Posts Tagged ‘loneliness’
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.
That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, America, apocalypse, art, Big Oil, Big Soda, Britney Spears, Chicago, children's books, China Miéville, class struggle, college, college sports, condoms, coronovirus, crisis, cruise ships, Dan Albergotti, democracy, Democrats, depression, divorce, DNC, domestic violence, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Elon Musk, Extrapolation, federalism, Felix Guattari, film, financial exigency, Frosthaven, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, hippos, homelessness, How the University Works, Joe Biden, journalism, kids today, language, Last Supper, loneliness, mad science, magnets, maps, Mario, medicine, Milwaukee, my scholarly empire, NCAA, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, originalism, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, Picard, plastic, poetry, police, politics, postdocs, prison-industrial complex, recession, remote learning, Republicans, revolution, Rick and Morty, Samuel R. Delany, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, strikes, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The World's End, TNG, toilet paper, unemployment, Utopia, voting, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, xkcd, YA literature, Zoom
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Another project of mine I’d love for you to be a part of (and to spread far and wide): CFP: Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom.
* CFP: Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency (A Nearly Carbon-Free Virtual Symposium). GoFundMe for the Marquette Graduate Conference on Death and Dying.
* History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage. Britt Rusert on The Radical Lives of Abolitionists.
* The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought.
* Rethinking “Introduction to Art History” at Yale.
it’s an amazing con that the right can bash our classes for being useless and then turn around five minutes later and bash them for being too important to mess with https://t.co/KGDzza45L7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2020
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department. Hanging Out — and Hanging On — at the MLA. Why I’m optimistic about the future of the humanities.
* Their end goal is not total cancellation of student-loan debt. It’s widespread acceptance of the idea that education in the 21st century is a basic need, and that it’s immoral to force people to go into debt to attain it.
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin Reread.
* Today in the hell world: Concentration camp memorials seeing rise in far-right visitors.
— Midwest Unrest (@MW_Unrest) January 25, 2020
* That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful.” Holding a City Hostage is Peaceful Now?
* Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group.
* Huge, if true: Crime Shows Are A ‘PR Machine’ For Law Enforcement.
* Liberal environmentalism y’all.
This what all them environmentalist talking points is calling for on the low pic.twitter.com/YygVM1mTDk
— w. e. b DAT NOIZE (@RantzFanon) January 23, 2020
eco-fascism is gonna become a bigger problem soon and it'll be the liberals paving the way for it, just as usual https://t.co/djQ3QMG50d
— hsna (@BlazeQuark) January 25, 2020
* An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey. Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data.
* But mostly I thought Twitter would be a nightmare because I could immediately forecast the divide between two groups of people: those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First.
* The absurdity of the neoliberal university. “Do I do research or pay rent?” Grad students in Santa Cruz start a wildcat strike.
* Why Attendance Policies Hurt Disabled and Chronically Ill Students.
* 25 Years of Fan Casting X-Men Movies.
* I’m pretty sure midnight was 35 minutes ago.
* Quentin Tarantino: I am in combat with blockbuster franchises. Wasn’t he going to make a Star Trek movie a few days ago?
* Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy.
Y’ALL I asked Amy to put up some “please pardon our progress” signs on the empty cases and I am UNDONE pic.twitter.com/y198SXo3D7
— Madeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay) January 22, 2020
* Celebrating Nancy Drew’s 90th Birthday the Only Way I Know How.
* Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?
* I am honestly and truly giving up.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sara Nelson for President.
just a totally different conception of what labor can do than pretty much the entire rest of labor leadership in this country. god bless her https://t.co/XSC3mo7hob
— marge 🕯 bernie (@mags_mclaugh) January 27, 2020
* Michael Light, Ellen Dinsmore and Michael Massoglia examined a database of federal criminal felony offenses that includes case type, defendant characteristics, court location, and judge-specific data. They find non-U.S. citizens living in New York and Washington D.C were eight percent more likely to be imprisoned than U.S. citizens after 9/11. The increased likelihood of incarceration for non-citizens in New York and D.C. was evident for a full four years after September 11, 2001. Courts in the Context of Crisis.
* Puberty blockers can be ‘life-saving’ drugs for trans teens, study shows.
Researchers reached that conclusion by analyzing data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey, involving 20,619 people between the ages of 18 and 36 years old.
hey just like America https://t.co/KCj0q72YOi
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2020
there’s a location in the storyworld called “utopia,” and when PICARD opens everyone who lived there is dead and it’s been on fire ever since https://t.co/uZsD0VMxY3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2020
* A few people have been tossing around my old Star Trek essay “We Have Never Been Star Trek” because the Picard launch too.
* A Utah Woman Was Charged for Going Topless in Her Own Home. Her Legal Case Is Not Going Great.
* Angry white men have declared war on the planet (again).
* Werner Herzog hears Paul F. Tompkins’ “Yelp Review for Trader Joe’s on Hyperion.”
Because you might need it today, here's Joey Ramone on prom night. pic.twitter.com/jpVPihYwrS
— Richard Kadrey (@Richard_Kadrey) January 28, 2020
* What could go wrong? Nuclear waste recycled into diamond batteries with “near-infinite power.”
Written by gerrycanavan
January 28, 2020 at 11:32 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 9/11, a poor dancer blames his pants, abolitionism, abortion, academia, academic departments, Afro-pessimism, America, art, art history, attendance, blockbusters, Captain Planet, CFPs, China, climate change, conference, coronavirus, crime fiction, crime shows, dark side of the digital, death, depression, detective fiction, disability, Doomsday Clock, dying, ecology, English departments, environmentalism, film, franchises, free speech, grad student movements, guns, health insurance, history, Hitler youth, How the University Works, Kobe Bryant, labor, language, loneliness, maps, Marquette, millennials, misogyny, MLA, movies, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, Nancy Drew, Nazis, neo-Nazis, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, optimism, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, police state, police violence, postcolonialism, propaganda, puberty, Quentin Tarantino, radicalism, rape culture, Richmond, Sara Nelson, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, social media, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, Tarantino, teaching, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Ramones, the university in runs, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, UC Santa Cruz, unions, University of Minnesota, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utah, Utopia, Virginia, virtual conferences, Werner Herzog, white men, white nationalism, white people, women, X-Men, Yale
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
the full corporate takeover of fan culture has turned fans from a subculture whose creativity stems from overidentification with commodities into guardians of IP, enabling the transition of ‘their’ franchises into a series of expensive but low-risk technical updates
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
& to shift the political horizon of fan ‘resistance’ away from from IP theft & toward minor gains in representation
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
repeating to my self in the mirror "Star wars is for adults" before seeing the final one & having a violent reaction like ingesting a poison
— wint (@dril) December 22, 2019
still the best star wars story produced in any medium cc @mattthomas pic.twitter.com/cfllpuBDzT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2019
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
The greatest work of science fiction I’ve ever been involved with – my Men in Black profit statement – arrived for the holidays. Sadly it lost 6x what it lost last period. Impressive for a movie that hasn’t been out in 22 years. Unless it’s been *sneaking* out. Yeah, that’s it. https://t.co/fE3bFMRJvb
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) December 27, 2019
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
Not to be all Everything Is Connected, but an inability/unwillingness to think hard and carefully about Society–and an insistence on individuals as the only thing that's real–is why Star Wars, Watchmen, and Bret Stephens are obsessed with genetics
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) December 28, 2019
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
terms like 'financial crisis' and 'bad economy' are propaganda obfuscating the fact that the point of capitalism is to bleed working people
for the vast majority of humanity there's no such thing as a good economy, and there's no such thing as a crisis for the ultra rich
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 27, 2019
You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years
— Raging Dull (@InternetHippo) December 27, 2019
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
In a somewhat healthy polity the fact that the president is pardoning, championing, and hanging out with this monstrous war criminal would be treated as a massive scandal and have serious consequences. But America is not healthy, and its political and civic elites are failing. https://t.co/vJdnrU69bT
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 23, 2019
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
more seriously tho it's striking what these two franchises, which are immense cultural productions and supposed testimonies to the limitlessness of imagination and possibility, implicitly posit as immutable – war, class stratification, various ideologies of gender and sex, etc
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 19, 2019
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
SANDERS: I was the only senator in 1999 who opposed Fat Bastard wanting to eat a baby, whereas my colleague Joe Biden was in favor of it
BIDEN: Look I’ve been friends with Fat Bastard for a long time, and I told him Fat, you gotta stop this talk about eating a baby, its not right— cj (@currentvictim) December 20, 2019
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 29, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, ACME, Amazon, America, American Studies, antibiotics, art, artificial intelligence, asylum, Australia, autobiography, automation, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Blank Check, books, C.S. Lewis, campus novels, capitalism, CBP, Chewbacca, Christmas, class struggle, college, comics, comics studies, corporations, crisis, Cthulhu, deafness, demographics, deportation, disability, Disney, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Dril, enchantment, Episode 9, escapism, ethics, fake news, fantasy, fantasy studies, fascism, film, Finland, franchise fiction, Freaks and Geeks, games, geoengineering, gravity, Hallmark movies, Harry Potter, holidays, Home Alone, How the University Works, ice, immigration, India, J.K. Rowling, Joe Biden, Judith Butler, Kamala Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindness, lists, literature, Little Women, loneliness, Looney Tunes, masculinity, Matt Shea, memes, memory, Men in Black, migrants, Monopoly, neoliberalism, Netflix, nostalgia, optimism, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, PAW Patrol, Pete Buttigieg, politics, pretty people, prison abolition, race, racism, radicalism, retirement, rich people, romance novels, Romance Writers of America, Salvador Dali, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, secularity, secularization, settler colonialism, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, streaming, television, TERFs, the 1960s, the 2010s, the deaf, the humanities, The Outer Worlds, The Rise of Skywalker, The Royal Tenenbaums, the university in ruins, Tolkien, trade wars, Utopia, vacations, Vietnam, voting, Wakanda, war crimes, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, white nationalism, white supremacy, Wile E. Coyote, writing, Y2K
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W
— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019
the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.
This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk
— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019
that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019
“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2019 at 10:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Afrofuturism, algorithms, America, apocalypse, assassinations, Barack Obama, books, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, CFPs, Charlton Heston, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, China Miéville, class struggle, David Bowie, Deadspin, death, Democrats, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, environmentalism, Equal Rights Amendment, Fahrenheit 451, franchise fiction, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, gig economy, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, Halloween, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, income inequality, journalism, Juul, kids today, loneliness, Mars, Marx, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, moral nuance, mortality, my life as a nerd, neoliberalism, New York, nuclearity, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, photography, police state, police violence, politics, precarity, prequels, presidential libraries, privacy, race, racism, Ray Bradbury, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, seasons, solar punk, Supreme Court, technical debt, the Anthropocene, The Doors of Eden, the Internet, The Matrix, the tuition is too damn high, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, University of Chicago, Utopia, vaping, Virginia, Vonnegut, WeWork, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.
* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.
* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!
* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.
* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.
* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.
* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.
* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
If what you’re saying is true, that would be really bad! So it must not be true. https://t.co/QoBpMh2TCq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 18, 2019
* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT
* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.
* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.
* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.
If we restored public funding to the university system, then they'd only be linked to large abstract war machines instead of individual billionaire perverts
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) August 21, 2019
* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.
Environmental activists warn that if the Amazon reaches a point of no return, the rainforest could become a dry savannah, no longer habitable for much of its wildlife. If this happens, it could start emitting carbon — the major driver of climate change. https://t.co/ZLX0PMcZls
— CNN (@CNN) August 21, 2019
When Notre Dame was burning, the world's media covered every moment of it and billionaires rushed to restore it. Right now the Amazon is burning, the lungs of our planet. It has been burning for 3 weeks now. No media. No billionaires. #PrayforAmazonas pic.twitter.com/RkBLS8SiE8
— charlotte 🖤 (@magicmadnesss) August 21, 2019
Jay Inslee drops out of presidential race to spend more time helplessly awaiting human extinction
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) August 22, 2019
* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.
* Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.
* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.
These Nigerian teenagers are producing short sci-fi movies using a smart phone and other everyday items. pic.twitter.com/9dXhPGuD9z
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 16, 2019
* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.
* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.
* How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.
Pia Klemp, the German ship captain who rescued migrants in the Mediterranean, as she refuses a medal from the mayor of Paris. pic.twitter.com/8vWXn28NaQ
— Jodi (@jodotcom) August 22, 2019
* Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.
Biden will spend eight months defending his kids from increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories and lose by three points https://t.co/Hcbn0gCET4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 21, 2019
literally the slogan for Joe Biden https://t.co/IyITvSHCSa
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2019
* Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.
hard to experience this period as anything other than a years-long psychotic break https://t.co/yZ9WS9BwHd
— the norms misser (@cd_hooks) August 22, 2019
* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?
* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.
Your reminder that Democrats won a majority of votes for state legislative races in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina in 2018 yet a broken political system awarded them a minority of seats. pic.twitter.com/NHhSWQrXSZ
— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) August 19, 2019
* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.
* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.
* In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
* NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…
* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.
* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”
* I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.
* Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.
* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.
* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.
* A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.
* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.
* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?
* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.
* In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.
* California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!
* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.
* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.
* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.
* One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.
* There is no Africa in African studies.
* The dialectic of enlightenment.
* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.
* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?
* The language of Mario Maker.
* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 take on Sony-Disney https://t.co/XJ6DRPthEJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2019
* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.
* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 22, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoBan, 1619, academia, academic jobs, accidents, actually existing media bias, Africa, African studies, Alaska, alcohol, algorithms, Amazon, America, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, animals, apocalypse, arson, Art Spiegelman, asylum, Baby Boomers, Bob Dylan, Bojack Horseman, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Brexit, California, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, childhood, climate change, climate denialism, climate rage, Columbia, cruelty, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, designer babies genetic engineering, disability, discrimination, Disney, Donald Trump, donor sperm, DoorDash, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, electric scooters, elves, Eric Garner, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fan fiction, fantasy, fascism, FBI, film, financial exigency, free speech, Gamergate, games, gerrymandering, glaciers, Golden Age, Greenland, guns, Heroes, Hippocratic oath, history, Hootie and the Blowfish, How the University Works, Hugo awards, I Can't Breathe, Ibram X. Kendi, ice, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, immigration, India, Islamophobia, Jay Inslee, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, Kashmir, Keanu Reeves, kids today, Legolas, liberalism, life expectancy, loneliness, Mario Maker, Marquette, mass shootings, Matrix 4, MCU, meritocracy, Mexico, modernism, Monopoly, monsters, Nazis, neoliberalism, New Gingrich, New York Times, Nigeria, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Oregon, ouch, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Northwest, parenting, photo ops, photographs, Pia Klemp, poetry, polls, Portland, postdocs, pregnancy, priesthood, Princeton, progressives, Proud Boys, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, reconciliationpunk, Republicans, riots, science fiction, science fiction studies, short stories, Siberia, slavery, Slytherin, socialism, Sony, Spider-Man, Starbucks, Stephen King, students, suicide, superheroes, tacos, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Confederacy, the dialectic of enlightenment, the elderly, the flu, the humanities, the Internet, The Matrix, the Moon, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the Wachowskis, tips, Tolkien, truth and reconciliation, undocumented workers, unions, University of Alaska, Viagra, wage theft, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, white nationalism, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin
Monday Afternoon Links!
* Call for Applications at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts: Division Heads of Children’s and Young Adult Literature (CYA) and International Fantastic Literatures (IF).
* In very broad strokes, colleges and universities have four main revenue streams: state appropriations, research funding, gifts and endowments, and student tuition. The first three come with serious restrictions regarding their use. Generally speaking, state appropriations can only be used for educational expenses, research funding is largely spent on specific research projects, and endowments go toward the pet projects of wealthy donors. Only student tuition can be used for anything university administrators want—construction projects, real estate, interest payments, administrative salaries, football coaches. In recent decades, university administrators have sought, like all entrepreneurial institutions, to maximize their revenues, but they have sought above all to maximize their unrestricted revenues—and have even been willing to sacrifice state funding in order to bring in more tuition. The Tuition Limit and the Coming Crisis of Higher Education.
* The University and the Pursuit of Happiness.
* Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture, something that, linguists say, has never happened in another country.
* Hobbes, the Science Fiction Writer: Part I, Part II. Part II wades into Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther…
* A Political History of the Future: Iain M. Banks.
* How White American Terrorists Are Radicalized.
* “The Workplace Is Killing People and Nobody Cares.”
* Neoliberalism and the family.
* If Tim Kaine can keep John Bolton off the National Security Council, all is forgiven.
* Surely one of the most depraved things any politician has ever said.
* The United States is doomed.
Don’t know who made this but yes. pic.twitter.com/GloVXEpoIS
— howitzer of mercy 🌹🏴☠️ (@girlziplocked) March 25, 2018
* The Stormy Daniels scandal is not gossip. Why the Stormy Daniels story matters, in one paragraph. And everyone needs to face it: Stormy Daniels’ Legal Strategy Strongly Suggests She Has Photos of Donald Trump.
That no one seems to know for sure if the payment to Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws would seem to be a pretty damning indictment of campaign finance laws.
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 26, 2018
* ‘Rick and Morty’ and The Rise of The ‘I’m a Piece of Shit’ Defense.
* From the archives! Superpowers and the ADA.
* Facebook: definitely bad.
Is there an argument that Facebook is almost entirely ‘negative externality’? It’s like an industry that just pumps crap into rivers and doesn’t make anything.
— Will Davies (@davies_will) March 25, 2018
* Borneo Lost More Than 100,000 Orangutans From 1999 to 2015.
* And here’s the robot future I’m worried about.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 26, 2018 at 1:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, America, apes, artificial intelligence, Black Panther, CFPs, children's literature, class struggle, Dan Harmon, depravity, disability, Donald Trump, extinction, Facebook, fantasy, gender, gender-neutral pronouns, government, guns, happiness, Hobbes, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ICFA, John Bolton, John Brown, kids today, labor, loneliness, mass shootings, neoliberalism, orangutans, play, politics, presentations, public health, Rick and Morty, Rick Santorum, robots, Scandal, science fiction, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, superheroes, superpowers, Sweden, terrorism, the Constitution, The Culture, the family, Tim Kaine, tuition, two-party system, white people, whiteness, work, xkcd
Happy Valentine’s Day Links!
* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.
* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.
* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”
* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?
* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.
* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.
KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’
The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.
* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.
Star Wars in the 1980s: laser swords and magic powers and what a cool ship
Star Wars in the 2010s: loving your kids will not protect them from the world or from themselves, and their talents will destroy their lives in the same way your talents destroyed yours, if not worse
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2018
* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.
* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.
* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.
* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’
* The Olympic hero for our time.
* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.
deporting a veteran who started using drugs to cope with untreated PTSD after being induced to serve in a war we shouldn’t be fighting by a promise of citizenship the country didn’t deliver on, to serve the racist whims of a universally loathed fascist the country didn’t vote for
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 2, 2018
* Know your police rape loopholes.
* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.
* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.
science fiction novel where an incredibly advanced society invents extreme life prolongation, which results in a now-immortal class of ultrawealthy perverts voting in fascists who appeal to their dim memories of the way the world worked when they were children
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 9, 2018
* In the richest country in human history.
* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.
* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?
* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!
* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.
* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.
* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.
* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.
* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.
* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.
Reading an unpublished @GerryCanavan paper on the contradictions of Black Panther: pic.twitter.com/HKjUmGAyVl
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) February 7, 2018
* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.
* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.
* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?
My favorite weird found-poetry I’ve discovered on this trip: in Switzerland and Germany first-person shooters are called “ego shooters.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2018
* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.
* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.
* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.
* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.
* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.
* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.
* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.
* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.
* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.
* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.
* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.
* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.
* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.
* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 13, 2018 at 10:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #quitlit, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Aetna, Afghanistan, Africa, afterlife, aliens, alt-right, Altered Carbon, Amazon, Amierca, animals, Annihilation, Antonio Gramsci, apocalypse, Arizona, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Billy Mitchell, birds, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, border patrol, breakfast, Bruce Springsteen, capitalism, cartoons, Case Western, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civilization, Civilization 6, Civilization V, class struggle, climate change, Cloverfield, Columbia University, concussions, conspiracy theory, crayfish, debt, democracy, Democrats, deportation, diabetes, digital economy, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, Donkey Kong, Dumbledore, dystopia, English departments, English majors, Episode 8, Europe, expanded universes, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, fascism, FEMA, feudalism, Firefly, first-person shooters, football, games, gay rights, gerrymandering, gig economy, graduate student unions, Groundhog Day, Han Solo, Harry Potter, health insurance, Heaven, Hell, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ice, immigration, Instagram, insulin, Jameson, Journal of Dracula Studies, Kentucky, Kim Stanley Robinson, Klingons, Laurence Tribe, lesbians, loneliness, Marxism, McCarthyism, MLA, Monopoly, music, my brans, my scholarly empire, Nazis, Netflix, nihilism, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oklahoma, Olympics, orcas, organized sarcasm, paranoia, pardons, Pennsylvania, pets, philosophy, photography, podcasts, police state, police violence, politics, polls, pollution, Puerto Rico, quit lit, rape, rape culture, reproductive futurity, Rick and Morty, robots, Rod Serling, Russia, science fiction, Serenity, SFRA, SFRA Review, slavery, South Africa, sports, Stanford, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, taxi waste, the Anthropocene, The Culture, The Good Place, the humanities, The King of Kong, The Last Jedi, the Olympics, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Twilight Zone, TNG, Trump, tweeting, Uber, voting, Wakanda, water, wealth, whales, white supremacists, Whole Foods, Winter Olympics, Worf, Žižek
Impeach Trump Now (and Other Links)
* I haven’t done a post like this in a while, so of course you have to catch up with the horrors of America collapsing around our ears. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Russia. Russia. Russia. The NSC memo was only last week! Republicans, Remove This Madman From Power.
Every minute this terrible man is in office is a shame from which this nation will never recover.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
* As White Supremacists Wreak Havoc, a University Becomes a Crisis Center.
* The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All.
* Slouching towards death squads.
* Defense fund for the protestors in Durham who pulled down the Old Soldier last night. A history. Gov. Roy Cooper calls for Confederate statues to come down in North Carolina. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery. These monuments should come down.”
Citizens unilaterally pulling down Confederate monuments their governments won’t is the most thrilling thing to happen in years.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
Pull down Confederate monuments from coast to coast!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
* After Obama’s 2008 Win, Indiana GOP Added Early Voting in White Suburb, Cut It in Indianapolis.
* Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
* Stop Calling Millennials the Facebook Generation. They’re The Student Loan Generation.
* 8 Times The World Narrowly Avoided A Potential Nuclear Disaster. This is how easy it would be for Trump to start a nuclear war. Averting Annihilation. Notes on Late Exterminism, the Trump Stage of Civilization. The Annihilator. Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War. Analysts are trying to work out what happens to the markets they cover in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence. The national security establishment versus the “madmen.” And from the archives.
The underlying logic is quite uncomplicated: unless America is the best and the most powerful, the entire world is forfeit. This is of course the brutish proposition that sustains American hegemony—that has sustained since it since the get-go. It’s the same threat whether it’s mouthed colorfully by Trump, or stated matter-of-factly by a career military officer like Defense Secretary James Mattis, who warned that “the DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” But as with so much else, hearing it laid out so baldly, in yet another unplanned and unvetted Trump ad-lib, has an arresting effect. As out of the mouths of babes, so out of the mouth of our President: the truth brings us up short. We move from an initial, disavowing reaction of “This. Is. Not. Normal” to a nauseous, self-implicating “Oh God, this is what normal always was.”
* Timely! Ava DuVernay is developing Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel, ‘Dawn’ as a television series.
* Now More than Ever, We Wish We Had These Lost Octavia Butler Novels.
* The “Weird Thoreau” on ecological fiction and the cult of climate-change denial.
* Half the GOP Base Say They Would Support Cancelling the 2020 Elections. The Other Half Won’t Admit It.
* Right-leaning media outlets have moral culpability for what is happening, if not legal culpability. They created this. The coming Civil War.
* Mom Deported Because She Didn’t Change Lanes.
* On Tuesday, they will reluctantly split up their family, flying to Mexico with their 12-year-old son to start a new life, while leaving their three older daughters — who are 16, 21 and 23 — behind in the U.S.
* Healthcare workers rally to halt Oakland nurse’s deportation.
* How ICE Is Using Big Data to Carry Out Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crusade. Private prison companies are saying Trump’s immigration crackdown is looking good for business.
* Thank you, Wisconsin, for the beautiful gift. Editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times.
* How to Tell If Your Eclipse Glasses or Handheld Solar Viewers Are Safe.
* Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence.
* Better Business through Sci-Fi.
* People in rich countries are dying of loneliness.
* The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music. Is it possible to swim through coins, Scrooge McDuck style?
* Forever Yesterday: Peering Inside My Mom’s Fading Mind.
* Biohackers encode malware within a strand of DNA.
* Side effects kill thousands but our data on them is flawed.
* Why do some people get so upset when we talk about how diverse the ancient Greek and Roman societies were? Because if Classical antiquity is the foundation of western civilization and they were multiracial/multiethnic societies, then the idea that western civilization is a white accomplishment based on a history of white superiority is called into question.
* Congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Measuring the slow death of the Rabid Puppies.
* On Game of Thrones, the Cracks Are Beginning to Show. It’s bad y’all.
People make fun of Tolkien for obsessing over dates + distances but he was right, when you don't your story becomes a cartoon. #GameOfThones
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 14, 2017
GAME OF THRONES S07E07: “The Swimmer”
Jon returns to Winterfell to find it in ruins; he has been gone for decades. Tyrion bakes a cake.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 14, 2017
* The Soul of the Gamer under Communism.
* What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology? To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.
* When Bill Murray Saw the Groundhog Day musical. UPDATE: Nothing gold can stay.
* A map for extraterrestrials to find Earth.
* “I came home because I believed what they said about the new system and that it was supposed to be the best in the world,” said Williams, 67. “But now it seems if we get hit by another Katrina, the city will be gone.”
* Learjet Liberalism: Advocates for climate action should stop defending the rich.
* And in a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 25th Amendment, academia, aliens, alt-right, Alzheimer's disease, America, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Ava DuVernay, Big Data, Bill Murray, Charlottesville, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, color, communism, cultural preservation, Dawn, death squads, Democrats, deportation, depression, Disney, DNA, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, DuckTales, Durham, ecology, eldercare, Game of Thrones, gaming, George R. R. Martin, Groundhog Day, hacking, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ice, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana, Jeff Vandermeer, Katrina, Koch brothers, liberals, loneliness, Lord of the Rings, medicine, memory, Mexico, military-industrial complex, millennials, murder, musicals, my scholarly empire, National Security Council, Nazis, New Orleans, New Weird, North Carolina, North Korea, nuclear wars, nuclearity, Oakland, Octavia Butler, Pantone, pardons, politics, Prince, prison-industrial complex, private prisons, protest, purple, Putin, Rabid Puppies, Republicans, rising sea levels, romance novels, run them down, Russia, Sad Puppies, science fiction, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, solar eclipse, student loans, Taylor Swift, terrorism, the Confederacy, the kids are all right, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Thoreau, Tolkien, true crime, UFOs, Virginia, Voyager spacecraft, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, weird fiction, white people, white supremacy, whiteness, Wonder Woman, Xenogenesis, you and I are gonna live forever
Infinite Sunday Infinite Reading
* From last week, a rare “actual content” post: White Male Critic Asks Why If Wonder Woman Is Really So Great Why Didn’t She Prevent the Holocaust.
* Princess Buttercup Became the Warrior General Who Trained Wonder Woman, All Dreams Are Now Viable. The Strange, Complicated, Feminist History of Wonder Woman’s Origin Story. Who mourns for the space kangaroos? I’m Pretty Sure Steve Trevor Lied About His Dick Size in Wonder Woman. Classic DC.
* Black Panther next! Everything We Learned From the Black Panther Teaser Trailer.
* Why you should go to the Octavia Butler sci-fi conference at the Huntington. I’ll be there!
* Bob Dylan Delivers His Nobel Prize Lecture, Just in Time.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Evergreen.
Weinstein’s Law states that in any campus argument the first person to call Fox News loses. https://t.co/dDvTH176OH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 10, 2017
* Evergreen headlines: Humanities Majors Drop.
* Eight reasons why universities can’t be the primary site of left organizing.
* UWSP student asks court to force poetry professor to give her an A.
* The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History.
* Fifty years of One Hundred Years of Solitude. No Magic, No Metaphor.
* Corbynmania! How Labour Did It. Why Corbyn Won. Theresa May’s desperation could undo peace in Northern Ireland.
* Excerpts from James Comey’s Opening Statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee or from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? The Comey testimony was riveting reality TV. I asked 6 legal experts if Trump obstructed justice. Here’s what they told me. Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren’t Going to Impeach Him. How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money into His Business. Trump’s DOJ says Trump can still get paid. Our A.I. President. A Noun, a Verb, and Vladimir Putin. All this and Trumpcare isn’t even dead. What Will Happen to Us? Four Cartoonists on A Life Without the Affordable Care Act.
“I cast Rule of Law.”
“The spell has no effect.”
“I cast Rule of Law.”
“The spell has no effect.”
“I cast Rule of Law.”
“The spell has no ef— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 8, 2017
But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?
— Moby Dick (@MobyDickatSea) May 4, 2016
* Reporter Covering Inauguration Protests Now Faces 75 Years in Prison.
* I think we may have had the Russians all wrong.
* Noam Chomsky explains the twentieth century.
* What if Your Cellphone Data Can Reveal Whether You Have Alzheimer’s?
* What’s really warming the world?
* Twilight of the comics direct market.
* Before I go: A mother’s hopeful words about life in its waning moments.
* The toddler survived with some scar tissue—but not everyone who gets Powassan, POW for short, is so lucky. With no treatment available, half of all people who contract the virus suffer permanent brain damage; 10 percent die. And while POW is nowhere near as prevalent as that other tick-borne summer scourge—Lyme—it is starting to show up more often.
* People tend to avoid sick people, even if they don’t consciously now that they are sick, according to a new study published in PNAS.
* The addicts next door. Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever. In one year, drug overdoses killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War did. The last words of a ‘heroin junkie’: There seems to be no escape.
* Not only will this happen in your lifetime — this tweet has accelerated the process.
10/2019: Chocula Revealed
5/2020: Boo Berry
10/2020: Untitled General Mills Project
5/2021: The Fruit Brute
10/2021: Chocula v. Frankenberry https://t.co/SIwttxFhv1— Todd VanDerWerff (@tvoti) June 7, 2017
* Shock finding: Tax evasion is shockingly prevalent among the very rich.
* On Aug. 15, 1977 at 10:16 p.m. ET Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected a curious signal from deep space. Nearly 40 years later, we finally know what caused it and, sadly, it’s not aliens.
* Donald/Donald. Don’t stop till you find the panda. How to succeed. Now my story can be told. Should we be concerned about that? What’s the problem with Florida? Can I interest you in a war on non-transport accidents? If you want a vision of the future. The state is that human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Zoos.
* In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground. Gut-wrenching.
* How Bostonians Defeated the Olympics.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* Peanuts and the Civil Rights Movement.
* ‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book.’
* For the first time ever, a video game has qualified for an Academy Award.
* When David Fincher nearly directed a Star Wars sequel trilogy.
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man…
* How Wookieepedia Tackles the Insanely Difficult Task of Chronicling the Entire Star Wars Universe.
* This week in the richest society in human history.
* At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard.
The all-rookie crew of Skylab 4, after discovering they were being secretly monitored & pushed to work 16 hour days mutinied after 6 weeks.
— Taylor R. Genovese (@trgenovese) June 9, 2017
* I’ve always known this is how it will end for me.
* Everett Hamner will be recapping Orphan Black season five for LARB.
* Some economies just can’t be disrupted. Grilled cheese for instance.
* So is — Mary Poppins? Fine, I guess.
* C. L. R. James in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism.
* Al Franken was a great guest on Marc Maron, if you missed it. Crazy to say it, I think he might actually run for president. Then again, why not him?
West’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is, and will always remain, the single most important screen incarnation of the character, for better or worse: For better because it was the most surprising, at times confounding, interpretation of the Caped Crusader, feather-light and hilarious precisely because of the character’s seeming lack of self-awareness; for worse, in the eyes of some fans, because it encouraged millions of people who had never picked up a Batman comic, or any comic, to be amused by the sight of adults dressing up in wild outfits and pretending to punch each other in the face. Every subsequent, high-profile reinvention of Batman, whether in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Tim Burton’s alternately perverse and sincere Batman and Batman Returns, Christopher Nolan’s operatic trilogy, and Zack Snyder’s funereal Batman vs. Superman, is, first and foremost, a reaction against the Adam West–driven Batman series.
* And the bad news never stops: Sleeping In Is Deadly, Popular People Live Longer, Adolescence Lasts Forever, and So Does High School.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 11, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic fraud, Academy Awards, actually existing media bias, Adam West, adolescence, AHCA, Al Franken, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animals, apocalypse, Apple, architecture, artificial intelligence, bad news everyone, Batman, Black Panther, Bob Dylan, books, Boston, breakfast, C-3PO, C.L.R. James, cancer, canon, cell phones, cereal, Chapel Hill, charity, Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, chocolate, civil rights movement, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, comics, communism, compatibilism, David Fincher, DC Cinematic Universe, DC Comics, death, death threats, democracy, denialism, disruption, Donald Duck, Donald Trump, drug addiction, ecology, elections, emoluments, environmental racism, Evergreen, film, Fox News, Fredric Jameson, free speech, free will, Gabriel García Márquez, games, grades, grading, grilled cheese, guns, health, health care, health insurance, high school, history, How the University Works, illness, impeachment, innovation, James Comey, Jeremy Corbyn, kids today, Labour Party, literature, loneliness, Lyme disease, magic, magical realism, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Poppins, Mike Flynn, Moby-Dick, monopoly of violence, monsters, mortality, my scholarly empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, Nina Riggs, Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize, Northern Ireland, obituary, Octavia Butler, Olympics, One Hundred Years of Solitude, opiates, Orphan Black, outer space, pandas, Peanuts, pinball, poetry, politics, pollution, popularity, Powassan virus, Princess Bride, prison-industrial complex, prisons, protest, R2-D2, race, racism, rich people, Robert E. Lee, rule of law, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sequels, Silicon Valley, Skylab, sleep, Snoopy, Star Wars, Steve King, strikes, student movements, tax evasion, television, the 1960s, the afterlife, the Constitution, the courts, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, The Negro Motorist Green-Book, The State, the truth is out there, Theresa May, ticks, UFOs, UNC, unions, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Utopia, Vikings, Vladimir Putin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, Wonder Woman, Wookieepedia, work, Wow! signal, WWI, WWII, WWIII, zoos
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.
Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU
— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016
* 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.
7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.
— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016
* 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.
Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL
— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016
* 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.
Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM
— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, Adam Kotsko, adjectives, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Alan Moore, alcohol, algorithms, Alice in Wonderland, America, animal personhood, animal research, animals, Apple, art, Art Spiegelman, austerity, Avatar, Balance of Terror, Barack Obama, basket of deplorables, Benjamin Robertson, Bill Clinton, Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter, Booster Gold, breastfeeding, Brexit, Britain, Bro Adams, Bugs Bunny, Camus, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, charity, China, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Newfield, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Civil War, class struggle, Clemson University, climate change, college majors, comics, communism, concussions, conspiracies, container ships, corporal punishment, credit scores, cryptozoology, cultural preservation, Dakota Access Pipeline, Dan Hassler-Forest, Darwing Duck, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, death, debt, deep time, Disney, Disney afternoon, Donald Trump, Donna Haraway, Douglas Adams, drama, Drug Enforcement Agency, drugs, DuckTales, Duke, Earth First, ecology, education, English, English departments, eschatology, eviction, Ewoks, faking your own death, fan culture, fantasy, fashion, first contact, FiveThirtyEight, flame trombones, Flat Earth, floods, FOIA, football, for-profit schools, Fordism, Fox News, Fred Moten, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Jameson, free speech, freedom of speech, games, gay issues, Gene L. Coon, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2016, genius, giraffes, graduate student life, graduate students, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda Jane, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, HBO, Hellboy, Henry Jenkins, heroin, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, homelessness, hydrofracking, illegal immigration, India, Infinite Jest, iPhones, Israel, ITT Tech, J.K. Rowling, Jack Daniels, James Tiptree Jr., Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, John Brunner, John C. Calhoun, John Carpenter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindergarten, King Lear, Klu Klux Klan, Kratom, labor, language, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Lewis Carroll, liberals, libraries, literature, lockouts, loneliness, Long Island University, magic, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, Making a Murderer, maladministration, mannequins, maps, Margaret Atwood, Maus, medical humanities, Mel Gibson, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, monsters, Montana, monuments, moral panic, Mother Theresa, musicals, my media empire, Nadja Spiegelman, names, narcissism, Nate Silver, Native Americans, NEH, neoliberalism, New York, NFL, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nostalgia, novels, obituary, oil spills, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, pennies, philanthropy, philosophy, Poe's Law, poetry, Pokémon Go, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, polls, Polygraph, pre-K, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, public universities, Quebec, queer readings writing themselves, race, racism, rape culture, Raymond Chandler, reaction, reactionaries, reading, religion, retirement plans, Richmond, rising sea levels, Roger Ailes, Romulans, sabotage, saints, Salvador Dali, Samsung, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scabs, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Shakespeare, slave trade, slavery, socialism, sound, Soviet Union, speculation, speculative fiction, speculative finance, sports, Stand on Zanzibar, Standing Rock, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, stillbirth, Stranger Things, strikes, student debt, student loans, student movements, surrealism, taste, teaching, tech trash, tenure, text adventures, textual histories, the Anthropcene, the avant-garde, the Capitalocene, the Chthulhucene, The City on the Edge of Forever, the courts, the Flood, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the humanities, the law, The Night Of, the oceans, The Passion of the Christ, the revolution, The Space Merchants, The Stranger, The Thing, the university in ruins, theater, theory, Thirteenth Amendment, TIAA-CREF, TNG, Tolkien, totality, trans* issues, transmedia, trees, trigger warnings, true crime, Trump TV, UIUC, Underground Railroad, unions, University of Chicago, Utopia, Virginia, Vonnegut, Vox, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Westeros, white people, wilderness, Wisconsin, words, WPA, writing, Zack Snyder
Ten Thousand Tuesday Links
* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.
* Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?
* Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.
* Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.
* How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.
* Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.
Accidentally read another thinkpiece hectoring UW acs for daring to think of themselves while adjuncts exist. So wrongheaded on every level.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015
Anyone who thinks what’s happening in Wisconsin is welcome news for contingent faculty, adjuncts, or grad students is completely deluded.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015
what if i told you “UW could see increase in adjunct faculty under proposed budget cuts” https://t.co/iajYj1Yd6R
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015
* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.
* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.
* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.
* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.
* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.
* America is still incredibly segregated.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
My sister is doing an experiment: Whenever men walk towards her, she doesn’t move out of the way first. So far she has collided with 28 men.
— Anna Breslaw (@annabreslaw) December 13, 2014
* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.
* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!
* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.
* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.
* NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.
* Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation, which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.
* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.
* What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.
* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.
* Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!
* Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.
* The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.
* 100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.
* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.
* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.
* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.
* Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.
* Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.
* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.
* Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.
* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”
* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.
* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.
* Language is like gymnastics.
* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 9, 2015 at 12:36 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic job market, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, airport security, Alison Bechdel, alpha males, America, anti-capitalism, Apple Watch, architecture, Assata Shakur, austerity, Bernie Sanders, beta males, brands, bureaucracy, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, CEOs, chimps, claw machines, comics, costumes, customer service, Democratic primary 2016, don't go to grad school, drones, Duquesne University, ecology, economics, energy, EPA, feminism, FIFA, fracking, Frank Lloyd Wright, Fun Home, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, George R. R. Martin, gig economy, gigs, gymnastics, Harry Potter, Hillary Clinton, hoaxes, Hogwarts, How the University Works, Internet, Islam, J.K. Rowling, Jesuits, jobs, Kalief Browder, labor, language, loneliness, manslamming, Marquette, masculinity, McKinny, metric system, Mexican standoffs, middlemen, Milwaukee, monkeys, musicals, my particular demographic, neoliberalism, Oklahoma, Ozymandias, pedagogy, poets, political correctness, pools, prejudice, privilege, psychics, Quidditch, race, racism, recommendation letters, renewable energy, Saturday Night Live, scams, schools, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Shorewood, skepticism, snow leopards, soccer, social media, solitary confinement, St. Louis University, student movements, suicide, Tarantino, teaching, tenure, the humanities, the past is another country, torture, TSA, unions, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, UWM, voter registration, voting, war on education, warp drives, Wisconsin, wolf packs, wolves, Women's World Cup, words, work, zoos, Žižek
All the July 4th Links You Wanted — And More!
* The Declaration of Independence has a typo; America is abolished. Happy Fourth of July.
* America at 238, by the numbers.
* Hobby Lobby as Pandora’s Box. The icing on the cake.
* Like the Founders intended, an investigation into Blackwater was squashed after a top manager threatened to murder a State department official. Checks and balances. The system works.
I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.
* As a Canadian I rather like the idea of the American Revolution being aborted and our Yankee cousins staying within the Empire. Among other things it would have meant that slavery would have ended in America a generation earlier and without violence (the British outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1834).
* Meanwhile, a great moment in American democracy.
* Great new web comic from Jason Shiga, whose Fleep and Meanwhile I’ve praised here before.
* Some Dawn of the Planet of the Apes prequels.
* A new China Miéville short story.
* Gynofuturism: Zoe Saldana says the best roles for women are in space.
* Here’s a List of What Junot Díaz Wants You to Read.
* Judy Clarke defends the indefensible.
* Maria Bamford’s new web series wants to put you in The Program.
* Philosophy Job Placement 2011-2014: Departments with Relatively High Placement Rates.
* Lionel Messi Is Impossible. More.
* How Belgium built one of the top contenders for the 2014 World Cup, and what the team means to this fractious nation. How Tourette’s-afflicted Tim Howard went from international ridicule to World Cup history. Really, All Hail Tim Howard. How Spain Succumbed to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Why the last group stage game is played simultaneously. Who Won the World Cup of Arm-Folding?
* Zwarte Piets were once openly characterized as Santa’s slaves. Man, Santa’s legacy is complicated.
* Cop Keeps Job After Violently Shoving Paraplegic Man From Wheelchair. The search continues for something a cop can do that will actually cost them their job.
* At time of austerity, 8 universities spent top dollar on Hillary Rodham Clinton speeches.
* The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the basic human right we all know about to see other people’s faces in public.
* A radical reply to Hobby Lobby: Take Away the Entire Welfare State From Employers. And another: Hobby Lobby, Student Loans, and Sincere Belief.
* The rules underpinning Porky Pig’s stutter.
* Shirley Jackson reads “The Lottery.”
* Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
* Oklahoma is now the earthquake capital of the country, thanks to tracking.
* Membership has its privileges: African leaders vote to give themselves immunity from war crimes.
* A Brief History of the Smithsonian.
* A People’s History of the Peeing Calvin Decal.
* In 1990 this nation faced a horrifying outbreak of Richard Nixon rap parodies. This is that story. (via @sarahkendzior)
* Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out.
* The arc of history is long &c: Oakland Raiders Will Pay Cheerleaders Minimum Wage This Season.
* American Gods is alive! It’s on Starz, but it’s alive!
* “Exclamation points have played a distinguished role in the history of Marxism.” Why We’re Marxists.
* SMBC on fire: If God is omniscient and omnipotent, how could he let this happen? Telepathy machines were created. Check Your Bat-Privilege. I’m the superfluous female protagonist.
* Scenes from the next Paolo Bacigalupi novel: An abandoned mall in Bangkok has been overtaken by fish.
* The UNC fake-classes scandal has gotten so outrageous even the NCAA has been forced to pay attention.
* Should “free college” be framed as a right or a privilege?
* When two good guys with guns confront one another.
* The Hard Data on UFO Sightings: It’s Mostly Drunk People in the West.
* Let’s colonize ourselves by 3D printing ourselves on other planets.
* Catfish and American Loneliness.
* The Hooded Utilitarian has been running an Octavia Butler Roundtable.
* Another Pixar conspiracy theory: the truth about Andy’s Dad.
* All about the miraculous Community revival. And more. Yay!
* Introducing the Critical Inquiry Review of Books.
* And some more good news! Bear rescued after head gets stuck in cookie jar. Happy Fourth of July!
Written by gerrycanavan
July 4, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, academic jobs, Africa, alcohol, alternate history, America, American Gods, animals, austerity, Bangkok, Batman, bears, Belgium, Blackwater, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cartoons, Catfish, checks and balances, cheerleaders, China Miéville, class struggle, climate change, college sports, community, contraception, cookie jars, Critical Inquiry, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Declaration of Independence, defense attorneys, democracy, Demon, depression, disability, earthquakes, exclamation points, Facebook, fish, Fleep, football, Fourth of July, guns, gynecology, gynofuturism, heroines, Hillary Clinton, Hobby Lobby, human rights, hydrofracking, Islamophobia, Jason Shiga, Judy Clarke, Junot Díaz, Lionel Messi, loneliness, Looney Tunes, malls, Maria Bamford, Marxism, Meanwhile, medicine, mercenaries, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Mississippi, museums, NCAA, Neil Gaiman, neuroeconomics, NFL, Oakland Raiders, Octavia Butler, Oklahoma, outer space, Paolo Bacigalupi, pelvic exams, philosophy, Pixar, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, Porky Pig, problem of evil, quantum mechanics, rap, religion, Richard Nixon, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, Shirley Jackson, short stories, slavery, Smithsonian, soccer, Spain, sports, student debt, Tea Party, teaching, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, telepathy, television, the Constitution, the courts, the Founders, the law, The Lottery, The Program, the West, theory, Thurgood Marshall, Tim Howard, Toy Story, typos, UFOs, UNC, war crimes, web comics, welfare state, women, World Cup, Zoe Saldana, zoos, Zwarte Piet
Some Links for the Weekend!
* After compiling extensive data from over 600 LEGO sets, students found that most Lego sets were marketed almost exclusively to boys and included very few female mini-figures. And, as one student wrote, “if there is a lego girl, she is either covered in make up or a Damsel in Distress.”
* Marvel and the war machine. Dragonlance and loneliness. Star Trek continuity: Talmudic and fundamentalist paradigms.
* Meanwhile the he-wasn’t-really-Khan heresy extends its influence.
* The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is establishing a major new center for the analysis of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the only such center based in a public research library, Schomburg officials said on Thursday.
* Milwaukee Bar Celebrates World Cup In Most Tone Deaf Way Possible. Could the 2022 World Cup really move from Qatar to the USA? Losing Brazil. The World Cup and Utopia.
The tournament is sold to us as the story of a level playing field from which a few deserving souls might be elevated to something more spectacular than equal access to opportunity. As if the latter were a given in our lives, and not, in fact, the elusive aim of an ongoing struggle. The level playing field of a bright green square of uniform grass produces a world of losers. What keeps the World Cup in place? What keeps national associations under FIFA’s sway?Who on earth really wants yet another tournament that concludes with a cynical exchange of fouls by two teams we imagine as enemies but who are, really, two sides of the same coin? Where, the fan asks, do we turn for a glimpse of some other possibility?
* The headline reads, “Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown.”
* Like Edge of Tomorrow, but every time he wakes up he has to invade Iraq again.
* 12 Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World.
* Only the young rich can save us now, Community ratings edition. Dan Harmon remains pessimistic about revival, but teases a potential sequel series.
* The violence of the system: A Pennsylvania mother of seven died in a jail cell where she was serving a two-day sentence for her children’s absence from school, drawing complaints from the judge that sent her there about a broken system that punishes impoverished parents.
* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.
* The Turing Test is complete nonsense, but this chatbot doesn’t even come close.
* Game of Thrones: Westeros High.
* Labor and/vs. the environment.
* Chris Hedges and plagiarism.
* Academic freedom watch 2014.
* And why didn’t anyone warn us! Baby No. 2 Is Harder on Mom Than Dad.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 13, 2014 at 8:06 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, America, artificial intelligence, Beverly Cleary, books, children's literature, civil unrest, community, Connor, continuity, Dan Harmon, Don't mention the war, Dragonlance, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, futurity, Game of Thrones, government, homelessness, Iraq, Khan, kids today, labor, LEGO, libraries, loneliness, Marvel, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mothers, Occupy, parenting, patriarchy, prison-industrial complex, Qatar, Ramona, ratings, science, science fiction, sexism, slavery, sports, Star Trek, television, the Pentagon, Turing Test, unions, Utopia, war on the poor, warp drive, World Cup
Television as Sociality
“As the sociologist Ron Lembo has shown, the TV offers solace in an otherwise isolated existence.” —Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works
How and why we watch. This may wind up as an early reading on the syllabus for my television class next week.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 14, 2010 at 11:33 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with community, consumer culture, loneliness, pedagogy, social media, Stanley Aronowitz, television, what it is I think I'm doing
Two Tragic Tastes That Taste Tragic Together
Two recent headlines tugged at my heartstrings: Could ocean acidification deafen dolphins? and Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies. Naturally the universe has found a way to combine these into a single, terrible Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of Tragedy.
For the last 12 years, a single solitary whale whose vocalizations match no known living species has been tracked across the Northeast Pacific. Its wanderings match no known migratory patterns of any living whale species. Its vocalizations have also subtly deepened over the years, indicating that the whale is maturing and ageing. And, during the entire 12 year span that it has been tracked, it has been calling out for contact from others of its own kind.
It has received no answer. Nor will it ever.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 6, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with despair, dolphins, existential dread, language, loneliness, ocean acidification, tragedy, whales