Posts Tagged ‘men’
Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!
- ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”
- 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
- Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
- Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
- “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
- This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.
- It’s still Christmas somewhere.
- Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
- The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
- A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
- China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
- Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
- Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
- Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
- The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
- Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
- Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.
- Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
- Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
- A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
- El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
- The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
- Effective altruism takes an L.
- It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
- An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
- to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
- Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
- Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
- Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
- The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
- America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
- They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
- Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
- If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
- Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.
- Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
- Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
- Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
- Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
- The Dark History of Hysteria.
- Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
- We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
- The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
- Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
- Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
- With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
- If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?
- The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
- So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
- I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
- LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
- Testing LEGO Investments.
- Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
- Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
- Film History According to Tarantino.
- The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
- Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
- It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
- I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
- A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
- Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
- A Century of Serious Difficulty.
- Is It Art?
- So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
- MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
- I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
- Fitting.
- And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!
Thursday Night Links!
* Rest in peace, Toni Morrison. A New Yorker flashback. The obligatory MetaFilter thread.
* Just in time for my fall class: [r/FanTheories] Hagrid is a Death Eater.
* Toward a Theory of the New Weird.
* In Praise of Samuel R. Delany. Samuel Delany on capitalism, racism, and science fiction.
* More Than 100 Immigrants Were Pepper-Sprayed At An ICE Facility. ICE Raids Miss. Plant After $3.75 Million Sexual Harassment Settlement. Families “Are Scared To Death” After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People. Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter. America’s “Poster Child” Syndrome. ICE agents try to raid Brooklyn homeless shelter without warrants, sources say. Death by deportation.
* Police Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder. Boston Police crush wheelchairs belonging to homeless folks. After HuffPost Investigation, 4 White Nationalists Out Of U.S. Military — But Others Allowed To Remain. Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules.
* Trump administration authorizes ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill wild animals.
* Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. Surviving Amazon.
* Tired: Trade war. Wired: Real war.
* Police “neutralized” the Dayton shooter in 30 seconds. He still shot 14 people. White House rebuffed attempts by DHS to make combating domestic terrorism a higher priority. Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing Are Chapters in the Same Manifesto. Understanding The Statements Of Mass Shooters. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto contains a dangerous message about climate change. How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. A future that currently doesn’t exist. America decided the death of children was bearable before America became America.
* Joke’s on you, libs! McDonald’s new paper straws aren’t recyclable — but its axed plastic ones were.
* How Gender Stereotypes Affect Pro-Environment Behavior. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper changes the game.
* How Peanuts Created a Space for Thinking.
* What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old?
* now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list
* A thread involving me where the other people are saying more interesting things: The NYT published a review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s “cosmic justice” that basically convinced me the film *is* fascist.
* How often do women talk in Quentin Tarantino films? Updated now for Death Proof, if you saw it earlier.
* Where are they now? Manson family edition.
* Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding. In the richest country in human history.
* The Highway Was Supposed to Save This City. Can Tearing It Down Fix the Sins of the Past?
* There’s a ‘Toxic Fallout’ From the Notre-Dame Disaster: Lead Contamination.
* Greta Thunberg Joined A Walkout At The First Major Summit Of The Movement She Inspired.
* Jeffrey Epstein Is the Face of the Billionaire Class.
* Dreams are lost memories: a fatalism vs stoicism film roundup.
* The legacy of colonialism on public lands created the Mauna Kea conflict.
* Robin Vos is a truly odious person.
* Seems fine: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials.
* Twilight of Pacific Standard.
* The man just upped my rent last night / and tardigrades on the moon
* The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On.
* And copyrightopia is already here, it just doesn’t apply to anything you’d actually want to read: Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.
Once Upon a Time in… Tuesday Links
* Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, is about male friendships as they evolve or don’t, fall apart or stay the same. It’s his kindest film, the one freest of his ego and the defensiveness of showy camerawork and clever editing. It’s unpretentious in a wholly surprising way, and vulnerable, too, in revealing fears of growing older and, as a consequence, becoming obsolete, soft, a joke. There’s some suicide stuff in that one, so be warned.
* For as much as Tarantino establishes a contrast between Tate on one side of the hedge, and Rick and Cliff on the other, he sees them as equally vulnerable, in different ways. Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s wistful midlife crisis movie. Quentin Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties. ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ takes the Sharon Tate murders — and makes them about men. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood Doubles Down on Shittiness Toward Women. tarantino’s good movies revolve around women & the bad ones don’t. reservoir dogs is sort of an exception, but it also depicts a world without women as a horrific farce. Tarantino vs. Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee’s Daughter Saddened by ‘Mockery’ in ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.’ Let’s Discuss That Massive Inaccuracy in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’ Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood… annotated. ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is a three-hour reminder of Tarantino’s talent — and blind spots. The end of the affair: why it’s time to cancel Quentin Tarantino.
* A few scattered thoughts from me on Twitter. I’m still chewing on it.
* Adam Tooze, historian of the Third Reich’s economy and of the recent 2008 crash, has argued that Neumann’s insights are quite germane today: “That there is no natural harmony between developed capitalism and legal, political, and social order; that modern capitalism is a fundamentally disruptive force that constantly challenges the rule of law as such.” Read this together with the warning by David Frum, conservative political commentator and author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018): ”If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That is the Benjaminian moment of danger we’re in now, looking forward with trepidation to the 2020 elections.
* CFP: Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism. CFP: The Fast and the Furious. CFP: Celebrity Studies — Keanu Reeves. CFP: Fandom: The Next Generation.
* Disney Is A Symptom, Not The Cause, Of The Problems Facing Hollywood.
* Greta Thunberg to sail across Atlantic for UN climate summits.
* Trump aide submitted drafts of 2016 ‘America First’ energy speech to UAE for edits, emails show.
* When you’ve figured out a way to monetize mass shootings.
* While Democrats dither, Republicans are innovating new ways to cheat to win.
* China Claims to Have Released Most of the Estimated 1 Million Muslims Held in Internment Camps.
* Parents Are Giving Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid. I don’t see why every treatment of this leads with “and it’s all legal” when it seems like it’s unquestionably fraud.
* Inside the #MeToo crisis—and coverup—sparked at Golden Valley High.
* Clergy Abused an Entire Generation in This Village. With New Traumas, Justice Remains Elusive.
* Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate.
* She Invented the Gender Reveal Party. She Has Some Regrets.
* Becoming Full Professor While Black.
* Inside the Fortnite World Cup.
* BREAKING (MY HEART): Humans Will Never Colonize Mars.
* This Asteroid Could Have Wiped Out a City. Scientists Almost Missed It.
* And an oldie, but a goodie: Neil and Buzz didn’t go very far.
Just Another Saturday Night Linkdump
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic. CFP: Edited Collection, Fan Studies: Methods, Ethics, Research. CFP: Reclaiming the Tomboy: Posthumanism, Gender Representation, and Intersectionality. CFP: Special Issue on Indigenous and Sovereign Games. CFP: The Age of the Pulps: The SF magazine, 1926–1960. CFP: Productive Futures: The Political Economy of Science Fiction, Bloomsbury, London, 12-14 September 2019.
* Awesome #altac job watch: Humanities Editor at Minnesota Press.
* The second half of the Women’s Studies issue on Octavia E. Butler, featuring my article of Parable of the Trickster, is now officially out. Check it out!
* Find out when someone started crying during Endgame, and you’ll find out who they’ve lost. (Really, though, it doesn’t make any sense.) “Avengers: Endgame” is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of “cinema” by “content.” In Praise of Poorly Built Worlds. The Avengers are the heroes of ‘Endgame,’ but Disney was the villain all along. But this time, we’re talking about a tragedy beyond what could possibly be commemorated through memorial sites. It would land somewhere closer to mass suicide and total infrastructural collapse–and where Endgame is concerned, there are no tragedies, there is only Marvel. Eco-Villains: Thanos and the Night King. To put it bluntly, and in Deleuze’s terms, superhero films are action films for people who no longer believe in action, for whom the capacity to act has been overtaken by the spectacle. It’s probably the best version of what an Avengers movie can be. And even that turns out to be silly, sloppily written, and to require massive amount of suspension of disbelief. Is it really too much to hope that Marvel stops debasing its characters and stories with events that can never live up to the MCU’s individual pieces? Interview With A Local Man Returning After Thanos’ Snap.
* MCU continuity enters its “fuck you, that’s why” period.
* An analysis of both side’s tactics in the Battle of Winterfell, from a military strategist. A counterpoint.
* Hate to agree with Ross Douthat, but it really does seem to be the case that hype aside Martin is just warmed-over Tolkien, but worse in every particular. Bonus Twitter thread goodness on GoT and colonialism.
* America is a horror: on Jordan Peele’s Us.
* Vox celebrates the great James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).
* Keeping company with my Audible app over lunch, I’ve come to see it as the buddy our tech overlords have granted me in the isolation that they help to impose. I feel this way about podcasts.
* Report Realism: Tentative Notes on Contemporary Kenyan Writing.
Genres that strain realism—the gothic and neo-gothic, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, and so on—are conspicuously absent in Kenyan writing, even as they are incredibly well represented in Kenyan book consumption. We are not writing what we are reading; even the very popular Christian-themed fiction about fighting demonic forces, which is really a variation of the horror novel, remains relatively sparse in terms of what we write or, perhaps more accurately, what we choose to make public of our writing. The believable and the realistic are bounded by NGO narratives and perspectives. And too many writers believe that the only writing worth anything is the believable and the realistic: to be a “committed” writer requires adhering to report realism.
Report realism believes in the power of “truth,” whether contemporary or historical, with a faith that borders on fundamentalism. In report realism, the truth will set us free. Report realism confirms objective NGO reports and affirms what Kenyans feel to be the truth of a particular condition. In report realism, for instance, the Kenyan prostitute is always a morally degraded figure looking for a way out to a respectable moral life. This realism is celebrated and supported by the NGO organizations who fund writing competitions and publish winning entries devoted to describing the real Kenya and by mainstream publishers who have the conservative mission of producing appropriately moral literature.
* ‘It drives writers mad’: why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?
* The saddest story ever told, beating Hemingway out by one word: Esports Part-Time Online Instructor.
* Yes, you will get a job with that arts degree. With that history degree, too!
* Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university.
* 6 Majors Were Spared the Ax at Stevens Point. But the Damage Might Be Done.
* Students and (not) doing the reading.
* How to Be a Better Online Teacher.
* Getting a Game Studies PhD: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars. Game Boys: The “gamer” identity undermines the radical potential of play.
* Sexual harassment is pervasive in US physics programmes.
* The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s. Being a Black Academic in America.
* ‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus.
* Swarthmore Fraternities Disband.
* Marquette faculty, students and community members rally for unionization. Unionization effort at Marquette leaves organizers, administration in a stalemate.
* The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb. A Moral Stain on the Profession.
* “Student loan debt is crushing millions of families. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational: Universal free college and the cancellation of debt for more than 95% of Americans with student loan debt.”
* Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find.
* Stanford keeps Stanford University Press alive… for one year.
* Charles Koch gave $25m to our university. Has it become a rightwing mouthpiece? George Mason University’s Donor Problem and the Fight for Transparency.
* Grad Students at Private Colleges Were Cleared to Unionize 3 Years Ago. Here’s What’s Changed.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated.
* All Literature Is Climate Change Literature. The Green New Deal Costs Less Than Doing Nothing. Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies. ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: vast expanse of rainforest lost in 2018. Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April. ‘Decades of denial’: major report finds New Zealand’s environment is in serious trouble. Alaska’s in The Middle of a Record-Breaking Spring Melt, And It’s Killing People. The Folly of Returning to Paradise, California. Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital. Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse. “You did not act in time.” We Asked the 2020 Democrats About Climate Change (Yes, All of Them). Here Are Their Ideas. The Billionaire’s Guide to Hacking the Planet. What if air conditioners could save the planet? The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth. ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive. A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet. Between the Devil and the Green New Deal. Five years. And here comes eco-fascism.
* Down and Out in the Gig Economy: Journalism’s dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry—not to mention writers like me.
But for most of us, freelance journalism is a monetized hobby, separate from whatever real income one earns. The ideal relationship for a freelance journalist to their work becomes a kind of excited amateurism. They should hope for professional success and acceptance but always keep a backup plan or three in mind. They will likely not be welcomed past the gates of full-time employment. By year five or six, they might be rebranding themselves as “editorial consultants” or “content strategists,” realizing that any genuine fiscal opportunity lies in shepherding corporate content to life.
* ‘Two-Tiered Caste System’: The World of White-Collar Contracting in Silicon Valley. The Future of Unions Is White-Collar. We Just Remembered How to Strike.
* These five charts show how bad the student loan debt situation is.
* “I am a woman and I am fast.” The ongoing harassment of Caster Semenya is simply incredible.
* Ten years later, police lies about Oscar Grant come to light. And elsewhere on the police beat: We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records. New York City’s DAs Keep Secret Lists Of Cops With Questionable Credibility. Virginia police sergeant fired after being linked to white supremacy.
* Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes. Emails Show Trump Administration Had No Plan to Track and Reunite Separated Families. Militia in New Mexico Detains Asylum Seekers at Gunpoint.
* TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be.
* France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity. An art historian explains the tough decisions in rebuilding Notre Dame. How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral. The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy.
* Mental health minute: Researchers say there’s a simple way to reduce suicides: Increase the minimum wage. The challenge of going off psychiatric drugs. The kids are not all right.
* The Rise of Useless Health Insurance. High-Deductible Health Policies Linked To Delayed Diagnosis And Treatment. American Prescription Drug Prices Are Out of Control. One Man’s Furious Quest to Get to the Bottom of It.
* Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests.
* Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
* A new Gallup poll says that America is home to some of the most stressed people in the world, reporting extraordinary levels of anger and anxiety that could be cause for concern, say doctors.
* Workers Should Be in Charge.
* I Work With Suicidal Farmers. It’s Becoming Too Much to Bear.
* On crunch time in the games industry.
* Instagram Memers Are Unionizing.
* How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever.
* Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird.
* Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium.
* Believe them when they say they want to kill us.
* Children of the Children of Columbine.
* My parents didn’t tell me they skipped my vaccines. Then I got sick.
* How a mall dies, Milwaukee edition.
* The hunt for rocket boosters in Russia’s far north.
* Job-hunting will only get worse.
* Of course I believe in hell. I vote for Democrats.
* The gamification of fascism.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fandom, and anti-fandom.
* My feckless Googling had reaped a monstrous reality that I knew was going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I asked myself: Is there something righteous in facing reality, or would it have been better to stay ignorant? A surfeit of ugly knowledge is a feature of our age, a result of the internet carrying to our doorstep, like a tomcat with a dead rat, all manner of brutal information. How many others have flippantly Googled an old friend and discovered something ghastly? This was not knowledge as power; it was knowledge as sorrow.
* “Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats.”
* The oldest known tree in Wisconsin.
* A Video Game Developed To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Seems To Be Working.
* How “Liberal” Late-Night Talk Shows Became A Comedy Sinkhole.
* Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men. What Good Dads Get Away With.
* When Measles Arrives: Breaking Down the Anatomy of Containment.
* Despite being legally required to conduct audits since the early 90s and holding a staggering 2.2 trillion in assets, the Pentagon held its first-ever audit this week — which it, unsurprisingly, spectacularly failed.
* I have so little faith in the holders of the Star Trek IP I can’t greet any of this news with pleasure. Even the realization that Discovery is (finally) going to do something truly original in its third season just fills me with dread. And I don’t know how to feel about this at all: Star Trek: Picard Series May Not Reunite TNG Cast. Star Trek: Discovery’s Depiction of Captain Pike’s Disability is a Betrayal of Roddenberry’s Utopian Vision. My mini-tweetstorm on the subject.
* Sundown on Deadwood: David Milch, battling Alzheimer’s, finally finishes his TV Western.
* Professional obligation watch, god help me.
* Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer.
* Tolkien estate disavows forthcoming film starring Nicholas Hoult.
* John Lennon’s 15 year old report card.
* Colonizing Condiments: A (Very) Short History of Ketchup.
* The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.
* Obituary corner: Gene Wolfe Was the Proust of Science Fiction. Before the Labyrinthine Lore of ‘Dark Souls,’ There Was Gene Wolfe.
* Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention.
* Medicine is magical and magical is art / The boy in the bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart.
* Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs.
* The Great Pornwall of Britain Goes Up July 15.
* The United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan.
* what piece of cosmo sex advice most haunts your waking hours
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix ‘buys 50 literary projects in last year.’
* It was in autumn that the happy face arrived. Death of a Salesman. No mathematics, no science can ever predict the human soul. Where do you want to eat tonight?
* 2019 National Geographic Travel Photo Contest.
* And only mass surveillance can save us now! Rough news day for Oxford if you ask me.
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”
* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Thursday Links!
* Call for papers: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult
* On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of ‘The Floor is Lava.’
* There were like 15 separate Trump bribery scandals just yesterday. This one could be the biggest.
* Happy anniversary, Robert Mueller.
* None dare call it fascism: Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. “These aren’t people. These are animals.” ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. Abolish the ICE Prison Complex.
* The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo.
* The Solo reviews are rolling in. Disney has already moved on.
* Revisiting Springsteen’s worst decade.
* Michigan State University Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Larry Nassar’s Victims. Report: USC Ignored Gynecologist’s Alleged Misconduct.
* Is Chicago Experiencing a Historic Preservation Crisis?
* Can Artificial Intelligence Help Find Alien Intelligence?
* The story you don’t care about, in the format you don’t want, in the series you’ll forget about while it’s still airing: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Will Focus On Young Aragorn.
* Same thing but Young Alfred.
* The Wrath of Khan Director Reveals He Was Making a Star Trek Trilogy for CBS, But It’s Been Delayed.
* How can you make Arrested Development season five even less promising? Netflix’s top scientists are hard at work.
* Elsewhere in entertainment news: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.
* Scenes from the Anthropocene: Scientists Match Pollution in Greenland’s Ice Sheet to Events from Ancient Greece and Rome.
* Someone, somewhere, is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect.
* We can now see how humans have altered Earth’s water resources.
* Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.
* Inside the largest comic book collection in the world.
* Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park.
* It is sometimes said that a generous basic income could empower workers to better resist their capitalist bosses. This familiar claim regarding the emancipatory potential of basic income has things almost exactly backwards. A universal basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is an organized working class already powerful enough to extract it. This fact should inform the Left’s political strategy.
* And I always knew: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.
All Your Sunday Reading™
* Call for applications: Postdoctoral Scholar for Futures of Literary and Cultural Knowledge, UCSB.
* Call for Papers: “Binge-Watching and the Future of Television Research: A Workshop” Sept 13-14, 2018, at Anglia Ruskin University.
* Studying Tolkien fanzines at Marquette University.
* I make a by-the-way appearance on this massive roundup of Infinity War links.
* What is an English professor?
* The Enduring Anger of Joanna Russ.
* Bonkers Wisconsin tax policy error in my favor.
* Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services. UC Workers on Strike. After 3-Day Strike, University Of California’s Service Workers Vow To Keep Fighting.
* A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired. The icing on the cake. Well, actually, this is.
* If you’re worried about free speech on campus, don’t fear students — fear the Koch brothers.
* Why universities became big-time real estate developers.
* Stephen Kuusisto on ableism in the university.
* White student calls police on black student napping in Yale dorm. When Calling the Police Is a Privilege.
* Academia’s #MeToo moment: Women accuse professors of sexual misconduct. 45 Stories of Consent on Campus. The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time.
* (Another) progressive case against the progressive case for the SAT.
* Never-ending nightmare: why feminist dystopias must stop torturing women.
* In 2011, Minnesota got a liberal governor and Wisconsin got a conservative one. Who was better off?
* What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
* Your workplace is killing you.
* Intrigue and Drama on the Han Solo Set. Catch the fever!
* One of the most purely destructive things Trump has yet done. Early days though, early days. Evergreen.
* Taking parents from their children is a form of state terror. Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance. An upcoming Supreme Court ruling could force all workers into forced arbitration, deprived of the right to class lawsuits. Trump Administration Wants to Train Teens in ‘Hazardous’ Jobs. Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab. A taxonomy of Michael Cohen and potential Trump corruption. How Michael Cohen Cashed In. It’s harder to pay off foreign governments than the US one. Breaking Down Gina Haspel’s Tense Confirmation Hearing. Trumpism Is Having Its Best Week Ever. We know a lot about Trump’s misdeeds. But most of all we know there’s more to come.
* How bananas is this Schneiderman story going to get? Man.
* And isn’t it pretty to think so?
* ’We Can Make Him Disappear’: The Power of County Sheriffs.
* In One Year, 57,375 Years of Life Were Lost to Police Violence. Plainclothes NYPD Cops Are Involved in a Staggering Number of Killings.
* How to Survive the First Hour of a Nuclear Attack. Wow, a whole hour!
* The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse.
* Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings.’
* Democrats against the gig economy. The Politics of Full Employment.
* It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.
* The Brooklyn Comedian Whose Joke About ICE Got Him a Visit From Homeland Security. ICE Breaking into Home: “We’ll Show You the Warrant When We’re Done.”
* The “Maddening Labyrinth” Aging NFL Players Face for Dementia Compensation.
* England revving up for a Corbyn prime ministership.
* There’s No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal. Almost as if… there’s no excuse at all…
* From blood diamonds to blood healing crystals.
* It sounds like my dream of a Bill & Ted parody of the trend towards grimdark 80s revivals is gonna come true.
* What CBS found when it bought four random used photocopiers.
* How political and media elites legitimized torture.
* #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable.
* You Won’t Like The Consequences Of Making Pluto A Planet Again.
* New York Court Says Chimps Aren’t People—But a Judge Is Not Happy About It.
* The dream of communism is the elimination of wage labor. If AI is bound to serve society instead of private capitalists, it promises to do so by freeing an overwhelming majority from such drudgery while creating wealth to sustain all.
* Imagine that it’s 2044, and everyone is still listening to Duran Duran.
* Sometimes you just need two men.
* And in the advanced Turing test, the machine convinces you that it is conscious and you aren’t.
The Terrible Serenity of a Browser with Every Tab Closed
* What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.
* We Reversed Our Declining English Enrollments. Here’s How.
* CFP: Exhaustion: Tired Bodies, Tired Worlds. Graduate conference at the Department of English, University of Chicago, this November.
* When machine learning is astonishing – I collected some highlights from a paper on algorithmic creativity. Great Twitter thread.
* Butler Mons honours Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, and whose Xenogenesis trilogy describes humankind’s departure from Earth and subsequent return. And on the second season finale of Levar Burton reads: “Childfinder.”
* ‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages.
* Climate Change, Revolution And ‘New York 2140.’
* Dic Lit.
* Dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.
* Post-Soviet science fiction and the war in Ukraine.
* Eighty Years of the Futurians’ Vision.
* A Radical Idea about Adjuncting.
* I didn’t really understand how unjust the academic system was for career advancement for women until I had children. What It’s Like to Be a Woman in the Academy.
* Teach the controversy, Hell edition.
* What It’s Like to Watch Isle of Dogs As a Japanese Speaker. Orientalism Is Alive And Well In American Cinema.
* Junot Díaz on the legacy of childhood trauma.
* The Breakfast Club in the age of #MeToo.
* Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is not a video-game-centered dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.
* Milwaukee students of color say it’s time to talk about the school-to-prison pipeline.
* A Syrian man has been trapped in a Malaysian airport for 37 days.
* The Fog of War and the Case for Knee-jerk Anti-Interventionism.
* 15 Years. More Than 1 Million Dead. No One Held Responsible.
* America should just stop all bombing.
* ‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence.
* Justice Dept. to halt legal-advice program for immigrants in detention. Amid deportations, those in U.S. without authorization shy away from medical care. ICE Won’t Deport the Last Nazi War Criminal in America.
* This proposal, requiring worker seats on corporate boards, is commonly referred to as “codetermination.” A number of European countries require worker representatives to be included in corporate boards, or for councils of workers to be consulted in appointing board members. The emerging plan to save the American labor movement.
* There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, carers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster or slower, with ostentatious brutality or bureaucratic drag, but it will always do it. Trump is gambling that Americans will embrace the brutal version, as they’ve done so many times in the past. If they do, will we be enough to stop them? Liberals constantly rediscover the violence at the heart of their politics, but can never learn a thing from it.
* When an algorithm cuts your health care.
* How the American economy conspires to keep wages down.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Universities Use the Specter of ICE to Try to Scare Foreign Grad Students Away From Unionizing.
* Why Your Advice for Ph.D.s Leaving Academe Might Be Making Things Worse.
* The definitive explanation of why Bitcoin is stupid.
* Wisconsin in the news: Suspected White Supremacist Died Building ISIS-Style Bombs.
* I predicted this: Apple orders its most ambitious TV series yet: An adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation.
* More than half your body is not human.
* Stan Lee needs a hero. Sounds like the sooner the better.
* Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age.
* The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news. Dangerous climate tipping point is ‘about a century ahead of schedule’ warns scientist. Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting at its Fastest Rate in 400 years.
* Tony Gilroy on ‘Rogue One’ Reshoots: They Were in “Terrible Trouble.”
* Catholic Colleges and Basketball.
* A people’s history of the Undertaker.
* John Carpenter: The First Fifteen Years.
* Only young people do revolutionary mathematics.
* Political correctness strikes again! MIT cuts ties with company promising to provide digital immortality after killing you.
* The Working Person’s Guide to the Industry That Might Kill Your Company.
* I was going to watch it anyway, but: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2 Casts Tig Notaro.
* A Jar, a Blouse, a Letter: The story of Julia Kristeva.
* Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement. Mark Zuckerberg’s 15-year apology tour.
* Why several trainloads of New Yorkers’ poop has been stranded for months in Alabama.
* Unusual forms of ‘nightmare’ antibiotic-resistant bacteria detected in 27 states.
* The best news I’ve heard in years: Fireball Island is coming back.
* That’s a relief! Don’t worry, the US would win a nuclear war with Russia.
* And no one’s hands are clean.
Monday Morning Links!
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here’s a Storify of the weekend’s #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* ‘Seat 14C’ short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington’s Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump’s CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it’s much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a “bipartisan” patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There’s no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the “Xennial” label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It’s a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Iran’s temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson’s widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* McConnell’s nearing a deal. Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes.
* ‘Terrorism’ misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I’m like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane’s backstory.
Tuesday Links!
* I should have realized the Nevada Medicaid for All bill was just a ratfuck. Let my guard down.
* On television, in journals, in the halls of Congress, none of the old methods by which American liberals enforced their claim to superior expertise are working anymore. For all their “resistance,” the greatest impediment to Donald Trump remains his own stupidity. Despite every evil and crime of his administration, the most ambitious Democratic victory on the horizon is making Mike Pence president. Our liberals are right: none of this is normal. This isn’t how it used to be. Everywhere, our best and brightest blink. Are they still in the desert? Is all this an hallucination, a bad dream? The Blathering Superego at the End of History.
* New Study Shows What Really Happened in the 2016 Election.
* Wisconsin and climate denial. As water quality worries grow, Wisconsin plots strategy on phosphorus.
* Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Potentially Monumental Political Gerrymandering Case.
* GOP Data Firm Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly 200 Million American Voters.
* Constitutional crisis may be Trump’s only hope.
* The DCEU has a problem — everybody likes Wonder Woman.
* itshappening.gif: Yes, The Dark Tower Movie Is a Sequel to the Books.
* thisisfine.jpg: It’s so hot in Phoenix, they can’t fly planes.
* The Official Reason for Star Trek: Discovery’s Many Delays Is ‘World Building Is Hard’.
* 8°C.
* Sad.
* An Oral History of Quentin Tarantino as Told to Me by Men I’ve Dated.
* Zadie Smith reviews Get Out.
* The Cars universe continues to suggest the existence of a Car Hitler.
* And some personal news: I’m a Republican now.
Sunday’d Reading!
* Presenting the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
* On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest.
* A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* So old I can remember when Eric and Donald Jr. were going to run the business and not have a political role. (January.)
* Cool, thanks for looking into it.
* Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI.
* The Republicans Broke American Politics, and Media Elites Are Blind to It. A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.
* The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It’s too late, of course, the cultists will believe in it for all time.
* Horrific hate crime in Portland. Seems to be part of a disturbing trend.
* New Orleans principal loses job after wearing Nazi-associated rings in video. Glowing 2015 profile.
* Meanwhile, in Arizona. In New Jersey.
* New Jersey not doing great in my newsfeed today generally. Though this was good.
* U.S. Airstrike Killed Over 100 Civilians in Mosul, Pentagon Says. The U.S. Is Helping Allies Hide Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria.
* ‘Mostly Toddlers’ Among 31 Drowned.
* A spectre is haunting Goldman Sachs.
* Trump going to the mattresses.
* How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative.
* Democrats doing much better, still can’t win a damn thing. The only answer is to keep offering them nothing and telling them they’re stupid, until they finally come around. Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment. Donald Trump Is A Big Reason The GOP Kept The Montana House Seat.
* Remember how terrible the AHCA is?
* Sheriff Clarke and some totally appropriate, not at all batshit insane behavior.
* A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance.
* A 31-year-old undocumented Honduran bicyclist, Marcos Antonio Huete, was hit by a car in Key West, Florida, on his way to work. The policeman’s camera shows him inquiring about the victim’s immigration status before offering medical assistance. He was later detained by the Border Patrol.
* “We want you to think Luke is bad” is an awfully large part of Last Jedi hype. I have to think that means they won’t actually do it…
* Title IX Policy shift at the University of Oregon: Faculty members at the University of Oregon will no longer be required to notify campus authorities when students confide in them that they’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed but say they don’t want the information reported.
* Wealth, I realized, is the adult version of magic: an incredibly powerful but ultimately arbitrary resource that transfers primarily through inheritance. It has some logic to it— but also enough randomness that those without can hope for a spontaneous windfall in the form of an improbably lucrative investment or a secret inheritance.
* Unexpected and interesting: Joss Whedon isn’t just finishing Justice League; he’s been working on it for a while.
* Truly, ours is the darkest timeline.
* A chance meeting with Mr. Rogers.
* If you’d bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you’d be worth $35M.
* Uber: a cheap scam all the way down.
* Original draft of Revenge of the Sith actually treated Padme as an interesting character.
* Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.
* These birds have the right idea.
* This one cuts me. When you’re in your thirties. Call CPS. #TheResistance.
* Everything was connected, and I was fucked.
* Can someone please explain the physics of Casper?
* And N6946-BH1 is all of us right now.
Wednesday Night Links!
* Journal Sentinel columnist James Causey was a third-grader at Samuel Clemens Elementary School. The problems of the city would play out with his classmates.
* Teen’s brothers witnessed his ‘violent, senseless’ death in Texas police shooting, family says.
* Flint puts 8,000 people on notice for tax liens for unpaid water bills.
* Ah, the holy mystery of free speech, with its inscrutable twists and turns.
* Today in academic controversies. I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent issue where my Facebook feed divided so evenly for and against.
* NASA, here to help: Science Fiction Space Technology Terms.
* Contingent No More: An Academic Manifesto.
*Democrats Can Retake the House in 2018 Without Converting a Single Trump Voter. Of course, they can lose that way, too… And speaking of losing. The coming clown show. I would have thought Gillibrand would be an instant frontrunner. Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. More on that last link here.
* A noncriminal mother of four was deported. Now in Mexico, she fears for her safety.
* Well, this seems fine: Donald Trump on whether he could start war with North Korea: ‘I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.’ How Trump Could Get Fired.
* The Whole World Is Now a Message Board.
* Why does a newspaper employ opinion columnists at all?
* Thor-centric podcast from Miles while Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is on hiatus.
* A Rare Journey Into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a Super-Bunker That Can Survive Anything.
* Finally someone said it: Let’s end compulsory schooling and stop forcing education ‘down everybody’s throat.’
* How your selfie could affect your life insurance.
* Shock finding: Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* Even more shocking! Men Are Less Moral after Exposure to Images of Sexy Women, Research Finds.
* Teach the controversy: Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Seems harsh.
* Mike Pence — IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
I Have (Not a Joke) 300 Tabs Open and This Afternoon I Am Closing Them All: Election Night Links!
I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t been able to tend to my open tabs at all. There’s over 300 — and I’m not leaving this room until I’ve closed them all. Let’s go!
* Really, I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to shamelessly self-promote: I missed announcing my trip to Atlanta for SLSA 2016 and my presentations on “Literary Studies after Blackfish” and the upcoming almost-almost-done issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding,” as well as my New Inquiry review of the (fantastic) end to Liu Cixin’s (fantastic) Three-Body trilogy. My new essay on “Geriatric Zombies” from The Walking Med was namechecked as part of a larger zombie news report in the Seattle Times. Most importantly I haven’t been able to hype my Octavia Butler book, which is printed and apparently shipping. I’ve even held one in my hands!
* Meanwhile, here’s my guess for tonight’s final results, just to get it out of the way: 340-198.
* CFP: Letters to Octavia Butler. CFP: The Comics of Alison Bechdel. CFP: English Studies in Ruins? CFP: The World of Harry Potter.
* A new issue of the Eaton Journal in Archival Research in Science Fiction is out, including a piece from Larisa Mikhaylova on Star Trek fandom in Russia.
* French town upholds law against UFOs.
* Invisible Planets / Invisible Frameworks — Assembling an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF. I’ve been reading the Invisible Planets collection and it’s great.
* Why we should lower the voting age in America.
* Žižek on the lesser evil. Jameson on fascism, but not yet. Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage For 2016 Campaign. Americans, Politics, and Social Media. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say. The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List. No, “we” are not collectively responsible for anything. Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right. Ivanka is the real threat. A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. And did someone order a Constitutional crisis with a 4-4 Supreme Court?
* What Happens if You Vote and Die Before Election Day? Too late for all of us, alas.
* In contrast to the Fordist society observed by Gramsci, power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to avoid the constraints of critical reason. Increasingly, it is non-representational codes—of software, finance, human biology—that mediate between past, present and future, allowing society to cohere. Where, for example, employee engagement cannot be achieved via cultural or psychological means, increasingly business is looking to solutions such as wearable technology, that treat the worker as an item of fixed capital to be monitored physically, rather than human capital to be employed. The key human characteristics are those that are repeated in a quasi-mechanical fashion: footsteps, nightly sleep, respiration, heartbeat. These metronomic qualities of life come to represent each passing moment as yet another one of the same. The New Neoliberalism.
* “We are all Thomas More’s children”: 500 years of Utopia. And at LARB.
* How America Outlawed Adolescence. The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child.
* Inside the NSA’s For-Sale Spy Town. The Indiana Town That Modernism Built.
* Where Ph.D.s Work. IPFW Community Shocked by Restructuring Recommendations. Last month’s strike at Harvard. And its results. A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats.’ Saudi college student in Wisconsin dies after assault. Johns Hopkins threatens to close its interdisciplinary Humanities Center, sparking outcry from students and faculty members. San Diego State University tuition, 1959. How State Budget Cuts Affect Your Education.
* The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity.
* The American Association of University Professors has launched an investigation focused on the dismissal of Nathanial Bork, who had taught philosophy courses at the college for six years before he was dismissed. The AAUP says that his dismissal raises concerns both because of the issues he raises about rigor and also because he was fired shortly after he complained about the situation to the Higher Learning Commission, the college’s accreditor. Further, Bork was active in efforts to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at the college.
* A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award. Love this.
* “University Paid for Bigfoot Expedition.”
* Starship Troopers coming back just as documentary footage of 2016. A darker, grittier Muppet Babies, for a tragic time.
* Quentin Tarantino still insists he’s going to stop at 10 movies.
* Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization.’
* “Capitalism Broke Earth, Let’s Protect Mars.”
* Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup Changing Computing Forever.
* The video for Soul Asylum’s 1993 smash hit featured real missing kids. Some eventually came home; some never did.
* Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery. Football Alters the Brains of Kids as Young as 8. Why treating diabetes keeps getting more expensive. The Other Sister: Returning Home to Care for an Autistic Sibling.
* Inmates Explain How They’d Run Prisons.
* If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women.
* Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow. Bathroom air freshener causes emergency response at nuclear site.
* Why can’t the Star Trek timeline advance?
* The Venom From This Snake Will Make Your Life a Living Hell.
* Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange.
* Why Did This Guy Collect 500 Screenshots of Soda Machines in Video Games? Because He’s a Genius. And elsewhere on the Jacob Brogan science beat: Everyone Poops. Some Animals Eat It. Why?
* Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Thumb U.N. won’t intervene.
* Now Is The Perfect Time For The Indians To Quietly Abandon Chief Wahoo.
* Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces. How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.
* The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year.
* In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history: The Pyramid at the End of the World.
* Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million in Jerry Sandusky Case.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Yellowstone’s “Zone of Death.” And I’ll take this one too: The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic.
* How Doctor Strange went from being a racist Asian caricature to a magical white savior.
* A new favorite poem:
* Animal minds: the new anthropomorphism.
* You weren’t educated, you were trained.
* Twenty-first century Victorians.
* How We Tell Campus Rape Stories After Rolling Stone.
* Native lives matter. Tribe vows to fight North Dakota pipeline through winter. The world watches. A Standing Rock Syllabus.
* Superheroes and sadness. Pixar and sadness.
* Presenting The Black Mirror Expanded Universe.
* Wildlife numbers more than halve since 1970s in mass extinction. Inside the Frozen Zoo That Could Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life.
* The secret history of Teaching with Calvin & Hobbes.
* A bad idea, but fine: The Adventures of Young Dumbledore.
* Kardashev Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist.
* And frankly you had me at LEGO, but I like the rest too: LEGO’s New Line of Female Superheroes Is the Toy We Deserve.
Sunday Links and Every Tab Is Closed, Forever and Ever Amen
* I’ve noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling’s readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author?
* Into the Black: Stories of People Getting Out of Debt. Via MeFi.
* The three student loan crises.
* Five years on Skid Row from University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart.
* Off to a great start: Rio officials had to open Olympic Stadium with bolt cutters after losing key. These Are the Actual Costs of the Rio Olympics. The ideology of the Olympics. A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics failed to report cases. With just days to go until the Rio Olympics begin, the AP—which has been testing viral levels since last year—reports water conditions are worse than ever. Inside the Gloria Marina, where the sailing races take place, adenoviruses per liter have jumped more than 42 percent since they first sampled it in March, 2015.
* Burn your money the higher education way.
* Elsewhere in obviously functional organizations: Recent construction of emergency exit near chancellor’s office for security reasons symbolizes closed-off nature of Dirks’ administration.
* “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
* “We call on the U.S. Department of Transportation to conduct a thorough examination into the prevailing practices of major American air carriers, including Delta Air Lines, and to develop policy guidelines on the objective factors that are to be considered when determining that a passenger may legally be removed from a flight,” CAIR-Cincinnati attorney Sana Hassan said.
* Clinton’s tuition plan and private colleges.
* “Free college” is a moralistic ruse, in other words, used to smuggle in a market logic where it has no place without addressing the core question of exploitative, exorbitant college costs. It treats education like anything else you’d buy in a store, and scolds those who feel otherwise by pretending they want to get something without working for it. There ain’t so such thing as a free lunch, of course: students and the public have amply paid for it already. They’re just not eating.
* Ira Steven Behr has been working on a Deep Space Nine documentary that apparently somehow includes a “notional season eight.” And while we’re at it: Oh, That’s Where Carol Marcus Was During Star Trek Beyond. Rumor of the Day: Star Trek: Discovery to take place before The Original Series?
* Roger Ailes Used Fox News Budget to Finance ‘Black Room’ Campaigns Against His Enemies. This story is just going to get more and more incredible as time goes on, I think.
* Seinfeld: “The Twin Towers.” An original spec script.
* Secrets of the Millennials Revealed: They’re Poor.
* But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry.
* This Joke Was Off-limits at Donald Trump’s Comedy Central Roast. Who Lies More? The Answer May Surprise You. You Always Hurt the Ones You Love. On Veterans. On Unlikely Voters. The Shrinking Electoral Map. Georgia as Battleground State. Bloodthirstier than Cheney. If President Trump decided to use nukes, he could do it easily. Congressman Proposes Law To Prevent Trump From Being Able To Launch Nukes On His Own. Only in America could proposals to bomb at least three nations and indefinitely occupy another be labeled “isolationism.” Senior GOP Officials Exploring Options if Trump Drops Out. What Happens If Trump Drops Out? If Trump Drops Out, The Result Will Be A Horrible Legal Quagmire. Premediating a Loss. Just 92 More Days in the Bunker. Here’s what an 8% Clinton Lead Looks Like. Trump, or Political Emotions. A Fable, by Teju Cole. Of course there’s more links after the chart.
* Anagha Uppal, an activist at the University of Tennessee, describes the meal plan rule as “an exercise in tyranny.” Ms. Uppal has not used her plan — “I don’t purchase from Aramark,” she said between bites of chicken salad in pita (cost: $5.74) at the Golden Roast Coffeehouse. On her laptop: a Food Recovery Network sticker; she’s a campus coordinator for the network, a national student group that fights food waste. It was Ms. Uppal who prodded officials to start the Big Orange Meal Share to let students donate swipes.
* Possibilia, or, Love in the Multiverse.
* Why Amish Children Rarely Get Asthma.
* When Exhaustion Became a Status Symbol.
* Travel reimbursement voucher, trip to Moon, July 16-24, 1969.
* Like the blog, my Tumblr has been languishing the last few weeks while I’ve been teaching, but every so often I throw up some gold. I don’t know what else I was expecting. I’m with Her(zog). You have every reason to go on living. The last week of my comics class.
* A Radioactive Cold War Military Base Will Soon Emerge From Greenland’s Melting Ice.
* Perhaps our billboards are the civic sludge, the highway litter, of America’s ambitions and aspirations — literally writ large.
* A Brief Publishing History of Game of Thrones.
* Tolkien: The Lost Recordings.
* Quantum Computing, Getting Closer.
* Crows Continue to Be Terrifyingly Intelligent.
* A new report from Zillow estimates that with a six-foot sea level rise, “almost 1.9 million homes (or roughly 2 percent of all U.S. homes) – worth a combined $882 billion – are at risk of being underwater by 2100.”
* What’s Wrong With the DC Comics Movie Franchise? Report: Warner Bros. Turned Suicide Squad Into a Mess in Its Panic Over BvS Criticism.
* …it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. The function of video game criticism.
* Men, am I right. Marriage, men, and alcohol.
* The “biological mystery” of the female orgasm.
* Last year, though, the National Institutes of Health banned funding of animal-human chimeras until it could figure out whether any of this work would bump against ethical boundaries. Like: Could brain scientists endow research animals with human cognitive abilities, or even consciousness, while transplanting human stem cells into the brain of a developing animal embryo? Would it be morally wrong to create animals with human feet, hands, or a face in order to study human morphology? Modern medicine thinks before it acts. SMASH CUT TO: After a nearly year-long ban…
* Life in the city without cops or firefighters would be unpleasant and, inevitably, tragic. But, she notes, “if sanitation workers aren’t out there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”
* Malcolm Harris reviews The Last Days of New Paris.
* Head shots of all of the ways US intelligence thought Hitler might try to disguise himself.
* In Super Mario Galaxy, whenever Mario drowns in a swamp, his hand reaches out from under the surface before being sucked in. However, since Mario’s head is so big, he cannot raise his hand above the surface without his head being still visible. To solve this, the game simply shrinks Mario’s head so it doesn’t interfere with the animation.
* How Bill Cosby Finally Landed in a Courtroom.
* The Blackest Superhero Story That Marvel Comics Ever Published.
* And Wisconsin, once again in the news.
Gerry Canavan 
