Friday Links Are Just a Party and Parties Aren’t Meant to Last

* Out today, a project very close to my heart: my edited 2016 rerelease of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Here’s the Amazon order page, for you or your favorite academic library!

* The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s. The Mobile Academic.

* The strange story of Hugo Gernsback, who brought science fiction magazines to America.

* Just in time for finals! MLA Eighth Edition: What’s New and Different.

* At LARoB Rebecca Evans reviews the reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Green Earth. David Perry reviews The Secret Life of Stories. Against Star Wars. Inside the Coetzee Collection.

* My desire to see The Twilight Zone has boomeranged on me in the most ironic possible way.

* An independent researcher claims to have discovered a lost civilization in China.

* Existential Depression in Gifted Children.

* Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man. Buzzfeed’s The Most Powerful Writing about Prince. Nation Too Sad To F*ck Even Though It’s What Prince Would Have Wanted.

Evidence is scant, but historians now believe the ancient Americans worshipped a fertility god they called “Prince.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 21, 2016

* The Secret Life of Novelizations.

* The Hidden Economics of Porn.

* Five Hundred Years of Utopia.

* Harriet Tubman once staged a sit-in to get $20. The Treasury just gave her all of them. You have no idea how hardcore Harriet Tubman really was.

* The smug style in American liberalism.

* How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.

* How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated.

* How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months.

* Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.

* Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem. Related: 25 Best Wisconsin High Schools: U.S. News Rankings 2016.

* Against Activism.

* For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress.” Bernie Sanders offers a different way forward. How Sanders fell short. The real scandal.

* 12 Reasons Not to Write Lord of the Rings.

* I Talked to the Kid Whose Mom Used Craigslist to Find Him a Feminism Tutor, and It Got Weird.

* Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea. Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric.

* Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors. But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

* Details arise about U.S. Bank robbery in the Alumni Memorial Union.

* Behold, the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.

* The Tragic History of RC Cola.

* U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.

* Hamilton just won the Pulitzer for drama. Here’s why it matters for American musicals. And congrats to Emily Nussbaum!

* This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress.

* The Average 29-Year-Old.

* Milwaukee’s Appeals, Vibrant and Cheap.

* First Criminal Charges Handed Down After Flint Water Crisis.

* A man once described as a “perfect donor” at an August, Georgia sperm bank and who fathered at least 36 children around the world is actually a mentally ill felon whose lies on his donor forms went undiscovered for more than a decade.

* We owe Rey and Finn’s friendship to Harrison Ford’s broken leg.

* Love It Or List It sued over shoddy renovations, ridiculous falsehoods.

* As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters.

* Hello, from the Magic Tavern watch! There’s two noncanonical podcasts from Foon-16 over at One Shot. There’s also a band new, slightly less… rigorous improv podcast from some of the principals involved called Siblings Peculiar.

* The U.S.’s Best High School Starts at 9:15 a.m.

* Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science.

* New Evidence Suggests That Limbs and Fins Evolved From Fish Gills.

* How to Shakespeare.

* Cards Against Humanities.

* And rejoice, comrades! Twilight Struggle has come to Steam.

still a great tweet, now more than ever https://t.co/i0yOcGbuuv

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2016

Can It Be? More Wednesday Links?

* …as long as critics and publishers frame African literature as always on the cusp, it will continue to be an emerging literature whose emergence is infinitely deferred. It will remain utopian, just out of reach.

* Also from Aaron Bady: ‘House of Cards’ Should Stop Trying to Be ‘The West Wing.’

* Never tell me the odds.

* How To Lower Univ. of Illinois Tuition (and it can work at other universities too).

* The Corinthian 15.

* Columbia Graduate Students Push for a Labor Union.

* The Loser Edit That Awaits Us All.

* How One University Unexpectedly Found Itself Ranked Among the ‘25 Most Dangerous Colleges.’ This is pretty horrifying, even before you get to my intuition that this is all prelude to an extortion scheme.

* Teaching evaluations: still bad! Don’t use them!

* Legendary, lost civilization discovered in Honduras rainforest 1,000 years later.

* Brian Williams has finally found the women responsible for his mistakes.

* Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon.

* My name is Ozymandias, Sim of Sims — look upon my work, ye Maxis, and despair.

* Remember the Maryland parents who let their two kids walk home from a park alone and then had to deal with police and child protective services? They heard from the state today. The couple was found responsible for “unsubstantiated” child neglect, a confusing charge that resolved nothing and left the couple possibly more nervous and paranoid than ever.

* Pharrell Made Only $2,700 In Songwriter Royalties From 43 Million Plays Of ‘Happy’ On Pandora. Disruptatational! Innovasmagoric!

* Daddy, what do you want me to be when I grow up?

* And from the too-good-to-check file: Profile of Hulk, a 175-pound pit bull.

Tuesday!

* Grieving, From Asbury Park. Clarence Clemons and the History of the Rock Sideman. With Clarence Clemons, the notes that mattered most weren’t on the saxophone.

* Mysteries of Göbekli Tepe.

Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife. “I, my colleagues, we all thought, What? How?” Schmidt said. Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. The accomplishment was astonishing, but it was hard to understand how it had been done or what it meant. “In 10 or 15 years,” Schmidt predicts, “Göbekli Tepe will be more famous than Stonehenge. And for good reason.”

* Of course you had me at Barthelme in Space.

* Mother Jones and a brief history of the speedup.

Webster’s defines speedup as “an employer’s demand for accelerated output without increased pay,” and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.

But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is “productivity,” a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don’t you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked) consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Except what’s good for American business isn’t necessarily good for Americans. We’re not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory…

* UNC gets hit with a Notice of Allegations from the NCAA.

* And really, honestly: how much jewelry does Newt Gingrich buy?

Thursday Night

* Every blog on the Internet is required to link to this Shakespearification of the entire script of The Big Lebowski.

BLANCHE
Whither the money, Lebowski? Faith, we are servants of Bonnie; promised by the lady good that thou in turn were good for’t.
WOO
Bound in honour, we must have our bond; cursed be our tribe if we forgive thee.
BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.
WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.
[They insert his head into the commode]
BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.
WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?
THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.
WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.
[They again insert his head into the commode]

* Sad news: New Jersey did not listen to Bruce. More here and here.

* More on the heretofore unknown ancient civilization being uncovered by deforestation in the Amazon in the New Yorker.

* More zombie television: MTV has licensed Dawn of the Dead.

* Look At This Fucking Idea For A Blog-To-Book Deal.

* John McWhorter on the death of languages. Via io9.

* ‘Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper.’

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

Via Kottke.

* And, for the first time ever, Fox News has been caught doing something dishonest.

Monday Midday

* Some in the Obama administration want the expansion of the increasingly misnamed war in Afghanistan to include drone attacks on cities in Pakistan the size of San Francisco:

“If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious,” said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning.

Well, we certainly can’t have that. Via Kevin Drum, who says “history is rhyming.”

* Following up on earlier posts: Timo tracks down more fake English in response to this post while this morning’s Muppet post prompts Eli to report that the Jim Henson biopic The Muppet Man is both promising and doomed.

* Meanwhile, President Lieberman remains the talk of the Internets. Does Joe have principles? (Only one.) Is Joe smart? (Not really.) What are our options now? (Not many.) Did Lieberman really endorse the Medicare buy-in compromise he’s now rejecting just three months ago? (Of course he did.)  Is it time for reconciliation? Josh Marshall still says no. Open Left says it doesn’t matter how, just get it done. There are even conflicting reports that the White House may be backing Lieberman’s latest tantrum. Taibbi weeps.

* ‘Philosophy prof won’t go to jail for making unofficial Derrida translations available to students.’ Jail’s too good for him!

* Also at Boing Boing: ‘Man returns library book due in 1955.’ What I like about this story is that he specifically took advantage of a late-book amnesty to do an almost $2000 fine. Kafka weeps.

* In the Yes Men’s first transatlantic action, an email purported to be an official Environment Canada press release this afternoon announced an incredibly ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. It also went on to commit Canada to paying 1% and eventually up to 5% of its GDP in 2030 to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

* The New Yorker analyzes China’s climate and energy policy.

* Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilization are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Also via MeFi.

* “James Chartrand” tells the story of how picking a male pseudonym got her more freelancing gigs and more money for them. Via MetaFilter.

* The end of Haloscan. Looks like I helicoptered out of Blogspot just in time.