Posts Tagged ‘McDonald's’
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.
* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”
* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.
* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Jul 24, 2019; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; A cat disrupts play in the second half between Tigres UANL and the Real Salt Lake during their Leagues Cup game at Rio Tinto Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – 13095176
Monday Night Links!
* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.
* We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.
* I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.
* I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.
* Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?
* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.
* Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.
* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.
* Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.
* How the Prison Economy Works.
* Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’
* Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.
* 24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.
* Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.
* This tweet got inside my fucking head.
* In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.
* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.
* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.
* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!
Friday Afternoon Links!
* Big story keeps getting bigger. ‘Total panic’ as ‘shell-shocked’ White House struggles to find impeachment footing. Madness at Fox News as Trump Faces Impeachment. As Republicans Face Impeachment Dilemma, Romney is a Lonely Voice of Concern. Impeach Barr too. Innocent Man Calls for Whistleblower to Be Executed. This Guy Truly Has No Idea What He’s Talking About. This Guy Too. Needle already moving. Impeachment Shouldn’t Be the Goal of Impeachment.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism.
* Pattern Recognition but real and completely depressing: The Pee Tape Is Real, but It’s Fake.
* Whoever wins, we lose: With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other.
* Wall Street vultures cutting ads for Warren now.
* Into every generation a Slayer is born: The harmless-looking girl… who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars: WWII heroine who joined the Dutch resistance aged 14, dies aged 92.
* For all its flaws, I liked Ad Astra more than a lot of my circle. Abigail Nussbaum gets at a lot of the reason why.
* Gollancz announces a £4,000 prize for sf writing by people of color.
* Grad programs still chronically lying about where their grads end up.
* White Borrowers? Almost Paid Off. Black Borrowers? Still Indebted.
* Greta Thunberg isn’t the only trailblazing young climate leader. Activists from the Amazon to Nigeria share their ideas for battling the climate crisis. Teen girls are leading the climate strikes and helping change the face of environmentalism. Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg. Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men? Greta Thunberg became a climate activist not in spite of her autism, but because of it. For people with Asperger’s, a role model emerges in Greta Thunberg. As an Autistic Femme, I Love Greta Thunberg’s “Resting Autism Face.” US politics is stuck. Can the climate movement shake it loose? I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth.
* Peace in our time: Sony and Marvel Strike a New Deal to Keep Spider-Man in the MCU.
* Will there ever be a cure for chronic pain?
* Cash/Consent: The war on sex work.
* Reunite.
* The creator of the labradoodle says he made ‘Frankenstein’s monster.’
* Spotted on the web: Games and Culture syllabus 2019.
* Trailer for documentary very specifically tailored to my Northern New Jersey roots: Class Action Park.
* Academic freedom under siege.
* That was fast: McDonald’s rolls out meatless Beyond burgers in Canada.
* There’s a serious blood plasma shortage, please consider donating.
* Wisconsin, you should be ashamed of yourself.
* Marquette program helps students with autism adjust to college life.
* Big mood: Kufungisisa, the local term for depression, is literally translated into “thinking too much”.
* And news of Tom Brady’s omnipotence does throw me for a loop.
Thursday Night Links!
* Rest in peace, Toni Morrison. A New Yorker flashback. The obligatory MetaFilter thread.
* Just in time for my fall class: [r/FanTheories] Hagrid is a Death Eater.
* Toward a Theory of the New Weird.
* In Praise of Samuel R. Delany. Samuel Delany on capitalism, racism, and science fiction.
* More Than 100 Immigrants Were Pepper-Sprayed At An ICE Facility. ICE Raids Miss. Plant After $3.75 Million Sexual Harassment Settlement. Families “Are Scared To Death” After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People. Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter. America’s “Poster Child” Syndrome. ICE agents try to raid Brooklyn homeless shelter without warrants, sources say. Death by deportation.
* Police Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder. Boston Police crush wheelchairs belonging to homeless folks. After HuffPost Investigation, 4 White Nationalists Out Of U.S. Military — But Others Allowed To Remain. Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules.
* Trump administration authorizes ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill wild animals.
* Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. Surviving Amazon.
* Tired: Trade war. Wired: Real war.
* Police “neutralized” the Dayton shooter in 30 seconds. He still shot 14 people. White House rebuffed attempts by DHS to make combating domestic terrorism a higher priority. Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing Are Chapters in the Same Manifesto. Understanding The Statements Of Mass Shooters. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto contains a dangerous message about climate change. How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. A future that currently doesn’t exist. America decided the death of children was bearable before America became America.
* Joke’s on you, libs! McDonald’s new paper straws aren’t recyclable — but its axed plastic ones were.
* How Gender Stereotypes Affect Pro-Environment Behavior. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper changes the game.
* How Peanuts Created a Space for Thinking.
* What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old?
* now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list
* A thread involving me where the other people are saying more interesting things: The NYT published a review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s “cosmic justice” that basically convinced me the film *is* fascist.
* How often do women talk in Quentin Tarantino films? Updated now for Death Proof, if you saw it earlier.
* Where are they now? Manson family edition.
* Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding. In the richest country in human history.
* The Highway Was Supposed to Save This City. Can Tearing It Down Fix the Sins of the Past?
* There’s a ‘Toxic Fallout’ From the Notre-Dame Disaster: Lead Contamination.
* Greta Thunberg Joined A Walkout At The First Major Summit Of The Movement She Inspired.
* Jeffrey Epstein Is the Face of the Billionaire Class.
* Dreams are lost memories: a fatalism vs stoicism film roundup.
* The legacy of colonialism on public lands created the Mauna Kea conflict.
* Robin Vos is a truly odious person.
* Seems fine: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials.
* Twilight of Pacific Standard.
* The man just upped my rent last night / and tardigrades on the moon
* The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On.
* And copyrightopia is already here, it just doesn’t apply to anything you’d actually want to read: Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Tuesday Morning Links
* A new documentary will explore the life and legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Janelle Monáe on Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism at Spotify.
* How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public.
* But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape. The Culture Wars Are Dead! Long Live the Culture Wars.
* Among the Hottest Job Markets on Campus: Police Officer.
* Call for papers: Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University.
* A mother and child fled Congo fearing death. ICE has held them separately for months, lawsuit says.
* A DACA Recipient Graduates Amid Deportation Fears.
* The drug war is (still) a race war.
* Black Panther and the Black Panthers, at NYRoB.
* Sweet Briar Milkshake Ducked awfully fast.
* Social media has come under increasing scrutiny for reinforcing people’s pre-existing viewpoints which, it is argued, can create information “echo chambers.” We investigate whether social media motivates real-life action, with a focus on hate crimes in the United States. We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign, and are uncorrelated with other types of hate crimes. These patterns stand out in historical comparison: counties with many Twitter users today did not consistently experience more anti-Muslim hate crimes during previous presidencies.
* Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang.
* If people on food stamps made Jared Kushner’s paperwork mistakes, they might starve.
* Not even 18 months in and they’ve completely dropped all pretense.
* There could be life on Europa, and they only have water cannons.
* Cobbled together in America by Americans, and inspired by contractual obligations and market demands, nothing about the Hey Jude album was “authentic.”
* Two X-Men fan letters from 1976, one who thinks Chris Claremont’s new run can only be saved by jettisoning the diverse cast, the other from a woman of color glad to see herself represented in the pages of her favorite comic. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
* Westworld against libertarianism.
* Workfare for the Private Equity Crew.
* In Praise of Alien3. I heard from a lot of these folks when I compared Infinity War to Alien3 the other week.
* The misassigned voters lived in a predominantly African American precinct that heavily favored Democrats in the fall, raising the possibility that they would have delivered the district to Simonds had they voted in the proper race.
* So inspiring: Disgraced congressman gets a second chance.
* For Peterson, the purpose of our politics and books and films and TV is to protect us from the feminine, which is a crazy and destabilizing energy. Certain culture is good for the brain and certain culture is bad, making you antisocial and destructive. Peterson loves both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories in which men save sleeping women with a kiss, and hates Frozen, a film in which Prince Hans turns out to be the bad guy. Frozen has “no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics,” he explained in Time this year. We must tell the same ancient story over and over, Peterson says, or we will all go insane.
* Literally no one could have predicted: Arrested Development’s Season 4 “Remix” Is an Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
* There’s nothing the human race can’t achieve.
* Retirement policy is basically alchemy.
* Self-driving cars are human experimentation.
* Defending the indefensible: What Isle of Dogs Gets Right About Japan.
* How you’re gonna die, by the numbers.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* And nothing gold can stay: goodbye, Peppa Pig.
Catching Up on My Open Tabs After an Incredibly Slow News Week in Which Nothing World-Historically Bonkers Happened
* CFP: And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python.
* CFP: The Films of Wes Anderson.
* Three on Dylan, Nobel Laureate. The Guardian reports.
After much consideration my position on this event is that I’m formally opposed, but nonetheless personally delighted.
* Barack Obama for first president of the Federation.
* Le Guin in the Post, the Nation, and the New Yorker.
* PKD and the Problem of 2-3-74.
* An adjuncting career, by the numbers.
* Idiots Who Run Harvard Let Their Low-Wage Workers Go On Strike.
* 4 Professors Involved in Philosophy Brawl Find Feces in Their Mail.
* With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices.
* Why a Controversial Palestinian History Class at Berkeley Was Cancelled, Then Reinstated.
* I make a brief appearance at the end of this CBS58 story on Marquette’s incredible Tolkien collection. I also pop up in this review of the first few episodes of Westworld.
* The Trouble with Thanksgiving.
This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.
* Arrested Development Season Five (not really). Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. All of Donald Trump’s Accusers: A Timeline of Every Alleged Grope and Assault. Gerrymandering helped Republicans take control of Congress, but now it’s tearing them apart over Trump. A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House. Here’s the math. Inside the Bunker. Inside the Meltdown. How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall. Let’s never forget what a terrifying thing we almost did. Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat. I guess I need a new surgeon. If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections. The Evan McMullin Century. A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two. Even the Humane Society. Teach the controversy. Thank you for your idea about a political thriller but unfortunately we find the plot preposterous. Michelle Obama for President. And because we’re all still asking: What Happens If Trump Drops Out?
* Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.
* New Jersey Transit, a Cautionary Tale of Neglect.
* “We’d at least like to have it said of us that we tried”: Marvel and the civil rights movement.
* How Rock and Roll Became White.
* “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”
* Department of Precrime, CIA edition.
* The search for a true blue M&M.
* Whatever this is for, I am so completely in.
* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.
* The four types of board games.
* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.
* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.
* The end of Devin Faraci and the end of The Canon podcast (for now). There’s more at the Mary Sue.
* Huge, if true: Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.
And on the subject of deranged tech madmen: Simpsons did it.
* Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad.
* The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever.
* The coming fight over “nonlethal neuroweapons.”
* What’s the Longest Humans Can Live? 115 Years, New Study Says. Challenge accepted.
* Now, I may have to move first.
* The kids are all right: Only 1 in 5 Millennials Have Ever Tried a Big Mac.
* On Delany’s Dark Reflections.
* App of the week: Really Bad Chess.
* The Perils of Becoming a Meme.
* Finally my condition has a name.
* And I told you, Mom: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
Mondayish Reading
* In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests. The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss.
* Marquette is hiring a sustainability coordinator.
* “Why I’m Teaching a Netflix Class.”
* What Do You Have to Make in a Year to be in the Top 1% of Your State?
* The Death and Life of Simulated Cities.
* You could call it Rahm’s revenge—the whole point of passing a more ambitious, more politically risky version of Obamacare was to get enough healthy people to buy coverage, and that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening.
* Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. How to Decimate a City.
* On science fiction and post-scarcity economics.
* I suppose I’ve always been ahead of the curve.
* Junot Díaz talk discusses social activism in academia.
* To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’
* Penn State Cancels Recreational Class Trips To NYC & DC Due To “Safety Concerns.”
* Star Wars, before the EU. Alan Moore’s Star Wars. Hang the Jedi.
* A brief history of judicial dissent.
* On Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s racism wasn’t the matter of a few unfortunate remarks here or there. It was a core part of his political identity, as indicated both by his anti-black policies as president and by his writings before taking office. It is completely accurate to describe him as a racist and white supremacist and condemn him accordingly.
* The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor?
* Antonin Scalia, fraud, part 87.
* The rise of “white student unions.” They’re probably fake.
* Use of High-Tech Brooms Divides Low-Tech Sport of Curling.
* When administrations co-opt student movements, Duke edition. Also at Duke: debate over continuation fees.
* CNN, still the worst, forever and ever amen.
* Trump has aggressively weaponized the ability of right-wing politicians to lie with impunity. Though you always wonder if there’s still some limit after all.
* The further I get into my thirties, the more depressed I become.
* Music stops, everybody switch positions on free speech.
* Colbert Drops to 3rd Place Behind Kimmel as New Poll Shows CBS Host Alienating Audiences. I’ve never understood CBS’s plan here.
* The McDonaldization of Medicine.
* The Unholy Alchemy behind Cheetos.
* Super-excited to trust my kids to the wisdom of the public school system.
* In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future.
* ‘Hunger Games’ Box Office: Why $101M Weekend For ‘Mockingjay 2’ May Be Cause For Despair.
* A “lost” James Bond movie written by Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, would have seen Daniel Craig’s 007 forced to kill Judi Dench’s spymaster M in a shock finale, according to a new book.
* The tech economy, still a bad joke.
* All U.S. Lab Chimps Are Finally Going To Paradise: A Retirement Home in the South Somewhere.
* Enjoy it while it lasts: Coffee’s good for you again.
* Elsewhere in science facts that are definitely going to hold up forever and ever: Scientists Say Psychopathic People Really Like Bitter Food.
* SyFy wants a Black Mirror too. Syfy is Releasing a Film, De-Rebranding, and Becoming Super Interesting.
* What crime is the founding of a bank, compared to the founding of a police department?
* But just in case you had any ideas that this wasn’t going to be a super-depressing list: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era.’
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Oops, Forgot a Title Links
* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they’ve run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was “produce more adjuncts,” but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.
* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.
* University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.
* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.
* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.
* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.
* The flag might actually come down.
* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.
* “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton.”
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.
Surge!
* But set Obama’s impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They’re certainly finding every possible way to blow it.
* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.
* For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.
* The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.
* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.
* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.
* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.
* What happens when the sea swallows a country?
* It’s just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.
* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.
* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.
* Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple’s App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell’s revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don’t simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.
* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.
* ‘Star Trek’ Fan Invited to Pitch ‘Star Trek Uncharted’ TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.
* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From ‘Breaking Bad’ Will Appear in a Future Episode of ‘Better Call Saul.’
All The Wednesday Links!
* I got some really good news the other day: an NEH Summer Stipend! Here’s the full list of $22.8 million in awards and offers for 232 humanities projects.
* Two of the poems from the award-winning first collection of my partner, Jaimee Hills, are up at Waywiser Press: “Synaesthesia” and “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* I taught #GamerGate in my video game class yesterday. It wasn’t my favorite day of the semester, not by a long shot, but TNI‘s “Gaming and Feminism” post was a great help, particularly the link to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 and Playing with privilege: the invisible benefits of gaming while male. I didn’t spend that much time on it, but I’m still tickled by Why So Few Violent Games?
* Salvage-Marxism embraces the Socialist rococo, the feel-good where we can and the feel-bad where we must, the utopian and the unflinching. Salvage will bring together the work of those who share a heartbroken, furious love of the world, and our rigorous principle: Hope is precious; it must be rationed.
* An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor. It is a world which does not require a Brechtian V-effect since it is already objectively estranged. The cosmonaut, stranded for an unforeseeable period on this planet owing to faulty technology (incomprehensibility of set theory or mathemes, ignorance of computer programmes or digitality, insensibility towards hip-hop, Twitter, or bitcoins), wonders how one could ever understand what is by definition radically other; until he meets a wise old alien economist who explains that not only are the races of the two planets related, but that this one is in fact simply a later stage of his own socio-economic system (capitalism), which he was brought up to think of in two stages, whereas he has here found a third one, both different and the same. Ah, he cries, now I finally understand: this is the dialectic! Now I can write my report! Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity.”
* Terry Pratchett: “Not having battles, and doing without kings.”
* Confabulation in the humanities.
* Fantasy scholarship needs theory. Badly.
* The first African science fiction short story? Leonard Flemming’s ‘And So It Came To Pass.’
* Adam Kotsko: Notes toward an overanalysis of a failed sci-fi spin-off.
* Did the Anthropocene Begin with the Deaths of 50 Million Native Americans? Defining the Anthropocene. The Inhuman Anthropocene.
* Scars of the Anthropocene: Japan builds a sea wall.
* Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought. A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water.
* Devastating report finds humans killed almost 3 million whales last century.
* Costa Rica powered with 100% renewable energy for 75 straight days.
* It’s May 2065, and Cornell’s Dean of Nonlitigable Revelry is angry. So good.
* Welcome to Ohio State, Where Everything Is for Sale.
It’s true that some of the faculty opposed this deal (but only 84 percent,according to a survey), and it’s also true that since the Australian takeover, prices for parking permits have gone through the roof. But it is not true, as has been reported in some places, that faculty have formed hitchhiking co-ops because they can no longer afford to park on campus.
The important point here is that this deal puts the lie to the complaint we hear so often that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world. Our CFO, the guy who orchestrated this deal, has just landed a very lucrative job with the Australian firm he sold the parking to. It’s called synergy, baby! Look it up.
* UW Struggle: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Public Authority Edition. This Is What Wisconsin’s 2.5% Budget Cut Looks Like.
* Sweet Briar Alumnae Outline Legal Case Against College.
* U.Mass. Faces $3B in Debt. reclaimUC: “That’s nothing.” More links below the chart.
* New York Attorney General Is Investigating Cooper Union’s Decision to Charge Tuition.
* “Why Tenure Matters.” Holy moly.
A former administrator at Chicago State University has accused its president and other officials of firing her in part because she refused their demands that she file a false sexual-harassment charge against a faculty member critical of the leadership.
* University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation.
* Free expression and academic labor.
It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates. They had the protection of the tenure system and often the benefit of faculty unions that could agitate on their behalf. But with so many instructors in a state of minimal institutional protection or authority, lacking long-term contracts, benefits, or collective bargaining, the risk of angered students multiplies. Adjuncts don’t even need to be fired; they can just not get any classes the next semester. Grad students don’t even need to be fired; they can just have their job applications placed on the deny pile. This is why I think the problem is actually probably much larger than the high-profile anecdotes would suggest. The greatest impediment to real pedagogical and political freedom on campus is self-censorship due to labor insecurity. Discussion of contingency is almost entirely absent in Cooke’s essay.
* Academics talking about money.
* On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”
* What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place?
* Nearly a quarter century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong.
* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?
* How one dad opted out his kindergartner from standardized testing.
* Trying the 12-year-old “Slender Man” stabbers as adults is as illogical and barbaric as they are.
* Plane Safety Cards Explained.
*A University of Calgary professor has written “the first scholarly study of the Archie comic,” titled Twelve-Cent Archie. Though some of his colleagues were skeptical, his motivation, Bart Beaty explains, was “to really challenge the kind of snobbery that’s inherent in the way that comics aren’t studied.”
* Meanwhile, we live in very weird times: Archie vs. Predator.
* Ted Cruz, I think, speaks for us all: “My music tastes changed on 9/11.”
* Lead prosecutor apologizes for role in sending man to death row.
* BREAKING: your weed killer is poisonous.
* America’s race problem has been solved, and it was easier than you would have thought.
* SF Bishop Sorry Sprinklers Installed To Roust Homeless Were Discovered ‘Misunderstood.’
* Worst person in the world speaks.
* If you give a lion a CAT scan.
* This Floating McDonalds Has Sat Empty For 28 Years.
* There goes my Plan B: Business Owner Millions in Debt Arrested Two Years After Faking Death.
* “As They Lay Dying”: Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.
* 1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child’s forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world. Mustaba Snoopy.
* Texas’ brazen attempt to silence one of its most effective death penalty defense lawyers.
* The Wall Street Journal reports that the leading trade group for compound pharmacists is now discouraging its members from supplying the drugs necessary for lethal injections — in what represents the first official stance the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP) has ever taken on death penalty issues. Relatedly.
* I’m not one for tech solutions generally but they should figure out a way to put microlocal cell phone jammers in cars. Nothing else is going to stop this from happening.
* The best description of social media I’ve ever seen:
* Podcast: Government Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know FBI Agents Can See They’re Creating Terrorists.
* Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad.
* The strange things people Google in every state. The most common job in every state.
* Before Judges, the Godfathers Become Sick Old Grandfathers.
* H-Bomb Physicist Ignores Federal Order to Cut 5,000 Words From Memoir.
* The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia.
* The Second Death of Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe, no longer at ease.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Zelda TV show isn’t going to happen.
* And it’s not all death and destruction: There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined.
Gerry Canavan 