Posts Tagged ‘Lean In’
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Jul 24, 2019; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; A cat disrupts play in the second half between Tigres UANL and the Real Salt Lake during their Leagues Cup game at Rio Tinto Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – 13095176
Sunday Morning Links!
* Somehow this one dropped out of the link post yesterday, but you know it hits all my buttons: Senate Parliamentarian Challenges Key Provisions of Health Bill.
* itshappening.gif. Democrats should be prepared to litigate pardons on every level, in advance. This is good too: Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes. We’re on the Brink of an Authoritarian Crisis. The Crisis Is Upon Us.
* Five poll numbers that should make Democrats uneasy. The fire next time. Signs of sanity from Chuck Schumer of all people, who’s been saying such things lately. 6 Months in, Is Trump’s America Living Up to Liberals’ Worst Fears? If Clinton Had Won.
* Connecticut mother facing deportation seeks sanctuary in local church.
* My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer.
* The Millennials Are the American Earthquake.
* The year is 2525. All life on Earth is extinct. Jared Kushner has just submitted a final corrected SF-86.
* Presenting Anthony Scaramucci’s deleted tweets. Inside Hunt & Fish, where beauties trawl for sugar daddies. One last time. And of course.
* Why does DC Comics hate Superman? It’s bizarre.
* Game of Thrones’s Medieval Crap.
* Rhapsody for the Anthropocene.
* The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel. Against Academic Conferences. I’m a long-married introvert who doesn’t drink, so if they outlawed conferences I’d probably come out pretty far ahead of the game — but I will say that #notallconferences are like what Matthew describes here: when I give a talk at the specialist conferences I usually go to there’s usually at least 20-30 people in the audience at each panel. (Maybe not at the early morning slot, but…) If panels are being that poorly attended as a rule, it’s likely a problem with the organization of the conference itself. I know my career has benefited a lot from finding out early which conferences were the right ones for me to be attending, and all of the opportunities that have made my career what it is came out of them. So it’s tough for me to say they’re not worth doing.
* I Studied the Humanities, and Now…
* Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay?
* Mapped: the United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.
* Cool world history visualization project at chronas.org.
* Adam Roberts previews what everyone says is the best European SF no one in America has ever heard of, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
* Die old and leave an incredible story.
* From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
* 29 minutes from New York to DC is a thing that is never going to happen.
* Chipotle Suffers Another Setback As Rats Fall From Restaurant Ceiling. Still, when you’re in the mood, Chipotle can really hit the spot.
* 7 Black Alt-History Projects That Would Be Better Than Confederate.
* 21 Today: The Rise of Speculative Fiction in Africa, year by year.
* Comic-Con seemed fun this year: Star Trek! Westworld! Stranger Things! Thor! Infinity War! Ready Player One! Ted Chiang! Flashpoint? Even Justice League looks reasonably competent. This seems… important for the sequel? And the dream of the 90s is alive in Captain Marvel.
* Lean in.
Thursday Links!
* I have a short piece up at the Cambridge UP blog: “We’re Sorry, the Final Frontier is Closed.” It talks a bit about the recent revival of space frontier and space opera fantasy in big-budget films like Jupiter Ascending, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Interstellar…
* Scientists determine the nation’s safest places to ride out a zombie apocalypse.
* Woodland ‘fairy door’ tradition ‘out of control.’
Now the trustees of Wayford Woods have announced ‘fairy control’ methods which will curb the “profusion of elfin construction”.
Trustee Steven Acreman said the trend was “in danger of getting out of control” but stressed he was not “anti-fairies”.
“It’s a very complex situation and nobody’s admitting that they’re evicting the fairies,” he said.
* “These beliefs persisted into recent times,” says Butler. “For example, in 1895 Michael Cleary convinced his family and community that his wife, Bridget, was a changeling. This was confirmed by a traditional fairy doctor, who attempted a herbal cure. When that didn’t work, they threatened her with fire, doused, and finally burned her to death.” Well, that’s certainly less charming.
* So by all means, criticize teachers when it is warranted. But resist education reformers at all costs, particularly when they rationalize their reforms as a way to address the problems of the teaching force. Education reformers, no matter their intentions, are the enemies of a unionized teaching force. They are the enemies of public education.
* Sweet Briar’s Sudden Closure Plans Leave Students and Employees Scrambling.
“The faculty and staff,” Mr. Brown said, “are feeling traumatized by this—not just by the loss of the institution, but by the way it has been handled. They seem to have no answers about anything, and that is what feels so deeply troubling.”
I hadn’t even thought about how impossible it will be for Sweet Briar faculty to sell their homes. What a nightmare.
* Who Gets the Endowment? I really hope higher ed media watches the dispersal of Sweet Briar’s endowment and property very closely.
Indeed, at the heart of the standard capitalist narrative is magic, as if the will to realize the abstract ideal of a cornucopia for all will itself — through fervent wishing and belief that can only be called religious — bring about the imagined state. It is the “invisible hand” idea from Adam Smith — the conviction that there really is a hidden force that given free rein sets everything aright. It is the God meme in capitalism and its writings, Smith’s among them, that is to capitalism what the Torah is to Judaism, the Gospels to Christianity, and the Koran to Islam: holy texts whose authenticity and reality must not be challenged or questioned unless as an adolescent moment of doubt, eventually subsumed by the re-embrace of total belief.
* I’ve always wanted a Trek anthology series. And with the ever-lowering cost of CGI effects it could be finally be done…
* In the short term, the contract faculty who teach the majority of courses at York University are striking for higher wages. In the long run, contract teaching needs to be abolished.
* The Unintended Consequences of Borrowing Business Tools to Run a University.
In some cases, regulation, not deliberative choice, has led campus leaders to rely on business advice. For example, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights II, signed into law in 1996, requires many of us to hire compensation consultants to ensure that “disqualified persons”—presidents, provosts, vice presidents for finance and administration, etc.—have not received an “excessive benefit” such as inappropriate compensation.In all situations that I have observed, this process has had unintended consequences. Using sophisticated tools developed for industry, the consultants have demonstrated that many higher-education leaders are undercompensated.
GASP! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED! I wonder if a “compensation consultant” has ever, in history, determined that a CEO was receiving “excessive benefit.”
* Raped on Campus? Don’t Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing. I’d see the story about Oregon’s admin raiding the campus health center for ammo to use against its own students, but I’d never seen the outrageous legal justification for it before now.
If you are a student and seek counseling at your college’s counseling center, your medical records are most likely not protected by the typical medical-privacy laws, otherwise known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Instead, they fall under the aegis of Ferpa, just as Oregon said. And compared with Hipaa, Ferpa is about as protective as cheesecloth.
* This Is What It’s Like To Go To Court In Ferguson, Missouri. DOJ Finds Ferguson Police Routinely Discriminate. Ferguson Police Tolerate Sexual Harassment of Female Officers. What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department? Particular lowlights from the DoJ report.
* Ferguson, Inc: The city’s protest movement tries to find a path forward.
* What’s happening here is fundamentally simple: the surveillance state enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care. The state cannot teach its citizens, because it has no idea what to teach; it can only place them under observation. Perfect observation — panopticism — then becomes its telos, which is justifies and universalizes by imposing a responsibility to surveil on the very citizens already being surveilled.
* Lao Science Fiction On the Rise.
* 1906 novel predicted what New York would be like in 2015 exactly.
* CSU profs: Stagnant pay pushing us out of middle class.
* American Airlines To Phase Out Complimentary Cabin Pressurization.
* More Companies Are Run By Men Named “John” Than By Women. Just lean in!
* Writers Block: TV Writers’ Rooms Have Even Fewer Women, Minorities Than Last Year.
* Douglas Adams made me a writer: Neil Gaiman salutes his friend and inspiration.
* The power of play: The effects of Portal 2 and Lumosity on cognitive and noncognitive skills.
* Lots of Cases of Synesthesia Are Based on Alphabet Magnets.
* Where’s The Funding For Women’s Soccer?
* Why Don’t Men Kick Each Other in the Balls?
* Stop Calling Children’s Gun Deaths “Accidental.”
* A singular event that has never happened in history before: Kenosha officer admits to planting evidence in homicide case.
* 2016 watch: Bernie’s Reasons Why Not.
* And Boing Boing has your gallery of Star Trek comic book covers.
