Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Lord of the Rings

Thanksgiving Links!

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Yes, but: the comic.

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

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

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

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

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

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

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

Written by gerrycanavan

November 22, 2022 at 11:35 am

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Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

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

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

Written by gerrycanavan

October 24, 2022 at 9:00 am

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new fall course: “Histories of Anti-Capitalism”!

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I’ve got a great schedule lined up for Fall: a special version of my Tolkien course partnering with UWM and linking up with the Haggerty’s “Art of the Manuscript” exhibit, and a grad special topics course called “Histories of Anti-Capitalism.” Here’s a course description — suggestions very welcome!

Other English Fall course descriptions are trickling in here

Course Title: Histories of Anti-Capitalism

Coure Description: “We live in capitalism,” Ursula K. Le Guin once said. “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” This course will take a long view of anti-capitalist thought, from the Luddite revolt of the early nineteenth century to the ongoing climate strikes of Greta Thunberg—investigating where resistance to capitalism has flourished and where it has failed, as well as where it has intersected with important trends in feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, LGBTQ+, ecological, and disability activism. We will also explore the speculative literary genre of utopia, and explore how its utopian, quasi-utopian, heterotopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have reflected, inspired, and critiqued the left’s centuries-long struggle against capitalist realism.

Readings: We will consider a wide mix of literary, historical, and critical-theoretical documents of anti-capitalist and counter-hegemonic thought from the last two-hundred-plus years. A final reading list is still being constructed (and very open to suggestions!), but major literary authors could include such figures as Edward Bellamy, Samuel Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Chinua Achebe, Gene Roddenberry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and major theorists could include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Vandana Shiva, Enrique Dussel, Donna Haraway, David Graeber, and José Esteban Muñoz, among many others.

Assignments: Final critical paper or creative project; symposium presentation; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic and informed class participation

Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!

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Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?

… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?

Written by gerrycanavan

March 12, 2022 at 6:38 pm

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Lost Semester Linkblogging!

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For a variety of reasons, this was an extremely busy semester, and I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my open tabs (I had several hundred open at one point!). An irrecoverable browser crash killed any possibility of ever doing even an omnibus record of what I’ve been reading and thinking about — but I do have a tiny number of highlights from the semester that I will link here just to close the book on it. I’m hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, that I can get back to a more regular update schedule in the spring…

Apologies!

The podcast will also be coming back too for the end of the Achebe season! Stay tuned.

Just Another Monday Morning, Just Another Set of Monday Morning Links

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

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Written by gerrycanavan

August 10, 2021 at 7:00 am

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Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy

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Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...

First, just a few things I’ve been doing:

And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:

Written by gerrycanavan

May 11, 2021 at 1:41 pm

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March Links!

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Written by gerrycanavan

March 6, 2021 at 9:04 am

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It’s Been a Minute: Links!

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Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?

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This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:

Written by gerrycanavan

October 30, 2020 at 4:29 pm

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Sunday Morning Links!

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* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…

* Apocalypse Now: Covid-19 and the SF Imaginary: Gerry Canavan, Jennifer Cooke and Caroline Edwards in conversation with Paul March-Russell.

* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.

* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.

USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.

* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.

* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.

* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.

* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.

* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.

* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.

* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.

* Ghouls, ghouls, ghouls.

* Andrew Cuomo, Leader.

Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.

* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.

9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.

* Are You Overpraising Your Child?

* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.

* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.

* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?

* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”

* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.

* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.

Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.

* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.

* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.

* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.

* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.

* The Evolution of Ransomware.

* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.

* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.

* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.

* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.

How UFO culture took over America.

* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.

* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!

* In search of Bombadil.

(Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.

* #MLA21 goes virtual.

* What about the bad job offers?

* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.

* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’

* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.

* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.

* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.

* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 23, 2020 at 9:55 am

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Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links

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* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…

For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans.  The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.

* On a Knife’s Edge.

* Rethinking MLA 2021.

* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.  

Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.

* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.

* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.

* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.

8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.

* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.

Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

* The Last Giraffes on Earth.

* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.

Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.

How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?

There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.

* Once again: against homework.

The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.

* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.

* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell

* Your Predominantly White Academic Organization (Yes, Even Yours) Is Exactly One Live-Tweeted Racist Event Away from Public Disgrace.

U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.

How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.

* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.

A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

* The Racist History of Tipping.

* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.

* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.

* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.

* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.

J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.

The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.

Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.

What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.

* The fight against racism starts at home.

* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.

* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.

* Don’t tease us Doc.

* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since

* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today

* cat in the furnace, check

* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked

* Two Americas.

* always has been — always has been

* just an update for all you non-biologists out there that biology twitter is currently in meltdown because a journal editor said some worms are overrated

* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.

* I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you fucking deserve

* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.

* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?

* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?

* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.

* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”

* Yet another Watchmen sequel.

* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’

Written by gerrycanavan

July 27, 2020 at 7:30 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!

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* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…

* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!

* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”

* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…

* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.

* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.

* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.

* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.

* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.

An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.

* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.

* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.

* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.

* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.

* Read it and weep, my friend.

Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”

 

Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.

Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.

* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.

* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.

When Will Capitalism End?

* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.

* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.

* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.

* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.

* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.

Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.

The best COVID-19 response in the world.

* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.

* Žižek vs. the virus.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.

* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.

* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.

The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.

What Is College Worth?

For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.

Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.

John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”

* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.

The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.

* Before the End.

J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.

* All the signs were there.

* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.

* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.

Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.

Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.

* The Prophecies of Q.

* Facebook researched the affect of its own platform on polarization and found that “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and then largely shelved its study, the WSJ reports.

The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.

* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.

* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.

How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.

* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.

* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.

Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!

* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.

* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.

* Rumors of Goonies 2.

* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”

* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.

* Racism and the porn industry.

* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.

D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.

* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.

* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

“What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.

Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.

‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.

John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.

* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?

* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’

* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.

Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.

* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.

There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.

I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.

Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.

* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).

*  I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.

* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.

* The Case against Mars.

Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.

* fMRIs (still) don’t work.

* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.

* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”

* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.

When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.

* Civil War ends.

* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.

* My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”

* This is how you get Skynet.

* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.

Written by gerrycanavan

June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else

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* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.

* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”

* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.

* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!

* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.

* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.

* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.

* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.

What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.

* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.

* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.

* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.

* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?

* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.

* Quarantine fatigue is real.

The COVID-19 Conjuncture.

* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.

The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.

Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.

* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.

* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.

* Four months as a private prison guard.

Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.

* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.

The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.

* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.

We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.

Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.

* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.

* Why Zoom Is Terrible.

The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.

So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?

* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.

* Flood and evacuations, including a looming environmental disaster at the Dow Chemical plant in Michigan.

* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.

* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.

Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.

* Charlie Brooker taps out.

The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.

* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.

* Take that, STEM!

* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.

* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.

Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

* How we got to Sesame Street.

Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.

* CBS All-Access gonna try again.

Coronavirus shutdowns exposed the fragility of the comic book industry. How will those in the Pacific Northwest comics scene survive?

* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.

* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.

* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.

* 36,000 Feet Under the Sea.

* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.

All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.

* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?

Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.

* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.

* No one knows what a g looks like.

* This one cuts deep.

* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.

* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread

* society if dads went to therapy

* made a Rube Goldberg machine

* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.

* Well this is just silly.

* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.

Written by gerrycanavan

May 22, 2020 at 9:01 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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