfortunately become increasingly susceptible to value monism, the belief that there is only one right way to advance, only one correct form of knowledge.

* Bouncy houses OF DEATH.

* The Cosby Next Time: Former Fox News Booker Says She Was Sexually Harassed and ‘Psychologically Tortured’ by Roger Ailes for More Than 20 Years.

* Crisis Theory: The Game!

* Underearners Anonymous.

* #unschooling

* Teasing Arrested Development season five, and the long-rumored recut of season four, at TCA.

* The good news is, we’re all going to live. Here’s the bad news.

6 Human Activities That Pose The Biggest Threat To The World’s Drinking Water. America Has Never Seen a Hot Weather Outlook Like This. And an upcoming conference at Marquette: Public Policy and American Drinking Water.

Early Animals Could’ve Caused Earth’s First Mass Extinction Simply By Existing.

How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure.

What Are Young Non-Working Men Doing?

* What Happened to Wikileaks?

Is Rolling Stone about to get throttled in court over UVA rape report?

* How the other fifth lives.

Ableism, Mass Murder, and Silence.

* Race and dermatology. Space and cardiology.

The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood.

Zombie bacteria that awaken from old corpses might sound like the stuff of an “X-Files” episode. The premise is far from a complete fiction, however.

* Metaphors too on the nose: rise of the corpse flowers.

* Elsewhere on the zombie beat: The Walking Dead Comic Nearly Ended a Lot Sooner Than Anyone Expected. That’s sort of amazing, honestly.

Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children.

J.K. Rowling Says Harry Potter is Done After Cursed Child.

The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices.

* Trans* identity will be reclassified by the WHO.

* Being Dazzler.

* Black Art Matters: A Roundtable on the Black Radical Imagination.

* News you can use: How to land a passenger jet without any flight controls.

* Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. How Prisons Overtook Schools as the Foremost American Institutions. Why Preschool Teachers Struggle To Make Ends Meet.

* This Rick and Morty clip reading from an actual trial transcript shows what how weirdly perfect the two voices work as a comedic duo, independently of any narrative context.

* I say the teach the controversy.

* How to do sex research.

* The Syllabus as a Contract: How do you deal with clever students who find loopholes you didn’t intend?

College learning takes 2.76 hours/day.

I grew up thinking journalism was just for rich white people. I was mostly right.

* Ghostbusters and liberal feminism. The Spiritualist Origins of Ghostbusters.

* This time the nostalgia industry is trained on my heart like a laser.

* Self-identified Jedi and political atheism, yes really.

* The end of the bulldog.

* Austerity nostalgia.

More Than 50 Animals Starve to Death in Venezuela’s Zoos as the Nation Endures Devastating Food Shortages.

* Automation and the end of liberal democracy.

* They told me capital was a vampire, and man, they nailed it.

As an artist, what can I consider if I want to de-objectify and add power to female characters?

* Politics roundup! State roll calls: What RNC and DNC delegates want you to know. Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go. Trump’s Likeliest Path to Victory May Be an Electoral College Tie. Bounce! Disability Rights at the DNC. Seven Minutes. The GOP’s Dilemma: How Low Can He Go? Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty? All the same, a pretty incredible chart. From the archives: Norman Mailer Goes to the RNC. How And Why Trump Will Try to Ditch the Debates. Donald Trump as a One Man Constitutional Crisis. An Anti-Trump Electoral Strategy That Isn’t Pro-Clinton. Revenge of the Ghostwriters. A Historic Dud.  Obscene Media Spectacle. American Horror Story. Is Donald Trump OK? “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We are the 5%. And we’re still allowed to vote.

* And the kids are all right: Trump, Clinton more disliked by millennials than Voldemort.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 1, 2016 at 3:35 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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