Posts Tagged ‘libraries’
Sunday Morning Links!
* Picard trailer! Disco trailer! Short Trek! It’s truly a Golden Age.
* Some new poems from Jaimee up at her website.
* State DOT orders homeless to leave encampment under I-794 overpass in downtown Milwaukee by Oct. 31. I’m amazed this situation was allowed to go on this long and am worried that it will turn truly ugly now.
* Anyone want to buy a college?
* He Was a Consultant for the Search; Now He’s the Chancellor. And the Faculty Is Furious.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of speech.
* College Students Just Want Normal Libraries. Fine, but get back to me when you figure out a way to turn that into graft.
* 22-year adjunct (and union leader) denied medical leave by UC Irvine following brain surgery.
* They were never going to land anywhere but “you’re damn right I ordered the code red.” Every Trump scandal follows a playbook. With Ukraine, the playbook finally might not work. If the rule of law meant anything to the American political class, Trump would have been impeached on the first day of his presidency. 2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified.’ CIA General Counsel Thought She Made Criminal Referral Based On Whistleblower Info. Bringing back all the classics. Chris Hayes explains it all. Crucial role of right-wing media missing from impeachment coverage. It’s the Republicans, stupid. Even Chris Cillizza gets it.
* I just hope they bring Rick Perry to justice.
* Immigrants will be denied visas if they cannot prove they have health insurance or the ability to pay for medical care, the Trump administration said. The government is simply lawless.
* This Supreme Court Term Will Launch a Conservative Revolution.
* Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor.
* Pharmaceutical Companies Are Luring Mexicans Across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma.
* Inside TheMaven’s Plan To Turn Sports Illustrated Into A Rickety Content Mill.
* The Four-Day Work Week—Not Just a Daydream.
* Saving the planet without self-loathing.
* Deep dive into the scandal rocking online poker.
* 21-year-old oversleeps jury duty, goes to jail for 10 days.
* US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded.
* The billionaire class: “I’m a fiscal conservative, but a cultural nihilist.”
* Cops can do anything they want wherever they want whenever they want.
* Bootleg film shows Florida prison in all its danger, squalor. An inmate shot it on the sly.
* From the archives: During the season 17 premiere of Sesame Street in 1985, after 14 years, the adults see Mr. Snuffleupagus for the first time.
* And from the other archives: Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.
* Top Joker burn. Joker and white resentment. Brogan breaks it down.
* House of X: still really good! I’m really interested to see where Hickman takes the franchise from here.
* DC continuity: still utterly bonkers!
* Still the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that cuts me the worst.
* And know, even in these dark times, there are still heroes in this world.
Friday Links! SpoOooOOOOOoOOOOooOOooky
* Remarkable reversal: James Tiptree’s name will be removed from the Tiptree Award after all.
* Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.
* Aggression sensors. Classroom barricades. How architects are transforming schools for the era of mass shootings. The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools.
* Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* Green and white nationalism.
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – fond of using an arboreal emoji on Twitter, until journalists smelled them out – demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ Quoting both Mosley and Heidegger, the alt-right publisher Greg Johnson asserts that saving the ecosystem requires saving the white race. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, a religious homestead movement named after a series of novels, combine racial myths with environmental mysticism.
Most of these are tiny, fringe movements. But there are signs that green and white nationalism is scaling up. In the recent European elections, France’s National Rally claimed that ‘borders are the environment’s greatest ally.’ Marine Le Pen declared that someone ‘who is rooted in their home is an ecologist’, whereas those who are ‘nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland’. Across the Atlantic, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed to be against illegal immigration because it ‘produces a huge amount of litter’, while the far-right pundit Ann Coulter has suggested that Americans must ‘choose between a green America and a brown America’. In India, public tree planting and reverence for sacred groves reinforce the government’s majoritarian claim that only Hindus are the nation’s true stewards.
* Someone who is good at the economy please help me.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: A program on civic virtue at UNC-Chapel Hill is raising concerns about secrecy and funding.
* John Bolton and the Fox News Century.
* Science corner! A bold new perspective suggests space-time isn’t a fundamental entity but emerges from quantum entanglement, says physicist Sean Carroll.
* ‘I Lost Everything’: The Obscene Cost of Being a Woman with a Chronic Health Problem.
* Actually existing media bias: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.
Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.
* The richest man in the world has some news for his workers at Whole Foods.
* Bizarre comet from another star system just spotted. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
* In my home timeline, Tiger Woods was on You Can’t Do That on Television for a season.
* In 1949, LIFE magazine broke it down.
* And your Lord of the Rings after-the-credits stinger.
Behold! Links!
* CFP: Forming the Future.
* CFP: The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces (Warsaw, December 2019).
* CFP: Decolonizing the Undead.
* CFP: Adaptation and Nostalgia.
* In Urging Faculty Not to Unionize, Marquette Cites Catholic Identity. Better doublecheck that citation.
* I went on a little tear about Slaughterhouse Five some people seemed to like.
* Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures.
* Science fiction and the path back.
* What Western Media Got Wrong About China’s Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth.’
* My point in observing that atmospheric carbon levels have gone up about about 14% while Game of Thrones has been a thing is that geological time is now faster than pop-cultural time. This has only ever been true before of earthquakes and volcanoes.
* Counterpoint: Climate change should be the subject of every DNC debate.
* There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for a disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place. Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years. Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Housing policy is climate policy. Striking at the End of the World. Climate Change Drove Neanderthals to Cannibalism, New Research Suggests. Fascism and ecology. Fascism, ecology, and misogyny. Neoliberal catastrophism. The road to civilizational collapse. Sounds like a lovely place for the last 10,000 people alive to hold up. Now do I have your attention?
* It’s only going to get worse: Trump Just Purged DHS Because Its Leaders Weren’t Breaking the Law Enough. Trump told border agents to break U.S. law and defy judicial orders.They all belong in jail.
* Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats.’
* Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the “embarrassing” kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for “elites” from “elite” institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class.
* Huge, if true: Assessment Is an Enormous Waste of Time.
* Exciting new horizons in making student evaluations even worse.
* Teaching in the time of Campus Reform.
* ‘I started dreading going to class’: Women speak out about sexual harassment experiences at Duke. Elsewhere on the Duke beat: Duke to Pay $112.5M Over Allegations of Falsified Research. Duke’s Nursing School Failed Them. They Say Their Race Played a Role.
* The death of an adjunct. This is how you kill a profession. How to talk to NTT faculty. There’s a lot of pain in academia today. So many workers/scholars are feeling left behind in the job market. If you are, too, you’re not alone. I talk to 8 working-class scholars who have been pushed out of the academy in this special Working episode.
* Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research. Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated. What happens to faculty after a college closes?
* A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?
* The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend.
* I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?
* Amazing coincidences happen every day.
* The digital humanities debacle.
* Unsilencing the writing workshop: creative writing heresy from Beth Nguyen.
* Chinese schools are using facial recognition on students. But should they? I say teach the controversy.
* Start school later! This is the lowest hanging fruit for educational improvement there is.
* A Note From Your Colleagues With Hearing Loss: Just Use a Microphone Already.
* Love to live in an apartheid state: “GOP leaders criticize Gov. Tony Evers’ lead pipe replacement plan, raising concerns that too much money would go to Milwaukee.” And a flashback to October: As the tax dollars paid to the state rose 19% between 2009 and 2015, an increase of more than $400 million, the amount of revenue the state shared with the county did not grow, according to county officials.
* Buzzfeed returns to Baraboo, Wisconsin, site of the infamous Nazi prom photo.
* ‘Disgusted by it:’ Whitefish Bay High School students accused of using racist language.
* Make Milwaukee Socialist Again.
* Abigail Nussbaum’s Us link roundup.
* In the history of gaming there are just 14 playable black female characters.
* Real Native history in a video game: An Indigenous take on The Oregon Trail.
* The Suprising History of the Ball Pit.
* All the absolute worst people in the world, working together and on the same page.
* Bidenwatch: when the cool uncle becomes the creepy uncle.
* The Senate having another extremely normal one.
* Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to dril. Give it to Bill Watterson, too!
* Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. ‘Think of the mothers of sons’: Notre Dame mom begs female students to stop wearing leggings, sparking protests. Sports-Bra Outrage.
* “New bills would ban pelvic exams without consent.” You mean they aren’t already — what?
* The US government is holding Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement again. It’s a vindictive, unconscionable attack on a brave truth teller.
* The changing face of homelessness in America in 2019.
* The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century.
* Minimum wage increases are associated with reduced numbers of suicide deaths.
* Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths.
* 13% of the world’s companies are ‘zombies.’ That’s not healthy.
* Today in the richest society in human history: Why I Am Stockpiling Insulin in My Fridge. The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.
* Epilepsy patient refuses to leave Vancouver hospital until her health needs are met.
* The keeper of the secret: one man’s devotion to uncovering the details of a single lynching case from the 1920s.
* A majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds.
* They tried to warn us: Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries.
* The Joker trailer legitimately seems like an SNL digital short about trying to make a prestige, Oscar-bait comic book movie. I can’t believe it’s real.
* The Deep Space Nine Anniversary Documentary Is Hitting Theaters for One Day Only.
* Fossil found from the day the dinosaurs died? Seems hard to believe, but wow.
* Click this link if you dare, but remember that some things that are learned cannot be unlearned.
* Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped.
* It’s Rupert Murdoch’s world, we’re just all going to die in it. I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.
* The rent is still too damn high.
* Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won’t Heal. This week in Hell World.
* First photo of a black hole. An informative Twitter thread.
* How Animators Created the Spider-Verse.
* That’s me in the corner. Atheism and democracy.
* How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care.
* A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.
* Depressing, yes, but also sort of comforting.
* Just going to go ahead and green-light this Goodfellas sequel.
* I assume this is already a CBS procedural.
* Putting academic knowledge to real world use: Experts Determine Whether Tyrion And Sansa Are Still Married On ‘Game Of Thrones.’
Phew! Almost to the end now!
* About ten years too late, it’s a start: How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?
* The Avengers: Endgame theory that Ant-Man kills Thanos by expanding inside his butt, explained.
* Miracles and wonders: Unless I’m mistaken this is the first time gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has ever gone to human trials.
* It is amusing the Dungeons and Dragons- a game for small children- has a more accurate model of intelligence than the Quilette people do: it’s a minor bonus to an extremely noisy stochastic process that is easily swamped by situational advantage modifiers.
* Meet Leigh Cordner, Medieval Times’ creative director.
* Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex.
* The unexpected philosophical depths of the clicker game Universal Paperclips.
* Just kidding! There’s no plan for either problem.
* Great news from the elite world of comics podcasting.
* Coming Spring 2026: Fatigue: A Star Wars Story.
* Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks!
* Once more, with feeling: Should You Go to Graduate School?
* CFP: Not Reading: University of Chicago English Graduate Conference.
* What are Muppets, anyway? Monsters from an evolutionary perspective.
* No.
* The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.
* Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign. More. More.
* Dungeons and Dragons and the class system.
* Bruno Latour: The New Climate.
* Which country shall we bomb today?
* Against “Fearless Girl”: 1, 2, 3. And a counterpoint.
* The Secret at the Heart of A.I.: No one really understands how it works.
* Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense.
* How artificial intelligence learns to be racist.
* The new Star Wars theme park seems like a place my kids will completely love.
* The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners.
* The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban.
* California State University cannot justify administrative growth, manager raises, audit says.
* The coming British bloodbath.
* The fake news long con: The Anne Frank Center.
* Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia.
* “I always have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the economies of post-collapse fictional societies.”
* Every Sci-Fi Star Map. Keep scrolling, we’re not done yet!
* Why the FBI Kept a 1,400-Page File on Einstein.
* American energy use, in one diagram. 410. There hasn’t been a cool month in 628 months. A closer look at how rich countries “outsource” their CO2 emissions to poorer ones. Countries Need to Move to Zero-Carbon Energy Now–Here’s Why.
* Why are doctors giving anti-psychotic drugs to toddlers? Kids Who Use Touchscreen Devices Sleep Less at Night. Let the children play.
* A New Study Confirms What You’ve Long Suspected: Facebook Is Making People Crazy.
* History as a never-ending struggle to delay the Nazi takeover of the world.
* Star Trek: Discovery delayed again, again. Ian McShane says a Deadwood movie script’s made its way to HBO. Every New (and Returning!) Development Thrawn Brings to the Star Wars Universe. ‘Locke and Key’ Pilot From Carlton Cuse Set at Hulu. Can Batman Beyond save the DCEU? And because you demanded it!
* Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science.
* What’s the most American movie ever made?
* NASA announces one of Saturn’s moons could support alien life in our solar system. NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere. Space Leaves Astronauts Partially Blind, and We May Finally Know Why. Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist.
* Recycling is in trouble — and it might be your fault.
* Why United Was Legally Wrong to Deplane David Dao. How Much Money Will David Dao Make From United Airlines?
* Moderate drinking is good for you, if you don’t control for wealth.
* Nintendo doesn’t want you to be happy.
* Jeff VanderMeer amends the apocalypse.
* It might be easier to make a list of who isn’t working for Putin.
* The Landmark Sexual Assault Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.
* There’s just one story and we tell it over and over.
* Editing the Constitution: Wisconsin conservatives are pushing for a constitutional convention. What are their motives? Oh, I bet it’s fine.
* Fifteen Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Film and TV Projects with Black Talent to Get Excited About.
* First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump.
* Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a federal informant?
* Trustees of the Whittier Law School said on Wednesday that it would close down, making it the first fully accredited law school in the country to shut at a time when many law schools are struggling amid steep declines in enrollment and tuition income.
* If you want a vision of the future. The thing is though. The hero’s journey.
* And just in case you haven’t heard: Capitalism is violence.
Return of the Son of Occasional Linkblogging
With new and unexpected obligations in the last few months it’s become very hard for me to keep up with the link-blogging. Sorry! It’s bad enough that I’m considering putting this function on the blog on (likely permanent) hiatus. But, for now at least, some links…
* Wordless, but one of the best things about parenting I’ve ever read: Dan Berry’s “Carry Me.” Made me cry each time I read it.
* For the night, which becomes more immense /and depressing and utter / and the voices in it which argue and argue. / For this conflict with the stars. / For ashes. For the wind. / For this emergency we call life. All-Purpose Elegy.
* This is really good too: “the best Spider-Man story of the last five years.”
* CFP: Utopia, now!
* Class, Academia, and Anxious Times. From Duke’s Own Sara Appel.
* Hugo nominations 2017! How well did the new rules do against the Sad Puppies? Meet the Hugo-Nominated Author of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex.
* The African Speculative Fiction Society holds the Nommo Awards to celebrate the year’s greatest speculative fiction written by African authors.
* A list of contributors has been announced for Letters to Octavia, which has been renamed Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (which I’m in, by the way — I’m the rascal writing about “whether we should respect Butler’s wishes about not reprinting certain works”). I’m also a small part of the Huntington’s current exhibit of the Butler archives, presenting at the associated research conference in June.
* I wrote a small encyclopedia article on “Science Fiction” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, which is live now…
* Desperation Time: Visions of the future from the left.
* ‘Doomsday Library’ Opens In Norway To Protect The World’s Books From Armageddon.
* The 43 senators who plan to filibuster Gorsuch represent 53 percent of the country.
* The history of all heretofore existing society is the history of archery dorks. Evidence that the human hand evolved so we could punch each there.
* Check out my friend David Higgins on NPR’s On Point, talking dystopias.
* War, forever and ever amen. What We Do Best. Trump’s bombing of Syria likely won’t be met with a wall of “resistance,” certainly not within the halls of power. That’s because for nearly all liberal and conservative pundits and politicians, foreign wars — particularly those launched in the name of “humanitarianism” — are an issue where no leader, even one as disliked as Trump, can ever go wrong. The Syrian Catastrophe. A Solution from Hell. Profiles in courage. There are no humanitarian wars. 7 Charities Helping Syrians That Need Your Support. The only answer is no.
* Incredible story: Hired Goon Drags Man Off United Flight After He Refuses to Give Up Seat. More details here. It’s only going to get worse.
* Trump Conspiracy Tweetstorms Are The Infowars Of The Left. It is shocking how these things erupt through my timeline day after day, then evaporate utterly as if they’d never happened.
* This week in the richest country that has ever existed in human history.
* Being Wealthy in America Earns You 15 Extra Years of Life Span Over the Poor.
* New York will no longer prosecute 16 and 17 year olds as adult criminals.
* I loved this story about the connections that expose us: This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account.
* We did it guys, we did it. But let’s not lose our heads yet.
* What Happens When Your Internet Provider Knows Your Porn Habits?
* Activism we can all believe in: Protesters raise more than $200,000 to buy Congress’s browsing histories.
* Democrats Against Single Payer.
* How to Survive the Next Catastrophic Pandemic.
* An epidemic of childhood trauma haunts Milwaukee. An intractable problem: For the last half-century, Milwaukee has been caught in a relentless social and economic spiral. Milwaukee celebrates groundbreaking of new Black Holocaust Museum site.
* Dolphins beat up octopuses before eating them, and the reason is kind of horrifying.
* Wild situation in X-Men Gold #1. The artist’s statement.
* If nothing else, Operation Blue Milk had me at “Nnedi Okorafor.” Everything Cut from Rogue One. The Final Star Wars Movie Will Include The Late Carrie Fisher.
* The Minnesota Eight Don’t Want to Be Deported to a Country They’ve Never Lived In. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE Yesterday.
* 7 Tips for Writing a Bestselling Science Fiction Novel.
* Can the Great Lakes Be Saved?
* Does This Band Name Start With The? A Quiz.
* America’s first female mayor was elected 130 years ago. Men nominated her as a cruel joke.
* Diabetes is even deadlier than we thought, study suggests.
* The Biggest Employer in Each US State. Look at all those universities we don’t need!
* Already old news, but worth noting: whether out of general interest or revenge Joss will be doing Batgirl. If I had Joss’s ear I’d pitch about 20-30 minutes of kung-fu action girl Batgirl and then have her paralyzed and do the Oracle plot instead. It’d be something different in this genre and something different for Whedon too, as opposed to something we’ve frankly seen from him a few too many times by now.
* Pedagogy watch: Why won’t students ask for help?
* More on the history of sleep: Why Do We Make Children Sleep Alone?
* When Every Day Is Groundhog Day: The Danny Rubin Story.
* No thanks: Disney Could Go Westworld With New Patent Filing for Soft ‘Humanoid’ Robots.
* There are dozens of us! Dozens! The Life Aquatic might not be Wes Anderson’s best film. But it is his greatest: The director’s misunderstood classic knows that sadness can’t be defeated, only lived with.
* Star Trek: Discovery ZZzzzzzzZZzzzzzZzzzz.
* Joe Hill (son of Stephen King): In the late 1990s I asked my Dad how to write a cover letter for my short fiction submissions. He was glad to help out.
* I always call Chuck Schumer the worst possible Democrat at the worst possible time, but Rahm Emanuel really gives him a run for his money.
* Margaret Atwood is dropping hints about a Handmaid’s Tale sequel. She even wrote a little bit extra, just in time for me to teach it this summer!
* KSR talks NY2140. KSR talks world building. KSR in conversation with Adam Roberts and Francis Spufford.
* Geoengineering watch. Sadly, this is probably our civilization’s only hope.
* These Are the Wildly Advanced Space Exploration Concepts Being Considered by NASA.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Tyrannosaurus rex was a sensitive lover, new dinosaur discovery suggests.
* PS: Conservatives and liberals united only by interest in dinosaurs, study shows.
* The proliferation of charter schools, particularly in areas of declining enrollment and in proximity to schools that have closed, is adding financial stress to Chicago’s financially strapped public school system, a new report co-authored by a Roosevelt University professor shows.
* How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons.
* Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data.
* The Original Ending of Alien Was Both Terrifying and a Huge Bummer.
* Fuck You and Die: An Oral History of Something Awful.
* The arc of history is long, but New York now has more Mets fans than Yankees fans.
* Congratulations to North Carolina.
* OK. OK. But I’m watching both of you.
* each-Ins Helped Galvanize Student Activism in the 1960s. They Can Do So Again Today.
* The Uses of Bureaucracy. Browser Plug-In Idea. A Brief History of Theology. To thine own self be true. Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Politics. Democracy. Art. #2017. Submitted for Your Approval. We lived happily during the war. Five years later. Pretty grim. Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice. How to tell if you are sexually normal. Juxtaposition of wish fulfilment violence and infantile imagery, desire to regress to be free of responsibility… Join the movement. Know your sins.
* And even in the darkest times, there is still hope: Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year.
New Year’s Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.
* 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.
* 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.
* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.
* Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!
* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.
* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!
* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.
* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.
* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).
* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.
* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?
“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”
* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.
* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.
* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.
* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.
* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.
* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.
* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’
* Behind the Scenes at the Met.
* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.
* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.
* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.
* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.
* A(other) New Map for America.
* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!
* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.
* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!
* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.
* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.
* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!
* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.
* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.
* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.
* I was a men’s rights activist.
* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.
* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.
* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.
* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.
* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.
* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.
* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.
* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.
* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.
* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.
* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.
* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.
* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.
* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.
* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.
* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.
* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?
* And they said culture was dead!
* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.
* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.
* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.
* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.
* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?
* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.
Tuesday Is Soylent Green Day Links
* Exciting news! My book, Octavia E. Butler (the latest in the University of Illinois’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction series) has a November 1 publication date and a pre-order page on Amazon!
* Some upcoming events at Marquette English this month: “Resume Doctor and Interview Bootcamp” and a Pop Culture and Pizza Night on Hamilton: An American Musical. There’s also MuHuCon this weekend and the Marquette/UWM joint conference next weekend.
* And speaking of Hamilton: Google Hamilton truth! A little more from LGM and William Hogeland.
* Though the rumors are that they may actually have learned something from their mistake.
* Kim Stanley Robinson’s Next Book, New York 2140, Will Feature a Half-Submerged Manhattan.
* This Church Believes Humans Can Live Forever on Earth. Sold!
* We’re running out of water, and the world’s powers are very worried.
* University of Kansas Acquires 1,000 Zines from a Defunct Radical Library.
* This Is What Really Happens to Your Brain When You’re Tripping on LSD.
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college course work for recruits.
* The Creative Writing of the Internet’s Premier White Supremacist Forum.
* Welcome to Night Vale: Two percent of humans can hear the Hum, a mysterious, low rumble in the distance. It might exist. It might be imaginary. It might be both.
* Diabetes watch: Are full-fat dairy foods better for you after all?
* Can this election get stranger? How Gen. James Mattis could become the unlikeliest U.S. president in history. I don’t know anything about Mattis, and doubt that he’s the guy, but I still think sabotaging the Electoral College by running one or more regional candidates in order to throw the election to the House is the only GOP strategy left that has any chance of success.
* No matter how you measure it, Bernie Sanders isn’t winning the Democratic primary.
* Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life.’
* Louis C.K. Has Millions in Debt Thanks to “Horace and Pete.”
* Attawapiskat declares state of emergency over spate of suicide attempts.
* The most and least meaningful jobs.
* This Is How Long Sex Should Actually Last. Science.
* The finding that launched a thousand sexist jokes: Men May Be Able to Avoid Dementia by Marrying Intelligent Women, Researchers Say.
* “I think that porn has the power to do what Bruce Springsteen can’t”: Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws.
* No one knows why they remained healthy, Friend said. But DNA from such people could one day provide insight into ways to prevent or treat such catastrophic disorders. “Instead of looking at people with disease, you need to look at people who should have gotten sick,” said Friend.
* There’s an insanely well-hidden Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Easter egg.
* How precious is a longtime family dog? As valuable as an heirloom vase or family photographs? A Wisconsin appeals court says no.
* Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others: After 50 years of animal-welfare legislation, rats and mice are still left out in the cold.
* A major perk of the job for New York State corrections officers may soon be off the table: The ability to be as brutal as they’d like with prisoners without having to worry about facing any serious consequences.
* Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were.
* Why Hollywood studios are taking a stand against an anti-revenge-porn bill.
* I want to believe: The Warriors Have A 93 Percent Chance Of Hitting 73 Wins.
* Huge, if true: Planet X to really cause mass extinction this month?
* And I know I say this a lot, but sometimes a thing really is ideology at its purest.
2016 Links!
* This Man Is Claiming To Be Able To Bring The Dead Back To Life By 2045. That’s good news, because Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Perhaps relatedly.
* So tragic: These parents cryonically froze their toddler in the hope she might live again.
* More bad news for my particular demographic.
* I’m at MLA this week, giving a paper on Saturday evening on Richard McGuire’s fantastic graphic novel Here for a panel on “The Anthropocene and Deep Time in Literary Studies.”
* The Year of the Imaginary College Student.
* Facebook ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back.’
* Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 24: Sullen. Also, here’s John Pat’s current syllabus on Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept.
* I think this one is old, but maybe it’s not old to you: Soc 710: Social Theory through Complaining.
* This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick.
* That’s when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed an amended lawsuit against the two companies, this time asking for them to give back all the money they made in New York State, to give it back to those who lost money and to pay a fine of up to $5,000 per case.
* I Studied Oregon’s Militia Movement. Here’s 5 Things You Need to Know.
* What Writing Shared World Fiction Taught Erin M. Evans About Worldbuilding.
* 12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system.
* Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels.
* David Harvey on Consolidating Power.
* No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape.
* Some Last Words on Pessimism.
* New Heights (Lows?) in Philosophy Job Application Requirements.
* The Far-Out Sci-Fi Costume Parties of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
* When a prison closes, what happens to the prison town?
* Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits againstUber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws.
* Tufts in the news! Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans.
* The novelistic sublime: Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline for Catch-22.
* If Google is a school official, I wonder if it’s a mandatory reporter.
* Tom Lutz and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* Through the looking glass: Game of Thrones author George RR Martin misses last TV deadline for new book.
* On reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On reading Ten Little Indians.
* Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes.
* Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
* The Sherlock special “The Abominable Bride” was terrible. Has this show completely lost its way? My DVR, in a noble effort to save my sanity, opted not to record it.
* It’s all happening again: Infinite Winter. A flashback.
* What I learned not drinking for two years.
* Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection.
* Harvard’s Find of a Colonial Map of New Jersey Is a Reminder of Border Wars.
* What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word?
* U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List From The Cold War Declassified For The First Time.
* This Asian Time Travel Thriller Could Be Next Year’s Breakout Action Movie.
* An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday.
* When Gene Roddenberry’s computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. Here’s how this tech mystery was solved.
* Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added.
* The rising academic field of David Bowie Studies.
* A Brief History of Farting for Money. (via)
* Hybrids. Uncanny Valley. And then there’s the weirdest, most unbelievable SF short film I’ve ever seen.
* Barbasol presents Disney’s James Cameron’s Avatarland.
* And of course there’s always more Star Wars links: The Feminist Frequency Review. Editing The Force Awakens. Listening to Star Wars. The Original Star Wars Concept Art Is Amazing. A Not-So-Brief History of George Lucas Talking Shit About Disney’s Star Wars. Is Han Solo Force-Sensitive? The Bigger Luke Hypothesis. Cross Sections of TFA Spaceships and Vehicles. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate. Are droids slaves? Rey & BB8. Reading Anakin Skywalker after Jessica Jones. If you want a vision of the future.
Oops, Forgot a Title Links
* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they’ve run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was “produce more adjuncts,” but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.
* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.
* University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.
* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.
* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.
* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.
* The flag might actually come down.
* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.
* “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton.”
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.
Surge!
* But set Obama’s impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They’re certainly finding every possible way to blow it.
* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.
* For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.
* The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.
* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.
* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.
* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.
* What happens when the sea swallows a country?
* It’s just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.
* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.
* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.
* Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple’s App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell’s revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don’t simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.
* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.
* ‘Star Trek’ Fan Invited to Pitch ‘Star Trek Uncharted’ TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.
* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From ‘Breaking Bad’ Will Appear in a Future Episode of ‘Better Call Saul.’
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Gerry Canavan 