Posts Tagged ‘marshmallow test’
March Links!
- SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
- My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
- I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
- My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
- Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
- And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.
- CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
- A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
- How to Build a World.
- How to Land on Mars.
- Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
- “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
- The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
- Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
- I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
- An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
- From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
- The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
- The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’
- President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
- The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
- Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
- Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
- New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
- The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.
- ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
- When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
- English departments rethink what to call themselves.
- A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
- Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
- Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
- What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
- Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
- More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
- The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
- ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
- Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
- Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
- Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.
- The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
- Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
- The Tyranny of Parents.
- Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
- A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
- Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
- Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
- The realest tweet.
- Chess is bad now. This is good.
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
- The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
- Finally, someone is making sense.
- Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
- Bring back the nervous breakdown!
- Is This the End of Tipping?
- The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
- I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
- All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
- And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.
Fourth of July America Links USA USA
* How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military. And they say literary criticism is useless.
* DHS immediately begins implementing green cards to gay couples, without stalling or dragging its feet or needing to be sued. Amazing. I’d have never predicted it.
* Heat maps of poverty in US cities, 1980-2010. At right: Milwaukee in 2010. “Whites are in blue; blacks yellow; Hispanics green; and Asians red.”
So far this offseason, around 450 Division I basketball players have announced they’re changing schools. This turnover has imperiled the sport, says Marshall University basketball coach Tom Herrion, who calls it a “transfer epidemic.” Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski says that “[k]ids don’t stick to the school that they pick and they want instant gratification.” South Carolina’s Frank Martin agrees: “Kids are not being taught to stay the course, be patient, to learn how to work and improve.” Adds Alabama’s Anthony Grant, “I don’t think it’s something any coach will tell you is good for the game.”
GREEDY NCAA PLAYERS DEMANDING RIGHT TO CHOOSE WHICH GROUP OF MILLIONAIRES WON’T PAY THEM FOR THEIR LABOR PLEASE CALL POLICE
* India has officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons, whose rights to life and liberty must be respected. Dolphin parks that were being built across the country will instead be shut down.
* An Open Letter to New Teach for America Recruits.
Many of you no doubt believe you are joining a progressive education justice movement, that is the message TFA sells so well. But I want you to understand clearly, TFA is not progressive. The kind of limited data-driven pedagogy, the fast-track preparation, the union-busting, the forced exploitation of your labor, the deep-pocketed affiliation with corporate education reform are all very conservative, very anti-progressive ideas. Look no further than TFA’s list of supporters/donors. The largest donations are from groups like the Walton Foundation, of Walmart fortune, which has a vested interest in the status quo of inequality, breaking unions, and keeping wages low and workers oppressed. Or notice the many partnerships with JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, the very institutions which caused the financial collapse and threw millions of Americans-including your future students’ families-into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and deeper poverty. These organizations choose to donate to TFA because TFA supports their agendas. If TFA was truly pushing back on the status quo of educational inequality, these types of donors would not only refuse financial support, they would be attacking a group which threatens their earning potential.
* Meanwhile, making the rounds again: Gates Foundation Funding Wrist Bracelets to Monitor Teaching Effectiveness. How to Write a Conservative Article about Education.
* The Humanities, Declining? Not According to the Numbers. Well, you know, you can prove anything using facts.
* “This is text from an actual email from an actual coursera professor to actual coursera students.”
* More than 260 colleges and universities in 40 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have students who are more likely to default on their loans than full-time freshmen are to graduate, an analysis of federal data shows.
* Bummer Watch Lightning Round: Fox News adopts George Zimmerman. Kevin Clash’s (One) Day in Court. Gitmo Detainees to Be Force-Fed at Night Out of Respect for Ramadan. The street value of black market ivory in China — up to $1,300 a pound — rivals that of cocaine or gold. And, of course, North Carolina. Oh, North Carolina.
* In New York, Blasi said, his security personnel did not have the police’s powers of arrest and don’t have the power to arrest and shoot lawbreakers, and the city police did not believe they had the power to enter this private space. During the Zuccotti crisis, Blasi said he dreamed of turning on fire hydrants, letting loose German shepherds and deploying blow torches. Ralph Blasi is a director of security for a real estate company. Fire hydrants, German shepherds, blow torches.
* The marshmallow test became an important part of psychology canon. But a study in 2012 suggests that the children in the experiment did not necessarily differ in their ability to resist temptation. Instead, it was their trust in the researcher to return with the promised marshmallow that differed.
* And the headline reads: Human head transplants? Neurosurgeon says ‘we have the technology.’ All right, damnit, I’m in.
Gerry Canavan 