Posts Tagged ‘MLA’
Friday Links!
* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.
* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.
* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?
* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.
* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.
* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.
* The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…
* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.
* Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.
* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!
* Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.
* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?
* How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.
* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.
* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.
* The Making of the American Gulag.
* 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.
* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.
* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.
* Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.
* Beware the climate pragmatists.
* Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.
* A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.
* Understanding the professional-managerial class.
* Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.
* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.
* Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.
* Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.
* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.
* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.
* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.
Another Day of Extreme Cold, Another Link Post
* CFP: The State of the Single-Author Study (also MLA 2020, deadline March 15). As Sean Guynes-Vishniac noted hopefully an SF studies scholar will participate as this has been a major site of research in recent years, largely due to the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.
* Just for the record: Polar vortex: what is it and how is it linked to climate change?
* Greta Thunberg: Act As If Our House Is on Fire. Because It Is.
* Kamala Harris picked a fight with the wrong fandom.
* Sanders’s bill, the “For the 99.8% Act,” would tax the estates of the 0.2 percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million, while the rest of the country “would not see their taxes go up by one penny under this plan,” according to aides to the Vermont senator, who is considering a 2020 presidential bid.
* Democrats Must Reach Out to Moderates in 2020 — By Waging a Vicious Class War.
* How a frustrated blogger made expanding Social Security a reasonable idea.
* Joshua Tree national park ‘may take 300 years to recover’ from shutdown. And another shutdown is just a few short weeks away!
* Modern Weather Forecasts Are Stunningly Accurate.
How much better? “A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”
* Cop watch: This Is What Truancy Laws Do. Feds used fake Michigan university in immigration sting. ICE force-feeding detainees on hunger strike. An asylum seeker’s quest to get her toddler back.
* OxyContin Maker Explored Expansion Into “Attractive” Anti-Addiction Market.
* Once you have your sensitivity raised about a particular condition, you see the abuses they suffer everywhere. Florida School Staffers Charged With Using Dark Room, Whistle to Torment Autistic Kids.
* You can report the news in a way that doesn’t inform anyone.
* Bipartisan agreement that Donald Trump is God’s chosen instrument for destroying the United States.
* No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture.
* What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free?
* I basically pitched this story in Graz, talking about the difference between Aquaman and Namor: Namor, ecoterrorist.
* The Beginning of the End of Capitalist Realism.
* Today in the liberal media’s endless drumbeat for war.
* 1984.
* It looks like I’ve accidentally made a terrific financial decision.
“We find that LEGO investments outperform large stocks, bonds, gold and other alternative investments, yielding the average return of at least 11% (8% in real terms) in the sample period 1987-2015,” write the authors of a study titled LEGO – The Toy of Smart Investors. “Small and huge sets, as well as seasonal, architectural and movie-based sets, deliver higher returns. LEGO returns are not exposed to market, value, momentum and volatility risk factors, but have an almost unit exposure to the size factor. A positive multifactor alpha of 4-5%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.4, a positive return skewness and a low exposure to standard risk factors make the LEGO toy an attractive alternative investment with a good diversification potential.”
* What You Should Know Before You Start Watching Porn.
* Scenes from the Anthropocene.
* And just in time for teaching SimCity later this semester: Behind one of the most iconic computer games of all time is a theory of how cities die—one that has proven dangerously influential.
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Closed Some Tabs Today Links
* * The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.
* Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?
* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.
* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.
* Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!
* Foundation #130 has been published.
* An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.
* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.
* Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.
* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.
* A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.
* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.
* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.
* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.
* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?
* Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.
* As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.
* White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.
* Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
* Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.
* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.
* Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.
* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.
* Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.
* What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?
* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.
* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.
* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.
* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.
* As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
* Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.
* Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.
* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!
* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.
* E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.
* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.
* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.
* In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.
* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!
* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.
* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.
* Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.
* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…
* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?
* Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.
* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).
* Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.
* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
* Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.
* Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.
* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.
* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”
* Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?
* Incompetence all the way down.
* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.
* In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.
* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.
* The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.
* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.
* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.
* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.
* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.
* We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.
* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.
* Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.
* Raising a child in a doomed world.
* The second civil war just got interesting.
* In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.
* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.
* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.
* And a plastic straw update: A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!
Thursday Links!
* * The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.
* My colleague C.J. Hribal’s essay “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” has won a Pushcart Prize.
* Sure! Why not.
* We did it! Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes.
* CFP: Indiana Jones and the Edited Collection. CFP: Blackness and Disability. CFP: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom.
* WISCON 42! “Doing Justice To The Archive: The Octavia E. Butler Papers.”
* There is only one Trump scandal.
* Stolen election pays big dividends.
* No one could have predicted this shocking turn of events.
* I’ll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy’s net returns to the University. Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish. Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA’s Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million). There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period. There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated. More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements. (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.) And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.
* Profession: The Sky Is Falling.
* Scandal after scandal focuses scrutiny on USC leadership, culture.
* The Best Question To Ask on the Last Day of Class.
* ‘Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay’: the rise of the religious left.
* Traditional Disobedience: Renewing the Legacy of Catholic Activism.
* After decades of dwarfs and elves, writers of color redefine fantasy.
* Magic: The Gathering and capitalism.
* Killing All Humans: A Flowchart.
* David Foster Wallace was terrible to women.
* The Two Crucial Filmmaking Elements Causing All Your Movie Feuds.
* Arrested Development season five has been managed so badly by Hurwitz and Netflix that it’s practically begging to be boycotted. More here.
* Marvel and the End of Counterprogramming.
* HBO’s Watchmen series sounds worse than I imagined.
* What Deadpool 2’s fridging controversy says about comics culture’s gender gap.
* Two Americans were detained by a Border Patrol agent after he heard them speaking Spanish. Gay Army chaplain struggles to save husband from deportation. Trump Gang Dragnet Caught a Teen Who ICE Said Looked Like He Was in MS-13. He Wasn’t. “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
* Breaking #MAGA: A man posed for months as an ICE agent. A traffic stop led his girlfriend to unravel the truth.
* Jordan Peterson, The Intellectual We Deserve.
* Shock: 2013 Chicago School Closings Failed To Help Students.
* The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica. Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system.
* Milwaukee cops abuse NBA star Sterling Brown. New York Jets chairman, brother of Trump ambassador, says he’ll pay fines for team players who protest during anthem.
* He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill.
* Immortality. Statement of teaching philosophy. Can YOU hit the bullseye?
* And huge, if true: America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
