Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘memory

Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

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I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 24, 2022 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Happy Captain Picard Day Links!

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* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.

The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.

* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).

* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.

* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.

The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.

Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.

* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.

Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.

* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.

The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.

The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.

* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?

* Abolish the Senate!

* It would sell! It would sell.

Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.

Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.

Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.

* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.

* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.

* And in a dark time, true art finds a way.

2020 Links for 2020

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* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”

* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!

* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.

It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.

Public Domain Day 2020.

* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?

The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’

* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.

I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.

The Subterranean Press edition of Unexpected Stories will be its first print edition, with a newly-commissioned introduction by Nisi Shawl, and an afterword by Butler’s longtime agent and literary executor, Merrilee Heifetz.

* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources​ in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.

Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.

Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.

* The problem with bringing back blogs is.

* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.

* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.

* Meet the Obamog(ho)uls.

Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.

* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.

* …one of the strongest cases for Bernie isn’t just what he’ll be able to achieve, it’s what he’ll refuse to do (cannot imagine him signing a grand bargain weakening Social Security, for instance).

* One Year in Washington.

* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.

* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.

* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.

* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.

* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.

Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.

Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.

The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.

The MLA Started Publishing Job-Searching Advice More Than 50 Years Ago. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.

University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.

Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.

* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.

* Being black at UW.

* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.

* The rise of the permanent protest.

* This is probably dumb — though maybe 1919 had a lot of bonus fraud in it, would be cool to study — but I have immediately and permanently internalized its lessons nonetheless.

Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.

* When your abuser is a cop.

Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.

* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.

* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?

* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.

* When AI runs the entertainment industry.

* When business people run the Olympics.

* DC and Marvel vs politics.

* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).

* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.

* Being Larry David.

* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.

* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.

* Asimov, groper.

How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!

* The decolonization of Miles Morales.

* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.

‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.

* @ me next time

* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.

* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.

* And Christopher Tolkien departs for the Grey Havens.

Written by gerrycanavan

January 16, 2020 at 2:11 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links

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* Holiday plans.

* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”

* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.

* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.

* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”

* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).

The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.

* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:

After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.

“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.

* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).

* Kill Your TV.

A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”

* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.

What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?

* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.

* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?

* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.

* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.

* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.

One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.

* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!

We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.

* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.

Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.

Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.

More than simple racism or discrimination, the destructive premise at the core of the American settler narrative is that freedom is built upon violent elimination.

* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.

* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.

* On pretty privilege.

* Trade war with Wakanda lol

* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.

* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.

* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”

* Yer cancelled, Harry.

Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.

Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?

* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.

* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.

Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.

* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.

* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.

* The truth about PAW Patrol.

* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.

* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.

* Home Alone 14.

* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.

* Oracle, how can I live forever?

21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.

* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).

* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 29, 2019 at 2:12 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!

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* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.

Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.

* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.

* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.

* On good science fiction.

* Get ready for the next recession.

* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.

* The looting of higher ed.

* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.

Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.

* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.

You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.

* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.

Set in 2053, Carbon Ruins inhabits a near-future world where we managed to get our collective shit together, reaching global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions goals in 2050.

* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.

* Cancel billionaires.

* The Obamanauts.

* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.

* The Concern Troll in Everyone.

I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.

* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.

Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.

* every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”

* The Supreme Court has told Domino’s they have to stop suing over an accessibility issue that would have cost them $40,000 to fix.

* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.

* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.

* Against automated hiring.

Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.

* What can’t we remember our earliest years?

* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.

Monday Morning Links!

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* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.

Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.

* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).

* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.

* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.

A Complete-ish List of Grad Students / Postdocs / Adjuncts / Alt-Acs / Whoevers in SF, Fantasy, and Horror Studies.

How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?

* Truly bizarre list of the top 100 films of the 21st century, almost tailor-made to annoy every single person viewing it.

* Employers have become obsessed with improving the health of their employees. But does it do anyone any good?

Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.

* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.

* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.

Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.

What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?

* Shots fired, Milwaukee.

* Oh, so there’s my problem.

Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.

* When a woman ran for president in 1872.

* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.

* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.

* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.

* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.

* Teenager’s memory resets every two hours after being kicked in the head, meaning she wakes up thinking every day is 11 June.

* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.

* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.

* How not to mourn Toni Morrison.

* And American Pharoah has done more to resist the Trump administration in a single afternoon than the Democrats have done in the last nine months.

Closed Some Tabs Today Links

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* Some kinda life.

* The evolving English major.

* The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.

Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?

* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.

* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.

Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!

* Foundation #130 has been published.

An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.

* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.

Black AfterLives Matter.

Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.

* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.

A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.

slaveresistance.tumblr.com

* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.

* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.

* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.

* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?

* The Sci-Fi Sex Scene That Changed My Life: Before I was old enough to fully understand I was transgender, I found Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn.

Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.

As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.

White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.

Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.

Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.

* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.

Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.

* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.

The Trump administration’s policies on family separation and abortion are driven by one view: A woman’s pain is fitting punishment.

Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.

What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?

* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.

* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.

* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.

* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.

As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.

Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.

* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.

Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.

* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!

* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.

* A farewell to Twitter.

E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.

* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.

* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.

In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.

* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!

* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.

* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.

Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.

* The Last Blockbuster.

* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…

* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?

* Another superbug.

Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.

* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.

* Today in the charter school scam.

* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.

* Bad typo.

Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?

* College-level mathematics.

Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.

* Reality-based recycling.

Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.

* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.

* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”

Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?

* Incompetence all the way down.

* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.

In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.

Historical memory and moral witnessing have given way to a bankrupt nostalgia that celebrates the most regressive moments in US history.

* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.

The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.

* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.

* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.

* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.

* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.

We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.

* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.

* Raising a child in a doomed world.

* The second civil war just got interesting.

In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.

* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.

* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.

* And a plastic straw update: Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!

Written by gerrycanavan

July 18, 2018 at 10:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Tuesday Links!

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* CFP: Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

* CFP: Sexual Violence, Social Movements, and Social Media.

* Tonight! I’m talking at this event about Black Panther, oppression, and liberation for the MU Amnesty International chapter.

* The Revealer has an excerpt from Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia.

Kim Stanley Robinson Makes the Socialist Case for Space Exploration.

Revisiting my nerd-fiction collection, I realize how much I needed pure lore when I was a kid, and how little I need it as an adult.

* How neoliberalism shapes the global economy and limits the power of democracies.

* America as glitching AI.

The Professor Who’s Warning the World About Facebook and Google.

How Dual Enrollment Contributes to Inequality.

Reading on the Chaos in the UW system.

* “Wisconsin Won’t Remove Names of KKK Affiliates From Buildings. It Will Build an Exhibit Instead.” Could do both, you know!

Which Animal Kills the Most Humans?

* Woman condemned to live in hell forever.

* “James Cameron Compares His Avatar Sequels to The Godfather, But Admits That Could Be a Huge Mistake.” Oh, you think that could be a mistake, do you?

* Obviously.

The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy.

* The good news for Trump is that this is the last bit of embarrassing tape footage out there [pauses, touches finger to ear] I’m being told the pee tape is real.

Woman fined $500 for taking her in-flight apple off the plane.

* Shock report: Man whose only qualification was physical proximity to Trump may not be qualified to run the VA.

* Unbelievable desecration on the Cinderella Blu-ray. Who signed off on this?

* Walking Dead and Fringe Director Seith Mann Will Bring BLACK to the Big Screen.

* The Science of Making CS Gas “Safe.”

She created a document to warn women of sexual harassers. It’s haunted her ever since.

* This App Can Tell You the Indigenous History of the Land You Live On.

* Your Next Job Interview Could Be with a Racist Bot.

* Here come the climate gentrifiers.

* It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler.

* Husband-wife Gaffigan comedy team will be Marquette’s spring commencement speakers.

* I say teach the controversy.

* And holy moly.

Weekend Links!

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* Clear your calendars for the An und für sich Star Trek: Discovery blog event, beginning Monday!

* A student project from my Tolkien class gets a great writeup at Marquette’s Digital Scholarship Lab.

* KSR’s next book has a cover.

* The MCU vs. America. What Black Panther can teach us about international relations. Weapons of Black Panther. And Žižek shows up two weeks late with a Killmonger-was-right take.

* The science of late sleepers.

* Why I’m Writing Captain America (And Why It Scares the Hell Out of Me).

* Mueller news you can use: almost all the Mueller leaks are from witnesses and tell us little or nothing about the true scope of the investigation or its likely outcomes.

* Hardware Wars: A People’s History.

* Wildcat teachers’ strike in West Virginia (but not on MSNBC). Onward to Oklahoma!

* Phew! Lucky coincidence.

Too Big to Tax?

* Buying a gun around the world. How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled. The Florida legislature’s push to arm teachers, explained.

* “The vast majority of healthcare wonkery is brainstorming new ways to rescue private insurers from collapsing every time they’re asked to do the one thing they exist to do.”

Public schools have been re-segregating for decades.

Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast.

NASA releases time-lapse of the disappearing Arctic polar ice cap. The age of climate migration.

* LEGO in the Anthropocene.

* Homelessness in the Magic Kingdom.

* Hitchhiker’s, back again.

Consumers Are Revolting Against Animal Cruelty — So the Poultry Industry Is Lobbying for Laws to Force Stores to Sell Their Eggs.

* This is you.

* Great story about retirees who cracked the lottery.

Brooklyn man wins nearly $1M lawsuit after NYPD cop tried to frame him on DWI charge.

* I’m Gen X again, maybe for good.

* I predicted this would happen: There is no psychohistory, and there never will be.

* I’ve used this as a hypothetical in class for years; let’s say I’m skeptical.

* The last word in Firefly fan physics: The Ultimate Solar System.

A right-wing online “university” is on track for a billion views in 2018, its professors are some of the best-known conservatives in media, and its founder wants to put it in real schools. So how come you’ve never heard of it?

* Memory is a virus.

* And your micro-game of the week: Post/Capitalism.

Happy Day after My Birthday to Me Links

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* I’ve had a few pieces come out in the last couple weeks, including a short rumination on memory in the Anthropocene (and Richard McGuire’s Here) for the online journal Deletion. I’m also batting cleanup in a beautiful new volume called Science Fiction: A Literary History, with a piece on “New Paradigms, After 2001.”

The Syllabus: A tribute to the late, great Jim Clark. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone singlehandedly hold a thing together the way Jim held together the UNCG MFA Program.

* The C21 conference for 2018 has a theme: Ends of Cinema. There’s also a promising looking conference happening at McMaster University on Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy. CfP: Fandom—Past, Present, Future, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. And a cool postdoc at Madison: Postdoctoral Fellowship on the Plantationocene.

* I loved this episode of The Lit Review podcast on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, with Adrienne Maree Brown. Highly recommend!

Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Anthropocene is that moment in which capitalist expansion can no longer expand, and you get a crush of the biophysical system – that’s climate change – and then you get a crush of the political economy.

31 Essential Science Fiction Terms And Where They Came From.

A Timeline for Humanity’s Colonization of Space.

* If China Makes First Contact.

* Science Fiction and the Arab Spring.

8 Sci-Fi Writers on Where Star Trek Should Go Next.

* The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons.

* Critical Perspectives on Waluigi.

* Welcome to the future, time traveler!

The House Just Voted to Bankrupt Graduate Students. The GOP Tax Plan Will Destroy Graduate Education. Grad Students Are Freaking Out About the GOP Tax Plan. They Should Be. I would expect a massive wave of college closures in 2018 and 2019 if this goes through.

* I’m very excited to read Malcolm Harris’s book on millennials, which is getting rave reviews. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times.

Unions aren’t just good for wage workers. Students can use collective bargaining, too. The idea of organizing student labor when even auto factory workers are having trouble holding onto their unions may sound outlandish, but young people have been at the forefront of conflicts over police brutality, immigrant rights and sexual violence. In terms of politics, they are as tightly clustered as just about any demographic in America. They are an important social force in this country, one we need right now.

It’s in students’ shared interest to seek later start times for the school day to combat the epidemic of insufficient sleep among high schoolers. It’s in their shared interest to improve their mental health by reducing competition. They could start by demanding an end to class rank or a cap on the number of Advanced Placement courses each student can take per year. It’s in their shared interest to make life easier and lower the stakes of childhood in general. Only young people, united, can improve their working conditions and end the academic arms race.

The excerpt from Harper’s was really good, too!

By looking at children as investments, it’s possible to see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in their human capital. It’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (and not in jail, insane, or dead). Any work beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet its members are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told millennials to accumulate as much human capital as they could; they did, but the market hasn’t held up its end of the bargain. What gives?

* The Uncounted.

* Documenting bias against married women in junior faculty searches. What It Looks Like When a University Tries to Revoke a Professor’s Tenure. The University and Debt: Thinking About Neocolonialism in the United States. The Great College Loan Swindle. The Finger-Pointing at the Finance Firm TIAA. Public Higher Ed Skews Wealthy. University History Departments Have a Race Problem. Public engagement is a two-way street.

What Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal Reveals.

It’s Official: ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series Gets Multiple-Season Commitment at Amazon. With Christopher Tolkien stepping down as executor of the estate I really think they should have waited to try to get the rights to The Silmarillion (which would work much better on television than in cinema). Trying to do the Jackson trilogy on a shoestring is just not going to hold up. Elsewhere in Tolkien news: an earnest effort to see him named a saint in the Catholic Church.

* Honestly Amazon just should have done Prydain.

* I’ve been saying it since the 1990s: Bill Clinton should have resigned. And Al Franken, who I thought better of, should now.

* My dream of one day being a federal judge remains alive.

Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary. Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between. World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn. Weaponizing the tax code. The coming retail apocalypse.

* This is one of the sickest deportation stories yet.

* Two murder convictions for the same shot.

Sexual Harassment Will Change Your Career Forever. Someone is editing all the bullshit out of celebrity sexual assault apologies. The Myth of the Male Bumbler. Let this flood of women’s stories never cease.

* Why Are There No Great Female Werewolves?

* In a time without heroes…

Portrait Of An American Mass Shooting.

* Malice for malice’s sake.

Scientist recalls training Laika for space.

* Mapping Quantum Leap.

Oh No, I Got Sucked Into the X-Wing Tabletop Game.

* The nightmare that is children’s YouTube culture.

* In a historic move I’m limiting myself to just one “we’re all going to die” link: Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change.

* Remembering that it is in fact possible to solve difficult environmental problems with deliberate intervention and international cooperation.

The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise.

* Japan, are you okay? I was worried and wanted to reach out.

* And I’ve been on the record saying this for years! Universe shouldn’t exist, CERN physicists conclude.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 17, 2017 at 1:47 pm

Thursday Morning Links!

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At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.

If you got a call offering a free cruise, you might be entitled to at least $300. I did! Check your numbers.

* Artist’s Statement, by Kara Walker.

* The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.

* President Of Charlottesville Synagogue Recounts Scene During Weekend Rally. More Witnesses. More. Documentary.

* Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist. All the President’s Klansmen. Goodbye, Pepe.

* Here are all the Republican members of Congress who have called out the president. Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity.’ Gwen Moore Calls for Trump’s Removal.

Durham protester charged in Confederate statue vandalism. Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue. Virginia. Richmond! The Capitol. Even Robert E. Lee didn’t think Americans needed all those Confederate statues. Leave the Durham memorial on the ground. News you can use. Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost. Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely. Trump Blasts Critics Who Judge Neo-Nazi Groups By Most Extreme Members. Now you’ve gone and made Ron Johnson ‘not entirely’ comfortable. Poor guys.

* Do your duty.

* Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed. White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him. Disgusted Robert Mueller Eats 2 20-Piece Chicken McNugget Meals In One Sitting In Attempt To Get Into Trump’s Mind.

They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported.

The curious case of a man detained by ICE who can’t stay, but can’t be sent back either.

* Today in Millennials killing things.

* White racists and genetic testing. Doxxing White Supremacists Is Making Them Terrified.

Today, Cloudflare reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and booted The Daily Stormer out from behind its DDoS protection service.

* Never Say Never Again.

* ‘Elder Orphans’ Facebook Group Creates Community For Adults Aging Alone.

* THE COURT: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

JUROR NO. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

The Voter Purge Crusade That Preceded Trump’s Sketchy Elections Commission.

* A good year for television adaptations of black SF!

The Patterns Around Octavia Butler.

Superhero Comics’ Long History of Beating Up Nazis.

WSU grad student designs map of precinct-level election results.

* Free Speech Year at Berkeley! I bet it goes great.

* Sonic Mania has a great mechanic for playing with a five-year-old, but I swear Sonic used to be faster.

* In an age without heroes.

* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?

* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.

Impeach Trump Now (and Other Links)

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* I haven’t done a post like this in a while, so of course you have to catch up with the horrors of America collapsing around our ears. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Russia. Russia. Russia. The NSC memo was only last week! Republicans, Remove This Madman From Power.

* And then there was today.

As White Supremacists Wreak Havoc, a University Becomes a Crisis Center.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All.

* Slouching towards death squads.

* Defense fund for the protestors in Durham who pulled down the Old Soldier last night. A history. Gov. Roy Cooper calls for Confederate statues to come down in North Carolina. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery. These monuments should come down.”

After Obama’s 2008 Win, Indiana GOP Added Early Voting in White Suburb, Cut It in Indianapolis.

Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.

Stop Calling Millennials the Facebook Generation. They’re The Student Loan Generation.

8 Times The World Narrowly Avoided A Potential Nuclear Disaster. This is how easy it would be for Trump to start a nuclear war. Averting Annihilation. Notes on Late Exterminism, the Trump Stage of Civilization. The Annihilator. Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War. Analysts are trying to work out what happens to the markets they cover in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence. The national security establishment versus the “madmen.” And from the archives.

The underlying logic is quite uncomplicated: unless America is the best and the most powerful, the entire world is forfeit. This is of course the brutish proposition that sustains American hegemony—that has sustained since it since the get-go. It’s the same threat whether it’s mouthed colorfully by Trump, or stated matter-of-factly by a career military officer like Defense Secretary James Mattis, who warned that “the DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” But as with so much else, hearing it laid out so baldly, in yet another unplanned and unvetted Trump ad-lib, has an arresting effect. As out of the mouths of babes, so out of the mouth of our President: the truth brings us up short. We move from an initial, disavowing reaction of “This. Is. Not. Normal” to a nauseous, self-implicating “Oh God, this is what normal always was.”

* Timely! Ava DuVernay is developing Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel, ‘Dawn’ as a television series.

Now More than Ever, We Wish We Had These Lost Octavia Butler Novels.

The “Weird Thoreau” on ecological fiction and the cult of climate-change denial.

Half the GOP Base Say They Would Support Cancelling the 2020 Elections. The Other Half Won’t Admit It.

* The Women of the Alt-Right.

* Right-leaning media outlets have moral culpability for what is happening, if not legal culpability. They created this. The coming Civil War.

Mom Deported Because She Didn’t Change Lanes.

On Tuesday, they will reluctantly split up their family, flying to Mexico with their 12-year-old son to start a new life, while leaving their three older daughters — who are 16, 21 and 23 — behind in the U.S.

Healthcare workers rally to halt Oakland nurse’s deportation.

* How ICE Is Using Big Data to Carry Out Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crusade. Private prison companies are saying Trump’s immigration crackdown is looking good for business.

Thank you, Wisconsin, for the beautiful gift. Editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times.

How to Tell If Your Eclipse Glasses or Handheld Solar Viewers Are Safe.

Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence.

* Better Business through Sci-Fi.

People in rich countries are dying of loneliness.

The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music. Is it possible to swim through coins, Scrooge McDuck style?

* Where is your god now?

Forever Yesterday: Peering Inside My Mom’s Fading Mind.

* Biohackers encode malware within a strand of DNA.

Side effects kill thousands but our data on them is flawed.

Why do some people get so upset when we talk about how diverse the ancient Greek and Roman societies were? Because if Classical antiquity is the foundation of western civilization and they were multiracial/multiethnic societies, then the idea that western civilization is a white accomplishment based on a history of white superiority is called into question.

* Congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Measuring the slow death of the Rabid Puppies.

The Table of Contents for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 has now been revealed, as selected by me (series editor John Joseph Adams) and guest editor Charles Yu.

On Game of Thrones, the Cracks Are Beginning to Show. It’s bad y’all.

* The Soul of the Gamer under Communism.

What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology? To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.

* When Bill Murray Saw the Groundhog Day musical. UPDATE: Nothing gold can stay.

* Taylor Swift for President.

A map for extraterrestrials to find Earth.

“I came home because I believed what they said about the new system and that it was supposed to be the best in the world,” said Williams, 67. “But now it seems if we get hit by another Katrina, the city will be gone.”

* Learjet Liberalism: Advocates for climate action should stop defending the rich.

* The kids are all right.

* And in a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 15, 2017 at 6:48 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Saturday Morning Links!

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Milwaukee writer finds prize-winning drama in personal story of pain, healing. Marquette’s own CJ Hribal.

What It Means to Be on the Left. Left of the Dial.

Why Capitalism is Just Shitbag Science.

Looking past Stone’s intricate play-by-play to the wider context, it’s hard not to view Uber and Airbnb as a new iteration of the upheaval and consolidation Taplin describes. The difference is that while Amazon, Facebook, and Google tighten their control over the entertainment we consume, the personal details we share, and the information we uncover, Uber and Airbnb want to stake a claim on how we move through the material world. Kelly describes this state of affairs as a new form of socialism untethered from the state, “designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization.” To me, it sounds more like Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-themed planet in the Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action.” It’s a world that, though torn apart by gang wars as the Enterprise arrives, is made to run smoothly when Captain Kirk inserts himself and his superior phaser technology into the conflict on behalf of the Federation, declares himself the victor, and then withdraws to allow the society to rule itself … as long as the Federation gets its cut. Kirk promises that money would be reinvested back into the planet — but that works mainly because the post-scarcity Federation can afford to treat Sigma Iotia II as an extended, world-sized experiment in developmental sociology.

U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel. 43 Senators, 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats. Incredible.

Internal EPA records obtained by ProPublica show that the Radford plant is one of at least 51 active sites across the country where the Department of Defense or its contractors are today burning or detonating munitions or raw explosives in the open air, often in close proximity to schools, homes and water supplies. The documents — EPA PowerPoint presentations made to senior agency staff — describe something of a runaway national program, based on “a dirty technology” with “virtually no emissions controls.” According to officials at the agency, the military’s open burn program not only results in extensive contamination, but “staggering” cleanup costs that can reach more than half a billion dollars at a single site.

* Sessions! Sessions! Spicer! Spicer! Saramucci! Kushner! Mueller! Manafort! Tillerson! And the rest.

* McCain.

President Trump is considering pardoning himself. I asked 15 experts if that’s legal. Nixon’s Justice Department warned that the president can’t pardon himself. Yes, Trump can legally pardon himself or his family. No, he shouldn’t.

Watching ‘Fox & Friends,’ Trump Sees a Two-Way Mirror. Trump Keeps Failing to Destroy Obama’s Legacy, as Aides Assure Trump All Is Fine. Same.

Nothing about the Trump presidency is normal. Keep remembering that.

* That Times interview. Man.

Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in.

Host a Mueller Firing Rapid Response Event. Are we heading toward a constitutional crisis? “Set aside Putin and follow the money”: a Russia expert’s theory of the Trump scandal. Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort. Oppo research! It’s probably a lot worse than we thought.

Thus, we have multiple pathways forward, none of them look good.

The one area where Trump has been wildly successful. We’re going to be living with the consequences of this trainwreck for a long time.

* I hope this happens to him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life.

Undocumented Dad Says Tearful Goodbye to His Kids Before Being Deported in Heartbreaking Video.

* A Deportation at MIT.

* Google Glass, but for making work even more miserable.

Data analysis of 34,476 comic book characters reveals they’re sexist as hell.

Volumes like Platform Capitalism and Ours to Hack and to Own should convince careful readers that our current, barely regulated gig economy is not sustainable. Subjecting workers to a national (or even global) reverse auction of wages and work conditions—where they are under constant pressure to perform tasks faster, and for less, than rivals will—is a recipe for exhaustion and poverty for those unlucky enough to be trapped in the platform matrix. Moreover, it is also a prelude to deflation and economic collapse, as precarious work provokes a twenty-first century revival of Keynes’s paradox of thrift.

2017 is so unexpectedly warm it is freaking out climate scientists.

The Trouble With Sex Robots.

Wes Anderson Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films.

* When Bachman was King.

* Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book is one of the studio’s only upcoming movies that’s not a follow-up or a remake.

* White Women in Robes: Race and The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought a lot about this while teaching the book this summer and still think Adam’s post on Gilead and ISIS is the best explanation beyond “semi-woke producers trying to avoid negative thinkpiece coverage” I’ve seen.

* Elizabeth Moss, “Accidental Activist.”

* No thanks. The Producers of HBO’s Confederate Respond to the Backlash and Explain Why They Wanted to Tell This Story.

* Philosophy and the Cold War.

* Teen Vogue‘s Guide to Anal Sex.

Defendants Can’t Be Jailed Solely Because of Inability to Post Bail, Judge Says.

* Gasp! What a shocking, one-time-only transgression from a uniquely bad apple.

It’s Time For Democrats To Stop Defending Obamacare And Start Replacing It.

The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked.

* Eugenics in America.

“In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress,” Yvonne Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, said on Friday.

How Fake Cops Got $1.2 Million in Real Weapons.

* Being Sansa Stark.

* We Asked People What Childhood Moment Shaped Them the Most.

New MIT Study Suggests Sonic The Hedgehog Might Be Living In Computer Simulation.

“Here was a story that asked the reader to actively oppose a cowardly hero, to drag the character against his will into conflict with a monster that turns out to be himself.”

* Robots: they’re just like us!

* Burn, baby, burn.

I May Have Committed A Little Light Treason Links

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* thisisfine.jpg: An iceberg the size of Delaware has broken off Antarctica. My kids are three and five. Just 90. And you’re a little late.

Blogger completely debunks claim Amelia Earhart was a Japanese prisoner.

* CFP: The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy, University of California, Irvine, on April 26–29, 2018. CFP: Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction. And our deadline was extended a month with the rest of the SUS: Suvin Today?, A Roundtable Discussion, The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN).

Nothing now would better serve the maturity and the invigoration of the Democrats than to give up any hope of sound advice or renewal from Bill or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They were pleasant to think about, but their politics have turned out wrong, and there’s nothing they can do for us now. The Age of Detesting Trump.

* Fredo, Fredo, Fredo. I tried to warn you: These revelations—and the possibility that more is yet to come—have made it increasingly untenable for Trump’s supporters to argue that there is nothing to the collusion story. And so, many have now begun to argue that even if there was collusion of the kind suggested by the Times, it wouldn’t be a crime—or even all that out of the ordinary. Some Trump loyalists are even making the case that it was smart and savvy for the campaign to pursue help from the Russians. Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.

* Too many Fredos.

* Fredo deserves better.

* I mean the wheels are really coming off.

* Trump still hasn’t resigned from his businesses like he promised, either.

* Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen: The Democrats! The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans.

* The attempt to stay faithful to the actual facts of the world that would make this impossible tanks the piece, but the overall message — that our political elites are soulless monsters without any hint of integrity or principle — is absolutely sound: What If Trump Had Won As a Democrat?

Democrats should take the class warfare message to upscale suburbs.

* Science Fiction and Dystopia in the Age of Trump.

Could a Robot Be President?

* What happens to America if Anthony Kennedy retires?

Cancer researcher was held at Boston airport. Now he is being sent back to Iran.

23 emotions people feel, but can’t explain.

Space colonization, faith, and Pascal’s Wager.

In St. Louis, America’s nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.

Between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. Rent Is Affordable to Low-Wage Workers in Exactly 12 U.S. Counties.

* Stage four credentialing. The Library of Heaven.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) garnered more than 3,000 complaints regarding the uniforms. They conducted their own tests and found concerning evidence: a short-sleeved jacket had levels of cadmium, a highly toxic chemical, that were above the acceptable textile industry standard. The tests also found traces of formaldehyde, nickel, and tetrachlorophenol, all of which can cause major irritations. Formaldehyde, for instance, is even on the American Cancer Society’s list of known human carcinogens. What’s more, in 2011, Alaska Airlines experienced a very similar problem after issuing uniforms from Twin Hill. Around 10 percent of employees reported reactions and that airline issued a recall. Despite this damning evidence, American Airlines maintains that their uniforms are safe.

* Looking forward to this movie: Chicago Library Seeks Help Transcribing Magical Manuscripts.

* Gotta love a headline that has the courage of its convictions: CRISPR gene editing technique is probably safe, study confirms.

We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. America leads the world in drug overdose deaths — by a lot. Trump-Loving Sheriff Won’t Let Deputies Carry Overdose Antidote. Small-Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs.

* The Klan comes (back) to Charlottesville.

Drones keep dropping drugs and porn into prisons.

* No! No! No!

* Yes! Yes! Yes! And I’m especially all in for this: Quentin Tarantino’s Next Movie Will Be About the Manson Family.

* Makes you think.

* Dark Stock Photos.

* Remembering Milwaukee’s Own Cordwainer Smith.

* Mizzou, two years later.

* The mass defunding of higher education that’s yet to come.

* Jeff VanderMeer Amends the Apocalypse. Russia 1917: You Are There. Nor Secret Griefs Nor Grudges: Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances. Cottage Industry.

The racial daring of Sundance’s Cleverman gives it an edge most superhero stories can’t match.

* The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.

As you can probably tell by looking around, every employee at our startup is 23 years old. On the morning of your 24th birthday, the barcode on your employee ID stops working and you can no longer enter our building. We do this to ensure our company has a ceaseless, youthful energy. We believe old people are displeasing to look at and also, bad at ideas.

The relationship between the Internet and childhood memory, or generational memory, is a strange one that hasn’t yet been sufficiently chronicled or really thought through.

* Nightmare jobs I’d never even though about: Rape Choreography Makes Films Safer, But Still Takes a Toll on Cast and Crew.

* Cyberpunk lives!

* First object teleported to Earth’s orbit.

* Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again! Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood in conversation.

* Wakanda and Zamuda: A Comparative Analysis.

* And sure, I can pick up tacos on the way home.

Written by gerrycanavan

July 12, 2017 at 6:43 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Thursday Links!

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Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.

Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio.

* Indeed, this kind of repression is perhaps more sinister because it ropes you into participating in your own silencing. You become the policeman in your own head. When considering whether to attend a demonstration, the powerful internal suggestion is that, even if you do everything “right”—even if you are being peaceful but just happen to be in the same vicinity as someone who isn’t—you could get caught up in a costly legal battle and face serious fines, even jail time. Your entire life could be turned upside down. You might be left alone. But it’s impossible to know—and the only way to be sure is to stay home. You still have the “freedom” to choose, but fully exercising that freedom amounts to playing Russian roulette with an entity all too eager to take that freedom away if you get caught standing near a smashed window. So, really, how much freedom do you have?

The government is spying on journalists to find leakers.

* Not exactly happily, I found this AAUP unpacking of procedural issues in the recent John McAdams decision pretty persuasive.

* An oral history of “The Inner Light.” The second-best discussion of “The Inner Light” you’ll see this year!

Monopoly vs. the Nazis: How British intelligence used board games to thwart the Germans.

How Jalada Is a “Revolution Uniting African Literature.”

Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting. Here’s why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner. More. Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation. They’re also looking into Trump’s personal attorney.

* Meanwhile.

Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules.

“He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,” says someone who speaks with the President. “I see him emotionally withdrawing. He’s gained weight. He doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts.” This is the most relatable Trump has ever been.

* Rise and shine, campers, ’cause it’s coooooold out there today.

* Don’t put ground wasp nest on your vagina to tighten muscles, warns gynecologist.

California Single Payer Is a No-Brainer.

* If you want a vision of every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.

* SMBC roundup! We discovered a new form of ethical animal consumption. The older you are, the more people you have to deal with, so the number of lies to tends to go up quadratically. The anti-status-quo society. But a strange thing happened. Quantum hypocrisy. Marine biology. Ontology and the barbecue. Neoliberal magic. No funeral. You too.

* Confidence. Never corner a teacher. Flirting and coquettery. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should. Or, Twitter.

The visit is intended to focus attention on the estimated more than 230 military veterans deported from the U.S. and on the need for a more rigorous process to ensure legal residents recruited with promises of citizenship are naturalized.

Man Faces Deportation After Failing to Pay Fare on Minneapolis Light Rail.

* “Fearless Girl” is rapidly becoming an entire syllabus in the theory of art.

More Than One-Third of Teen Girls Have Experienced Depression, Study Finds. When you have numbers like this you have to conclude that the problem isn’t the girls.

In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives comics’ dead women their voices back. Buy it here!

Suffering Sappho! The Tortured History of Female Superheroes.

* If only there were an appropriate Marx quote for this.

* On taking candy from a baby.

* A vaccine for denialism? I’m skeptical.

* When a trip doesn’t end.

Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.

* We Bought a Crack House.

White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.

* 1 in every 4 children robbed of their childhoods.

* “Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.”

The patent and copyright systems are clear examples of how the distribution of income is determined by the rules put in place as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the “free market.” There is nothing about the laws of the economy that says the government has to grant these monopolies, and it certainly was not a natural process through which their length and scope came to be extended in the last four decades.

* So you were buddies with a Nazi.

* The law, in its majestic equality.

* And a smart think piece from the archives: Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context. More relevant now than ever…

Written by gerrycanavan

June 1, 2017 at 1:51 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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