Friday Links!

* Deadline this weekend! Suvin Today?, A Roundtable Discussion, The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN).

* People Are Sharing Photos of Real-Life Places That Belong in a Wes Anderson Film. Below: a conference room in North Korea.

* What the stock market’s rise under Trump should teach Democrats. Great piece from the great Rortybomb.

First, Democrats need to reevaluate their idea of themselves as disinterested stewards of the economy — as a party that accepts the current economic arrangements largely as a given. Second, they need to understand what their coalition looks like if they can’t peel off moderate Republicans, as they predicted they would throughout 2016. Third, they also need to decide if the economy requires structural changes, or merely some tinkering around the edges. And finally, they must decide whether social programs should target narrow populations or lean towards universalism.

* It’s a bit premature for Democrats to start planning what they’ll do with their domination once they have it, but I agree with Jack Balkin that they need to start fighting fire with fire.

* Study claims Clinton lost because of ravaged communities sick of war. I’m sure her hawkishness was a factor at some level, but the last few months have made it crystal clear that people pick their team first and then select some reason why.

* DFW vs. Twitter.

So I've been thinking about this topic a lot over the past few months as my relationship to Twitter has intensified & worsened. 1/

— DFW Society (@DFWSociety) July 6, 2017

If DFW thought life in the 90s bombarded us w/information, Twitter makes that look like the Stone Age. We live in an age of "total noise" 8/

— DFW Society (@DFWSociety) July 6, 2017

* A History of American Comics.

* Mars Trilogy –> Aurora: “Mars covered in toxic chemicals that can wipe out living organisms, tests reveal.”

* Stories of a Hollow Earth.

* The best SF going is being printed at SBnation.

* Hackers are Targeting Nuclear Facilities, Homeland Security Dept. and F.B.I. Say.

* The Police State Can Come After Trump Protesters, But It Can’t Make Them Cooperate.

* A judge said these kids get a green card. ICE says they get deported.

* Internal memo reveals ICE officers have free rein to detain any undocumented immigrant.

* Republican lawmakers buy health insurance stocks as repeal effort moves forward. Tillerson Considered Central Figure In ExxonMobil Investigation. Accessory after the fact (at best). GOP source of fraud allegation vs. Bernie Sanders’ wife admits info was hearsay.

* How long till Michael Flynn is a #hero of #TheResistance?

* 2020 watch: Kamala Harris.

* Self-appointed ‘King’ Macron is no antidote to Trump.

* The House Has a ‘No Sleeveless’ Dress Code for Women.

* How CNN Made Its Own Reporting Sound Like Blackmail.

* The Alt-Right 2.0. The Dirtbag Left. On SWATting.

* Hundreds dress like zombies at ‘Welcome to hell’ protest ahead of G20 summit in Hamburg.

* Progressives have long viewed Penn with deep skepticism, noting that he has repeatedly used his close ties to Democratic officials as a vehicle for promoting his corporate clients. But there’s another wrinkle to Penn’s advice: He now invests in Republican advocacy firms — and profits from the electoral defeat of Democrats.

* Hollywood Has a Bad-Movie Problem. Fan Fiction Is a Bad Television Show’s Best Friend. I Would Totally Read the Harry Potter Fan Fiction Written by a Neural Network.

* An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: lecturers are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

* AIs: artificial intelligence vs academic integrity.

* Drug addiction as learning disorder.

* Oh baby: Homebrewers Find An NES Emulator Inside The Nintendo Switch.

* Brand New Book By Maurice Sendak Has Been Found in the Late Author’s Archives.

* Encryption by destruction. Social media. Gimme all your money.

Saturday Morning Links

* “All the ingredients are there for a near-record or historic cold outbreak,” he said. “If you’re under 40 (years old), you’ve not seen this stuff before.” The Polar Vortex Is Coming.

* Gasp! Most College Presidents, Coaches And Other Leaders Are White Men, Study Confirms.

* A letter from the disciplinary turf war at Duke University.

* Here’s Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free.

* Michael Bérubé factsplains the MLA convention.

* The only threat to academic freedom in this case comes from the attacks on the ASA, not the ASA resolution.

* Slate covers the MLA Subconference.

* Like Sendak and Gaiman, Tolkien insists that fairy tales aren’t inherently “for” children but that we, as adults, simply decide that they are, based on a series of misconceptions about both the nature of this literature and the nature of children.

* Community laughs in the face of your “ratings.”

* Where is the minimum wage increasing in 2014?

* Our brains don’t work: Lavishing Kids With Praise Can Make Them Feel Worse About Themselves.

* A tale of two pot users: OK for elites, illegal for others. David Brooks’ Polluted “Moral Ecology.”

* The Veronica Mars trailer has arrived.

* And the Internet is a massive time-travel killjoy. Why didn’t someone come back and warn us this would happen?

Saturday Morning

* Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public. Obama has 431 ways to win; Romney has 76.

* “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence”: a late Believer interview with Maurice Sendak.

* The Longform Guide to Climate Change.

* Kurt Vonnegut visits Biafra in 1979.

* Mark Hamil teases Star Wars: Episode IX, c. 1983.

* And Evan and China tear it up at the Memory Marathon.

Saturday Night!

* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.

* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.

* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”

* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?

* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?

* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.

* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!

Saturday!

* Today, Trina is one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. I was pretty cranky about this the other day on Twitter with respect to the Mitt Romney bullying story (on which subject fellow UNCG MFA alum Steve Almond gets biblical here).

* Activists say Argentina now leads the world in transgender rights after giving people the freedom to change their legal and physical gender identity simply because they want to, without having to undergo judicial, psychiatric and medical procedures beforehand. Great!

* Brazilian politicians and journalists were not placated. “We’re going to show this gang that they can’t come down here and create whatever environmental mess they want,” Carlos Minc, a co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and environmental secretary of Rio state, told the newspaper O Globo. “I want to see the CEO of Chevron swim in that oil.” Great!

* The free market as more efficient than central planning, case 751.

* All of the current administrative solutions are perverse and/or unsustainable.  Public universities cannot solve their financial problems by raising tuition even more quickly in the face of the tuition bubble, the student debt bubble, public anger after decades of similar annual increases at 3-4 times inflation, a pro-education president who is campaigning to punish tuition increases with further funding cuts, and mounting damage to an entire academic generation symbolized by the recent tripling of the number of PhDs on food stamps. 

* Funny how this works: Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.

Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.

* Taibbi: Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor.

* A quick note from Jameson about base and superstructure.

* The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening. I’ll take one of each applicable video game system, please.

* Wes Anderson Tumblr blogs. It’s early going, but “Directed by Wes Anderson” may eventually be your winner here.

* And I’d have paid good money to see a Maurice Sendak Avengers.

Everything Is Sad on Tuesday Night

* Oh, Carolina, you’re better than this. Durham County results: For 22359 (30%), Against 51591 (70%).

* But perhaps that’s not depressing enough for you tonight.

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson says. “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.”

* My new city becomes ground zero for the Walker recall.

* Gay Teen Who Fired Stun Gun in the Air to Scare Away Menacing Bullies Expelled from School. True confession: When I was thirteen I hid a kitchen knife by the front door in case some other kids followed me home from the bus stop like they’d promised they would. I was hopeless, alone, and didn’t know what else to do.

Schools that defend bullies and punish their victims make me want to homeschool my kid.

* A Maurice Sendak profile. Spiegelman and Sendak.

* Atrios has your news from 2022.

The last time the an administration did the supposedly responsible thing, the fiscal “hawks” suddenly decided that the worst possible thing was no longer a deficit, but a surplus, and that therefore it was necessary to have massive tax cuts for rich people.

And they will, of course, do it again.

Nobody cares about the deficit. Those who claim to the most care the least.

* The Comics Crier: 36 Pages of Comics That Aren’t Comic.

* Hardt and Negri have a new electronic pamphlet out on occupation and encampment. So does Chomsky.

* When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger.

* The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends.

* “Spoiler,” a police procedural that takes place post-zombie apocalypse.

* And Paul F. Tompkins has a new web series on what appears to be the world’s worst website. Check it out anyway.

Where the Wild Things Were

RIP, Maurice Sendak. Here are links to his recent unforgettable appearance on Colbert: 1, 2. I’m sure there’ll be more retrospection all week.

UPDATE: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotic vomiting in your mouth! I say, ‘You are in touch, lady—you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… That is your childhood self!” (source)