Posts Tagged ‘mass shooting’
Weekend Links!
* After Isle of Dogs, I’m filled with nothing but dread for The French Dispatch. Here’s what we know so far.
* Astronaut Accessed Estranged Spouse’s Bank Account from International Space Station. How can they say true crime is over when we have the first-ever crime in space!
* Once again, for the people in the back: The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. In Bolsonaro’s burning Brazilian Amazon, all our futures are being consumed. We’re Living Through A Climate Emergency Right Now — We Just Aren’t Paying Attention. The Limits of “Experiencing” the Climate Crisis. In a Devastated Town, Sanders Explains His Plan for a Climate Revolution.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* Kirkwood professor who stated he supported Antifa resigns.
* On December 22, 1973, an embattled President Richard Nixon met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces. It was a ceremonial meeting, not the sort where important decisions are supposed to get made. But one of the generals realized something was deeply off. Nixon was agitated. “He kept on referring to the fact that he [Nixon] may be the last hope, the eastern elite was out to get him,” the four-star general later said. It seemed the president was “trying to sound us out”—to see if, “in a crunch,” the generals would overthrow Congress and the judiciary, and keep the criminal president in power. Through a White House, darkly.
* The US is already occupying Greenland.
* A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?
* In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria.
* Kids left without either parent at home for 8 days after Mississippi ICE raid. And updating a story from yesterday: Federal Agencies Have Been Sending Employees Articles From White Nationalist And Conspiracy Websites For Months.
* Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States.
* How segregation makes your commute worse.
* State of the unions: what happened to America’s labor movement?
* Tarantino corner! ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Is a Science Fiction Film. Tarantino’s gruesome revenge fantasies are growing more puerile and misogynistic. Stop, you’re both right!
* There’s a Latinx void at the heart of video games.
* How David Koch Changed the World.
* Slouching towards autokill drones hovering over every street corner.
* The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media.
* When Kids Are Straight Until Proven Otherwise.
* Occasionally, though, one can sense the fears emerging out of the anonymous voices. A therapist talks about patients who are “one bad night away from suicide” now facing new burdens of paperwork. A parent writes, “Medicaid enrollment limits tell my son his life is worthless and he might as well die because he is diabetic.” Another respondent worries that enrollment caps will “limit my ability to get my asthma treated and medications covered.”
* Marvel’s making some interesting moves on Disney+. I might actually watch WandaVision.
Closed Some Tabs Today Links
* * The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.
* Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?
* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.
* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.
* Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!
* Foundation #130 has been published.
* An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.
* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.
* Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.
* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.
* A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.
* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.
* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.
* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.
* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?
* Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.
* As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.
* White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.
* Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
* Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.
* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.
* Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.
* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.
* Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.
* What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?
* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.
* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.
* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.
* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.
* As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
* Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.
* Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.
* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!
* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.
* E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.
* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.
* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.
* In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.
* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!
* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.
* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.
* Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.
* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…
* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?
* Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.
* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).
* Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.
* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
* Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.
* Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.
* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.
* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”
* Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?
* Incompetence all the way down.
* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.
* In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.
* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.
* The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.
* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.
* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.
* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.
* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.
* We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.
* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.
* Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.
* Raising a child in a doomed world.
* The second civil war just got interesting.
* In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.
* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.
* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.
* And a plastic straw update: A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!
Monday Morning Links!
* If you only read one Star Trek: Discovery postmortem this week, it’s got to be Abigail Nussbaum’s. But if you read too, here’s mine at LARB! No Follow-Through.
* Then this one #3: In Its First Season, Star Trek: Discovery Asked Hard Questions It Never Really Wanted the Answers to.
* Original pitch for Star Trek: The Next Generation had a hologram captain. Fake Research Paper Based on Star Trek: Voyager‘s Worst Episode Was Published by a Scientific Journal.
* Science Fiction Film and Television 11.1 now available! With a special section on the science fiction of Scarlett Johansson, essays on District 9 and dating simulators, and a review essay on Get Out!
* Meanwhile, the 2019 CFP for the MLA’s speculative fiction discussion group, of which I am now the immediate past chair:
Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction
How “visionary fiction” (Walidah Imarisha’s term for stories imagining “newer, freer worlds”) contributes to speculative fiction theory, pedagogy, practice. 200-word abstract, CV by 16 March 2018 to Alexis Lothian (alothian@umd.edu).
* I got the chance to watch this documentary on Flannery O’Connor last week as part of a Marquette English event. It was great! Can’t wait for it to find a home.
* Nothing but respect for my president.
* Horrified Florida students beg the adults: Please, do something about guns.
* I have a thing to say about growing up after tragedy.
* On the imperative of content. No one knows.
* The goal was to create “products,” which could then be monetized, but according to Leslie, who took over oversight of the institute in 2015, “There was not the foundation of a business plan” at the institute’s inception. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the “Framework for Excellence” which midwifed the Institute was literally dreamed up in two days by Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa and his advisors and passed by the regents “without asking a single question.”
* We should just create “incentive” / punishment structures that force college presidents to retire at 64 1/2, just like they all did to faculty.
* When the White Supremacists Come to Campus.
* When the suits killed Barnes and Noble.
* The august sport of (checks notes) curling may never be the same.
* Male privilege is having never thought about this possibility.
* Ban The United States From The Olympics.
* Cleaning products as bad for lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day, scientists warn.
* How banks block people of color from homeownership.
* ICE really doubling down. Man who called 911 about suspected burglary detained by ICE. He can’t get proper HIV treatment in Venezuela. But he’s being deported anyway. ICE Arrests in the Pacific Northwest Increased 25 Percent in 2017. Washington officials gave activist’s info to ICE. Refusing an interpreter to a deaf detainee. How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans. ICE Arrests Man at a Green Card Interview. Tearing families apart.
* Like Uber but for human trafficking.
* Westchester School Leaves Behind Disabled Students in Fire Evacuation.
* This List of Every Reason Banner Hulks Out in the Classic Hulk TV Series Is Hilarious.
- Receiving a lethal injection, and then having the person say, “Oh. I just gave you a lethal injection. Sorry, David.”
- Wandering around in the service ducts of a hotel (predating Bruce Willis) only to accidentally yank several of the pipes loose and get a full blast of hot steam
- Being tied up and fed soup by an elderly Japanese woman who doesn’t
understand words like “You’ve GOT to cut me loose!” - Being thrown under a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade float by a mean guy in a gorilla suit who gives David a few kicks for good measure
- Receiving a speeding ticket
- Wandering around inside a carnival funhouse, only to have someone turn on the machinery so that David is somehow caught in a rolling tumbler and flipped over a few times and then thrown down a convenient slide
* ‘Minecraft’ Data Mining Reveals Players’ Darkest Secrets.
* How should we talk about Trump’s brain?
* The Security Clearance Situation in the White House Is Bonkers.
* The case for impeaching Clarence Thomas.
* Here’s What Critics Are Saying About Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.
* New York Federal judge rules that embedding tweets can violate copyright law.
* Black Panther killed it. Black Panther and the Invention of Africa. Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve. The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool.
* Winners of the 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
* The Donkey Kong Timeline Is Truly Disturbing.
* Let kids have a sense of control over their own lives. The research is clear, let’s ban homework. In Defense of Picky Eating.
* First ship crosses Arctic in winter without an icebreaker as global warming causes ice sheets to melt. Miami could be underwater in your kid’s lifetime as sea level rise accelerates.
* A History of the United American Socialist Republics.
* Here’s All 290 Star Wars Movies Officially in Production Right Now.
* I loved this read of “The Voice of the Dolphins” at LARB, but it’s odd that the piece never notes the very strong suggestion in the story that the entire dolphin project was a hoax.
* What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
* And in a time without heroes: Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake.
Monday Morning Links!
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here’s a Storify of the weekend’s #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* ‘Seat 14C’ short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington’s Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump’s CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it’s much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a “bipartisan” patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There’s no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the “Xennial” label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It’s a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Iran’s temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson’s widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* McConnell’s nearing a deal. Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes.
* ‘Terrorism’ misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I’m like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane’s backstory.
Wednesday Night Links
* The Utopia symposium in the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is especially good, if I do say so myself. Featuring Raffaella Baccolini, Troy Bordun, Catherine Constable, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carl Freedman, Lisa Garforth, Dan Hassler-Forest, Veronica Hollinger, Alexis Lothian, Roger Buckhurst, Tom Moylan, Sharon Sharp, Steven Shaviro, Debra Benita Shaw, Rebekah Sheldon, Imre Szeman, Phillip E. Wegner, and Rhys Williams…
* Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes.
* Fear of an Ill Planet: On the Importance of Sickness and the Demands of Otherness.
* I think maybe every literally academic I know has been talking about this story.
* The Scalia obituaries keep coming: 1, 2, 3.
* Huge cuts to ethnic studies at SFSU.
* The Troubled Academic Job Market for History.
* Never in my worst dreams about the future of the university could I have imagined such a thing was possible: Chicago State University Cancels Spring Break.
* David Milch, the storied mind also behind ‘Deadwood,’ changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: “He’s brilliant.”
* Yay, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. Booooooo, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. In any event.
* Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime.
* “There no longer are any rules in the Supreme Court nomination process.” I’ll do you one better!
* Usually this sort of mythologizing isn’t caught fast enough to be traced: The Evolution of the Myth of the Sanders “English Only” Chant.
* Social media, the new mind control.
* Polls and Trump’s Supporters. My word.
* Elsewhere in dystopian backstory: The Virginia Senate has passed legislation that would transform all law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth into secret police, quite literally, a dangerous step in the direction of unaccountable and non-transparent government. No other state has gone as far as the Senate bill would take Virginia into the realm of secrecy where it concerns state and local police.
* When the Public Defender Says, ‘I Can’t Help.’
* Nobody, but nobody, can trip over their own feet like Obama.
* The Huntington Tumblr has a few pictures up from one of Octavia Butler’s horse stories.
* The contested legacy of Stan Lee.
* A People’s History of #CancelColbert.
* Nice work if you can get it: Rutgers president gets a $97,000 bonus.
* The Oscars Forgot to Nominate The Force Awakens For Best Picture.
* Why Professor Indiana Jones Never Published His Research.
* Ok, sold: Margaret Atwood’s Next Book Is a Prison-Bound Take on The Tempest.
* Well, that doesn’t sound so bad… Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
* Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist.
* On the plus side, we are living through a golden age of theme parks.
* Rosemary G. Feal will step down as executive director of the Modern Language Association next year after 15 years in that job, the group announced on Wednesday.
* Fermi Paradox watch: maybe life is that rare.
* But mostly Fuller House evokes a smut-free porn parody, with sexualized adult versions of characters who, in the collective psyche, are frozen in amber as children. Elsewhere on the Onion‘s Full House porn parody beat.
* “Dogs and Certain Primates May Be Able To See Magnetic Fields.” Tell no one my secret.
* Breastfeeding is probably really not that big a deal.
* Winning the lottery can also bankrupt your neighbors.
* Twilight of saying “Aycock” at Duke and UNCG.
* KSR coverage in American Literature: “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, theMars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change.”
* Why Is Inver Hills Banning Union Activist From Campus?
* The Problematic, Sexist Subtext of Laughing at Hitler’s Alleged Micropenis.
* Lev Grossman on Narnia and grief.
* The best news I’ve gotten all year: Milwaukee’s Air and Water Show postponed until 2017.
* Blade Runner 2 is an abomination that should never have been made, but I am interested to see how they deal (or don’t) with the Deckard/replicant issue.
* And Philip K. Dick is just straight-up writing our reality now.
Gerry Canavan 