Posts Tagged ‘magic’
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!
* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.
* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?
* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.
* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.
* The market can’t solve a massacre.
And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”
* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.
* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.
* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.
* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.
* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.
* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.
* The rise of the prison state.
* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.
* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.
* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.
* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.
* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.
* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.
* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.
* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.
* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.
* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.
* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.
* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.
* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.
* Hate spree killings in Austin.
* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.
* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.
* Happy International Women’s Day.
* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.
* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.
* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.
* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.
* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.
I May Have Committed A Little Light Treason Links
* thisisfine.jpg: An iceberg the size of Delaware has broken off Antarctica. My kids are three and five. Just 90. And you’re a little late.
* Blogger completely debunks claim Amelia Earhart was a Japanese prisoner.
* CFP: The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy, University of California, Irvine, on April 26–29, 2018. CFP: Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction. And our deadline was extended a month with the rest of the SUS: Suvin Today?, A Roundtable Discussion, The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN).
* Nothing now would better serve the maturity and the invigoration of the Democrats than to give up any hope of sound advice or renewal from Bill or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They were pleasant to think about, but their politics have turned out wrong, and there’s nothing they can do for us now. The Age of Detesting Trump.
* Fredo, Fredo, Fredo. I tried to warn you: These revelations—and the possibility that more is yet to come—have made it increasingly untenable for Trump’s supporters to argue that there is nothing to the collusion story. And so, many have now begun to argue that even if there was collusion of the kind suggested by the Times, it wouldn’t be a crime—or even all that out of the ordinary. Some Trump loyalists are even making the case that it was smart and savvy for the campaign to pursue help from the Russians. Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
* I mean the wheels are really coming off.
* Trump still hasn’t resigned from his businesses like he promised, either.
* Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen: The Democrats! The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans.
* The attempt to stay faithful to the actual facts of the world that would make this impossible tanks the piece, but the overall message — that our political elites are soulless monsters without any hint of integrity or principle — is absolutely sound: What If Trump Had Won As a Democrat?
* Democrats should take the class warfare message to upscale suburbs.
* Science Fiction and Dystopia in the Age of Trump.
* What happens to America if Anthony Kennedy retires?
* Cancer researcher was held at Boston airport. Now he is being sent back to Iran.
* 23 emotions people feel, but can’t explain.
* Space colonization, faith, and Pascal’s Wager.
* In St. Louis, America’s nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.
* Between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. Rent Is Affordable to Low-Wage Workers in Exactly 12 U.S. Counties.
* Stage four credentialing. The Library of Heaven.
* The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) garnered more than 3,000 complaints regarding the uniforms. They conducted their own tests and found concerning evidence: a short-sleeved jacket had levels of cadmium, a highly toxic chemical, that were above the acceptable textile industry standard. The tests also found traces of formaldehyde, nickel, and tetrachlorophenol, all of which can cause major irritations. Formaldehyde, for instance, is even on the American Cancer Society’s list of known human carcinogens. What’s more, in 2011, Alaska Airlines experienced a very similar problem after issuing uniforms from Twin Hill. Around 10 percent of employees reported reactions and that airline issued a recall. Despite this damning evidence, American Airlines maintains that their uniforms are safe.
* Looking forward to this movie: Chicago Library Seeks Help Transcribing Magical Manuscripts.
* Gotta love a headline that has the courage of its convictions: CRISPR gene editing technique is probably safe, study confirms.
* We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. America leads the world in drug overdose deaths — by a lot. Trump-Loving Sheriff Won’t Let Deputies Carry Overdose Antidote. A Small-Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs.
* The Klan comes (back) to Charlottesville.
* Drones keep dropping drugs and porn into prisons.
* Yes! Yes! Yes! And I’m especially all in for this: Quentin Tarantino’s Next Movie Will Be About the Manson Family.
* Remembering Milwaukee’s Own Cordwainer Smith.
* The mass defunding of higher education that’s yet to come.
* Jeff VanderMeer Amends the Apocalypse. Russia 1917: You Are There. Nor Secret Griefs Nor Grudges: Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances. Cottage Industry.
* The racial daring of Sundance’s Cleverman gives it an edge most superhero stories can’t match.
* The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.
* As you can probably tell by looking around, every employee at our startup is 23 years old. On the morning of your 24th birthday, the barcode on your employee ID stops working and you can no longer enter our building. We do this to ensure our company has a ceaseless, youthful energy. We believe old people are displeasing to look at and also, bad at ideas.
* Nightmare jobs I’d never even though about: Rape Choreography Makes Films Safer, But Still Takes a Toll on Cast and Crew.
* First object teleported to Earth’s orbit.
* Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again! Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood in conversation.
July the 5th Be With You Links
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose “job hunt” turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my “individualized” health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* * The “mass graves” story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution.Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman’s name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we know her story?
* CTRL-F “rape” CTRL-F “slave” CTRL-F “Hemings”
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings’s slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
* Dear TNI Contributors, Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, too.
* In sum, here’s what they found: If you’re going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* ‘Beta Males’ Want To Kill Women Because They Can’t Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn’t? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don’t ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don’t worry folks; we’ve got this.
It’s called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of ’90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn’t die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don’t speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don’t speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don’t Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Thursday Links!
* Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.
* Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio.
* Indeed, this kind of repression is perhaps more sinister because it ropes you into participating in your own silencing. You become the policeman in your own head. When considering whether to attend a demonstration, the powerful internal suggestion is that, even if you do everything “right”—even if you are being peaceful but just happen to be in the same vicinity as someone who isn’t—you could get caught up in a costly legal battle and face serious fines, even jail time. Your entire life could be turned upside down. You might be left alone. But it’s impossible to know—and the only way to be sure is to stay home. You still have the “freedom” to choose, but fully exercising that freedom amounts to playing Russian roulette with an entity all too eager to take that freedom away if you get caught standing near a smashed window. So, really, how much freedom do you have?
* The government is spying on journalists to find leakers.
* Not exactly happily, I found this AAUP unpacking of procedural issues in the recent John McAdams decision pretty persuasive.
* An oral history of “The Inner Light.” The second-best discussion of “The Inner Light” you’ll see this year!
* Monopoly vs. the Nazis: How British intelligence used board games to thwart the Germans.
* How Jalada Is a “Revolution Uniting African Literature.”
* Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting. Here’s why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner. More. Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation. They’re also looking into Trump’s personal attorney.
* Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules.
* “He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,” says someone who speaks with the President. “I see him emotionally withdrawing. He’s gained weight. He doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts.” This is the most relatable Trump has ever been.
* Rise and shine, campers, ’cause it’s coooooold out there today.
* Don’t put ground wasp nest on your vagina to tighten muscles, warns gynecologist.
* California Single Payer Is a No-Brainer.
* If you want a vision of every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.
* SMBC roundup! We discovered a new form of ethical animal consumption. The older you are, the more people you have to deal with, so the number of lies to tends to go up quadratically. The anti-status-quo society. But a strange thing happened. Quantum hypocrisy. Marine biology. Ontology and the barbecue. Neoliberal magic. No funeral. You too.
* Confidence. Never corner a teacher. Flirting and coquettery. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should. Or, Twitter.
* The visit is intended to focus attention on the estimated more than 230 military veterans deported from the U.S. and on the need for a more rigorous process to ensure legal residents recruited with promises of citizenship are naturalized.
* Man Faces Deportation After Failing to Pay Fare on Minneapolis Light Rail.
* “Fearless Girl” is rapidly becoming an entire syllabus in the theory of art.
* More Than One-Third of Teen Girls Have Experienced Depression, Study Finds. When you have numbers like this you have to conclude that the problem isn’t the girls.
* In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives comics’ dead women their voices back. Buy it here!
* Suffering Sappho! The Tortured History of Female Superheroes.
* If only there were an appropriate Marx quote for this.
* On taking candy from a baby.
* A vaccine for denialism? I’m skeptical.
* Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* 1 in every 4 children robbed of their childhoods.
* “Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.”
* The patent and copyright systems are clear examples of how the distribution of income is determined by the rules put in place as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the “free market.” There is nothing about the laws of the economy that says the government has to grant these monopolies, and it certainly was not a natural process through which their length and scope came to be extended in the last four decades.
* So you were buddies with a Nazi.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* And a smart think piece from the archives: Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context. More relevant now than ever…
Sunday’d Reading!
* Presenting the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
* On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest.
* A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* So old I can remember when Eric and Donald Jr. were going to run the business and not have a political role. (January.)
* Cool, thanks for looking into it.
* Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI.
* The Republicans Broke American Politics, and Media Elites Are Blind to It. A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.
* The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It’s too late, of course, the cultists will believe in it for all time.
* Horrific hate crime in Portland. Seems to be part of a disturbing trend.
* New Orleans principal loses job after wearing Nazi-associated rings in video. Glowing 2015 profile.
* Meanwhile, in Arizona. In New Jersey.
* New Jersey not doing great in my newsfeed today generally. Though this was good.
* U.S. Airstrike Killed Over 100 Civilians in Mosul, Pentagon Says. The U.S. Is Helping Allies Hide Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria.
* ‘Mostly Toddlers’ Among 31 Drowned.
* A spectre is haunting Goldman Sachs.
* Trump going to the mattresses.
* How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative.
* Democrats doing much better, still can’t win a damn thing. The only answer is to keep offering them nothing and telling them they’re stupid, until they finally come around. Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment. Donald Trump Is A Big Reason The GOP Kept The Montana House Seat.
* Remember how terrible the AHCA is?
* Sheriff Clarke and some totally appropriate, not at all batshit insane behavior.
* A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance.
* A 31-year-old undocumented Honduran bicyclist, Marcos Antonio Huete, was hit by a car in Key West, Florida, on his way to work. The policeman’s camera shows him inquiring about the victim’s immigration status before offering medical assistance. He was later detained by the Border Patrol.
* “We want you to think Luke is bad” is an awfully large part of Last Jedi hype. I have to think that means they won’t actually do it…
* Title IX Policy shift at the University of Oregon: Faculty members at the University of Oregon will no longer be required to notify campus authorities when students confide in them that they’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed but say they don’t want the information reported.
* Wealth, I realized, is the adult version of magic: an incredibly powerful but ultimately arbitrary resource that transfers primarily through inheritance. It has some logic to it— but also enough randomness that those without can hope for a spontaneous windfall in the form of an improbably lucrative investment or a secret inheritance.
* Unexpected and interesting: Joss Whedon isn’t just finishing Justice League; he’s been working on it for a while.
* Truly, ours is the darkest timeline.
* A chance meeting with Mr. Rogers.
* If you’d bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you’d be worth $35M.
* Uber: a cheap scam all the way down.
* Original draft of Revenge of the Sith actually treated Padme as an interesting character.
* Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.
* These birds have the right idea.
* This one cuts me. When you’re in your thirties. Call CPS. #TheResistance.
* Everything was connected, and I was fucked.
* Can someone please explain the physics of Casper?
* And N6946-BH1 is all of us right now.
Sunday Links!
being an addendum to these Supersized ICFA Weekend Links
* On that “asking questions about Russia” NYT op-ed I linked yesterday: Getting an op-ed into the New York Times is notoriously difficult, as the paper’s editors treasure its selectivity and prestige, for the obvious reason that a NYT byline confers an extraordinary amount of credibility on the writer. Thus the Times makes particular choices about the voices that are worth listening to, and the voices that are not. And by printing the Mensch op-ed, the Times has said that Mensch is a person whose thoughts ought to be in the paper. But one can only think this if one has abandoned all standards for what constitutes reasoned opinion on Russia.
* Democratic elites are delusional — you can’t subdue the reactionary right without a robust alternative political vision. Politicking Without Politics.
* More than 200 civilians killed in suspected U.S. airstrike in Iraq. We have been bombing this country nearly continuously for nearly thirty years.
* As Spencer shows, it is these seemingly anodyne conceptual commitments, combined with their structural expression, that bind contemporary architecture to the imperatives of neoliberalism, a term for which Spencer develops a coherent and persuasive account. Pushing against the conception, developed by theorists such as David Harvey, of neoliberalism as simply the latest step in the developmental “logic of capital,” Spencer sees it as something much more intentionally and insidiously cultivated: it is “a school of economic thought,” he writes, “that has consciously directed itself, through key individual thinkers, as a project to remake the mentality and behaviour of the subject in its own image.” Following Foucault, Spencer argues that neoliberalism — characterized primarily by its valorization of the free market — is a form of “governmentality” involved not just in the shaping of economies but in the “production of subjectivity.” Neoliberalism does not impose itself on us coercively, via punitive measures or structures of discipline, but gently shapes our common-sense understandings of the world and ourselves through the medium of our everyday experiences, turning us into competitors, entrepreneurs, and round-the-clock workers. We are not exactly subjugated by neoliberalism, as one is subjugated by totalitarianism; instead, we are “subjectified” by it. Rather than its victims, we learn to become its willing participants; and architecture, argues Spencer, becomes one of our key instructors. What Exists is Good: On “The Architecture of Neoliberalism.”
* Paul Ryan Failed Because His Bill Was a Dumpster Fire. Why Obamacare Defeated Trumpcare. GOP wonders: Can it get anything done? Trump the Destroyer. Sidelined Democrats let grass roots ‘resistance’ lead the way on health care fight.
* Is a billionaire-funded coup to rewrite the Constitution on the verge of happening? Trump is president and the Senate still exists. I say take the deal and then fight for a real democracy at the convention. You’ll never get it this way.
* Tressie Mcmillan Cottom talks Lower Ed at Dissent‘s “Belabored” podcast.
* On this episode of Left of Black, Professor André M. Carrington (@prof_carrington), author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press), joins host Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) in the Left of Black studio. Carrington was at Duke University to deliver a keynote address at the Black Is, Black Will Be: On Black Futures symposium.
* Survey Finds Foreign Students Aren’t Applying to American Colleges. So that about wraps it up for American universities I suppose.
Fall Break Links!
* CFP: The Fourth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 2017. CFP: The Marxist Reading Group 2017.
* Tolkien news! Beren and Lúthien coming in 2017. Elsewhere in things from my childhood that I’ll almost certainly repurchase: Inside the new D&D Monster Manual.
* “Whoa,” said the gangster/minotaur, awed at how close he’d just come to losing his forearm. He was beginning to understand that this wasn’t the relatively straightforward world of street-level dope dealing anymore; this was Dungeons and Dragons.
* I’m glad somebody finally paged KSR: “Why Elon Musk’s Mars Vision Needs ‘Some Real Imagination.'”
* Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies.
* “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions.
* TFW you cut down a 600-year-old tree.
* On translating Harry Potter. Harry Potter by the Numbers. And did you know Harry Potter was nearly a major cultural phenomenon?
* On The Strange Career of Steve Ditko.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Mistake on a Lake: In Michigan, privatization and free-market governance has left 100,000 people without water.
* One teaching artist sees it differently. “There will always be bad artists with a lot of money who want to go to art school,” she said. On the Future of the MFA.
* The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job.
* The Secret History of Leftist Board Games.
* There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: On Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning. Relatedly: The World’s Happiest Man Wishes You Wouldn’t Call Him That.
* Degree programs in French, geology, German, philosophy and women’s studies are suspended, effectively immediately. Eight additional majors within existing departments, six teaching programs and four graduate programs have been shut down. The university is planning a teach-out program for currently enrolled students. Tenured faculty members in affected programs will be reassigned to different departments. The future of the campus’s nursing, dental education and medical imaging programs is still under discussion. Degree programs in environmental geology and environmental policy were cut previously, in July.
* Advice for how to use Twitter as an academic. Of course, as everyone knows, the only winning move is not to play.
* From David M. Perry: “My non-verbal son communicates through ‘Hamilton.'”
* From Adam Kotsko: From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.
* Dylan, Christ, and Slow Train Coming. Teaching the controversy: Kurt Vonnegut in 1991: “Bob Dylan Is the Worst Poet Alive.” Imperialism-in-Artistry: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Win Is Proof Adichie Is Right about Beyonce. Local Boy Makes Good. But not too good: The Nobel Prize Committee Have Given Up on Trying to Get in Touch with Bob Dylan.
* Game of Thrones is even whiter than you think.
* The self-driving car, Baudrillard, and America.
* On the history of fantasy scholarship.
* David Letterman and his beard.
* The LSAT and class struggle.
* Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks. ‘What Kind of Mother Is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?’ No, There Are No Ninth Month Abortions.
* The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of “imaginative power,” and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.
* Another gerrymandering primer. I’m inclined to make a joke about Obama’s proceduralism even ruining his post-presidency but this really is a major issue worth throwing his weight against.
* Texas?
* In The Hollow: The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race.
* The Anthropocene and Empire.
* How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers out of Millions in Retirement Savings.
* Atlas Obscura: The Land of Make Believe.
* A People’s History of John Stewart, Green Lantern.
* And then there’s this one: Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.
* Breastfeeding as captivity narrative.
* I’ll allow it, but know that you’re all on very thin ice.
* Thank god the Mac version isn’t ready yet: Civ VI is out.
* A dark, grittier Captain Planet: Leonardo DiCaprio wants to make a Captain Planet movie.
* Hungerford makes Infinite Jest represent how commercial publishers and their enablers in the mainstream media engineer a novel into a canonizable success. The market is corrupt, she says. But is it any more corrupt or distasteful than the publication and marketing of her university press book? “Post 45” is a scholarly association; Hungerford is one of nine Board members. Two other Board members are the series editors for the “Post 45” imprint. The “Advance Praise” for Making Literature Now includes effusive comments by two people whom Hungerford praises in the book, a blurb by a former colleague at Yale, and other comments so hyperbolic that they appear to have been written under the influence of laughing gas. Hungerford put out a misleading trailer for the book in the Chronicle, excising the misogyny charge that’s essential in her closing chapter, perhaps because she feared anyone who had read Infinite Jest would see through that charge and not order Making Literature Now. Her title is grandiose because her data is extremely limited. Rather than the survey that the title implies, Making Literature Now is literary tourism combined with two takedowns.
* Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference.
* Student writing in the digital age.
* Live long and trick or treat.
* I’m telling you, the simulation is crashing.
* And ours is truly a fallen world.
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
June Links — Supplemental
* A New Hope, as it was always meant to be experienced: as infographic.
* Really, actually ideology at its purest: ‘There is a future for Harambe’: Cincinnati zoo reveal sperm was removed from gorilla who was shot dead so he could still become a father.
* Murder-suicide at UCLA. Police are suggesting a student may have murdered a professor.
* Lost Superstitions of the Early-20th-Century United States.
* Airships and Reanimated Corpses from the Pages of Early Science Fiction.
* If Osama bin Laden had not existed, the United States would have had to invent him. Although William V. Spanos never quite puts it that way, this claim nevertheless encapsulates one of the fundamental insights of Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation — namely, that American exceptionalism entails a dense knotting together of the vitality of the nation and targeted killing. The very being of America as a more-than-merely-national nation hinges on its capacity to obliterate its enemies in the most spectacular fashion, while simultaneously arrogating the life-force or resources of its enemies for itself.
* “Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors.”
* “In terms of the labor market, 2016 is a great year to graduate.” The Graduate Opportunity Index. For-Profit College Grads Earn Less Money Than They Did Before College.
* The Trump University Scam seems pretty egregious even by Trump’s standards.
* Trump Has a Conflict-of-Interest Problem No Other White House Candidate Ever Had.
* I’m trying not to get tired of saying this, but just try to imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton came out to defend herself against some perfectly reasonable questions, and said “The press should be ashamed of themselves” or pointed to a reporter and said, “You’re a sleaze.” She wouldn’t be criticized or questioned, she’d be crucified. Reporters would ask if she had lost her mind and was having a nervous breakdown. There would be demands for her to pull out of the race immediately, since she had shown herself to be so unstable.
* Applications for TFA’s two-year teaching stints have plummeted 35 percent during the past three years, forcing the organization to reexamine and reinvent how it sells itself to prospective corps members. It has been focusing particularly on how to engage students at the nation’s most-selective colleges, where the decline in interest has been among the steepest. The improving economy probably has far more to do with this than any anti-TFA publicity campaign.
* The idea that young workers should cut their teeth by working long hours for low pay, or even for free, is the result of employers holding all the cards in the economy. It’s the same phenomenon that lets businesses get away with lax safety standards, unpredictable schedules, and offering scant benefits. By making it harder for employers to demand extra hours as part of the job, the overtime rule is an important tool to shift the balance of power towards working people.
* “Magic Is Ruining Game of Thrones.“
* Salvage Perspectives #3: Or What’s a Hell For?
* This stunning Korean thriller is the summer’s first great movie.
* But the future has always been several: how could it be otherwise, when it hasn’t happened yet? The millennial or apocalyptic future, the future that abolishes time itself, is not the same as the prophetic future of a possible or desired outcome, which is not the same as speculative future of science fiction, which is not the same as the future envisaged by a calendar or a to-do list, which is not the same as the future of the high-yield bond, which is not the same as the future which will involve you reading the next sentence, or deciding not to. But what all these have in common with the phenomenological future – the one involved in the direct sensation of time passing, the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it – is their slipperiness. Futures can never be touched or experienced, only imagined; this is why they’re as diverse as the human psyche, and why they tend to be so dreamlike: at turns ludic, libidinal, or monstrous.
* Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy.
* At thirteen, a neglectful foster system tore me from the only woman I ever wanted to call “Mom.” Decades later I tracked her down and finally got my happy ending.
* New Orleans’s New Flood Maps: An Outline for Disaster.
* Jay and Miles Overthink X-Men: Apocalypse.
* The last political compass test you’ll ever need.
* After a Life of Punches, Ex-N.H.L. Enforcer Is a Threat to Himself: Stephen Peat has symptoms — memory loss and headaches — often associated with C.T.E., a brain disease linked to head trauma.
* ‘It’s only working for the white kids’: American soccer’s diversity problem.
* And Another Small Private Closes Its Doors: Dowling College.
Gerry Canavan 