Friday Links!

* Why the Fires in the Amazon Are So Bad. The Fires in the Amazon Were Set on Purpose. Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest. Thank goodness someone lost their job over this.

climate-change induced extinction will not resemble your vague imaginary of a rapture-like mass death, it will look like an acceleration of the extractive processes of capital and world war, breaking biogeochemical cycles, and cascading ecosystem failures.

— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019

the world that remains will not be dead as some claim, but it will be severely diminished, and permanently scarred by the damage of an accelerating capitalist industrial civilization exploding into the biosphere. it is by definition unimaginable.

— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019

* But wait! There’s an easy solution to this! Can Mars Be Made Habitable in Our Lifetime?

* Elsewhere in the that’ll-solve-it bin: What if We All Ate a Bit Less Meat?

* 2 Scholars Will Leave MIT’s Media Lab Over Its Director’s Financial Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

* Want to Be an English Professor? It Gets Harder Every Year.

* Mesa College English Professor Showed QAnon Video in Class, Students Say.

* Justice corner! The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks. ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on Orange Is The New Black. Customers Handed Over Their DNA. The Company Let the FBI Take a Look. Precrime didn’t even work in the movie!

* What’s going on with Milwaukee’s population?

* ‘Forever chemicals’ detected at low levels in Milwaukee tap water for the first time.

* Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.

* The Ultimate List of What Star Trek You Should Watch Before Picard.

* Hasbro’s new Monopoly for Millennials game is an insulting experience.

Hot take:
The crap-AI essay grading system for the SAT is good actually

because it judges students on the thing that will most impact their lives,

which is being able to convincingly lie to poorly-designed AI.

— Actual Doctor Galaxykate (@GalaxyKate) August 22, 2019

* Tenured law professors behaving badly.

* The arc of history is long, but Major U.S. Phone Companies Agree to Plan to Combat Endless Robocalls.

* A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games.

* And MIT scientists prove you’re just lazy.