Posts Tagged ‘memory’
Thursday Morning Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* ‘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.
* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?
* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.
Impeach Trump Now (and Other Links)
* 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.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* And in a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Saturday Morning Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* “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.
* We Asked People What Childhood Moment Shaped Them the Most.
* New MIT Study Suggests Sonic The Hedgehog Might Be Living In Computer Simulation.
* Robots: they’re just like us!
I May Have Committed A Little Light Treason Links
* 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.
* 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.
* 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. A Small-Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs.
* The Klan comes (back) to Charlottesville.
* Drones keep dropping drugs and porn into prisons.
* Yes! Yes! Yes! And I’m especially all in for this: Quentin Tarantino’s Next Movie Will Be About the Manson Family.
* Remembering Milwaukee’s Own Cordwainer Smith.
* 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.
* Nightmare jobs I’d never even though about: Rape Choreography Makes Films Safer, But Still Takes a Toll on Cast and Crew.
* First object teleported to Earth’s orbit.
* Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again! Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood in conversation.
Thursday Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.
* 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…
Weekend Links!
* Are you at AWP? Or in DC generally? Jaimee is! She’ll be doing a book signing at the Waywiser Table at 12:30 Saturday and then reading at the Waywiser reading at 7:30 PM at the Den.
* This is so outrageous. 21 years in the US, arrived at 14, two US citizen children, arrested at a scheduled check-in with ICE. You could hardly find more compelling proof that this is entirely and exclusively about cruelty.
* “Pentagon journal explores what could happen if a president called for Muslim internment camps.” Gee, I wonder.
* Meanwhile, in another classic authoritarian maneuver, the outsized ego at the heart of the Trumpist seizure of power has surrounded himself with an obliging retinue of enablers and quisling yes-men. Trump likes to divide people between “haters and losers”—a cheap shot that is actually a fairly useful way to categorize his own team. It’s Already Happened Here. How to Stop an Autocracy. Profiles in Courage: Rand Paul, Civil Libertarian.
* Every day. Something crazy happens every day.
* The history of this era is going to be so, so unbelievable.
* Neither Nordstrom nor Ivanka but International Socialism.
* It’s getting to the point where you can’t even call for the wanton slaughter of students without some PC SJW raising a stink about it.
* How Political Fear Works. Beware of Self-Censorship. Who Benefits From Trump’s Chaos? What’s in it For The Collaborators? There Are No Good Reasons Not To Fight.
* Obama’s Lost Army: When Obama Killed OFA.
* I liked this: The Meitheal Manifesto: Thirteen Agreements to Save the World.
* Some rare good news on the climate.
* Darkest thing I’ve ever seen, first for one the one reason and then for the other.
* The arc of history is long, but Mac malware is slowly catching up to its Windows rivals.
* Solitary Confinement Is a Great American Shame.
* Remembering Richard Rorty on Trump (and the reformist left) (again).
* No one is reading those reference letters. “Truly, this is the single easiest fix in academic culture.”
* Science education in the time of Trump.
* You can’t argue with facts, little brother.
* Bees aren’t endangered anymore! Surprisingly easy fix actually.
* Everything is hot now and getting hotter. Everything seems off or wrong and it is hard to get your bearings because so few of the old landmarks remain. It is hard to believe that some things ever happened, that certain places ever existed. Sometimes I am convinced my memory is wrong or fooling me. The idea that there might be a United States. The idea that this vast and unruly countryside, these ruined cities, these endless refugee camps, might have once been something else. If no one invades us now and only some countries send food and aid, it is only because they too are under stress. Or because we are so fucked up and so many of us have so many weapons. Somewhere in the lost places, there are still nukes, too. Jeff VanderMeer’s “Trump Land.”
* SF Cities Beyond Blade Runner.
* Graverobbing the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
* Source map from the first great comic book crossover.
* TGIF!
* Oh, this was so brutal to read. There but for the grace of God go I at least for now.
Here are my vitals: I have more than $200,000 in student loans and $46,000 in credit card debt—all accumulated during my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., and then search for a tenure-track job. My annual salary translates to a little more than $3,000 in monthly take-home pay. I pay $800 a month in rent, $1,100 in credit card bills (paying only the monthly minimums), $350 in student loans, and have $285 a month car payment. I also pay the usual insurances, utilities, groceries, gas, et al. I don’t have cable. Or a kitchen table. Or blinds on any of my windows. I’ve cancelled all magazine and newspaper subscriptions—an actual dilemma for a journalism professor. For my first year in Bangor I didn’t even have a bed. Instead I slept on a Target air mattress until it lost its breath; then I moved to the couch (which I had purchased on credit), until my back finally demanded I buy a bed (credit, again).
* And of course you had me at A New Deep Space Nine Documentary Reveals What Would Have Happened in Season Eight. Here’s another good writeup.
Live from a Hotel Room in Philadelphia – Saturday Links!
* Climate work and despair. It’s a tough problem in the classroom, too. Climate change conflicts somehow with an assumed, mandatory pedagogical optimism; the lack of a solution or even a “hope spot” often leaves the class feeling somehow incomplete.
* Today our president was trolled on Twitter by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vicente Fox.
* Ted Chiang in the New Yorker. Great piece.
Beyond this narrow Wikipedian territory, Chiang is reluctant to venture. Although he is amiable and warm, he is also reticent and does not riff. Over several conversations, I learned, in addition, that he owns four cats, goes to the gym three times a week, and regards a small cylindrical seal made of hematite sometime around 1200 B.C. as one of his most treasured possessions—it was a gift from his sister, a reference to “Tower of Babylon.” He told me that, when he was a child, his family celebrated Christmas but wasn’t religious. When I asked Chiang if he had hobbies, he said no, and then, after a long pause, admitted that he plays video games. He refused to say what he eats for breakfast. Eventually, I sent him an e-mail with twenty-four questions that, I hoped, might elicit more personal details:
Do you have a favorite novel?
There isn’t one that I would want to single out as a favorite. I’m wary of the idea of a favorite anything.You’ve spent many years living near the water. Do you like the sea?
Not particularly. I don’t actually spend much time on the coast; it’s just chance that I happened to move here.What was the last work of art that made you cry?
Don’t know.Do you consider yourself a sensitive person?
Yes.
* Required Reading: 50 of the Best Sci-Fi Comics.
* Conspiracy theories we can believe in: the 19A0s, the suppressed decade between the 1970s and 1980s whose memory has been repressed.
* Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not. This article certainly supports my implicit bias against these sorts of studies.
* Trumpism: The Devil We Know.
* Today in the hopeless search for some Trump upside: the end of the campus sex bureaucracy.
* How could it possibly get worse? Oh.
* From December: UN opens formal discussions on AI-powered autonomous weapons, could ban ‘killer robots.’
* I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems.
* In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.
* A Practical Guide to Teaching Children Basic Math Concepts Using LEGO Bricks.
* And meanwhile, in the other universe…
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