Posts Tagged ‘MLA’
It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy
* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.
* The part I was born to play.
* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
* The novel in the age of Obama.
* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.
* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.
* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.
* Student evaluations: still bad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.
* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.
* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.
* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.
* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’
* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.
* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.
* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).
* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?
* UBI already exists for the 1%.
* 26, 171.
* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.
* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.
* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.
* The End of the Rural Hospital.
* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.
* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.
* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.
* But this one takes the cake.
* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…
* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.
* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.
* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.
* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?
* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.
* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).
* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.
* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.
* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.
* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.
* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.
* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.
* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.
* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.
* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.
* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.
* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.
* Neanderthals were people too.
* When a Video-Game World Ends.
* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.
* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.
* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”
* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”
* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.
* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.
* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.
* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.
* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.
* Superheroes and the kids today.
* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.
Friday Links!
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Wednesday Links!
* Some CFPs I posted yesterday: Buffy at 20! SFFTV Call for Reviewers! And Paradoxa 28: “Global Weirding” has officially appeared in the world as well; see a table of contents and our introduction, and then get one of your very own…
* I’m still gathering the loooooing list for the Pioneer Award — so let me know if you know of a peer-reviewed edited collection in SF studies broadly conceived, published in 2016, or a peer-reviewed article on SF published in a non-SF-studies journal, also in 2016!
* Visiting MLA 2017? Can I interest you in #s444?
444. Infinite Jest at Twenty
Saturday, 7 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 112A, Pennsylvania Convention Center
A special session
Presiding: Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.
1. “Infinite Jest‘s Near Future,” Lee Konstantinou, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
2. “Aesthetics of Trauma in Infinite Jest,” Carrie Shanafelt, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ., Teaneck
3. “No Year of Glad: Infinite Jest after 9/13/2008,” Gerry Canavan
Responding: N. Katherine Hayles, Duke Univ.
* I shared that one, so here’s the debunking: The Bad Research Behind the Bogus Claim That North Carolina Is No Longer a Democracy. I guess I relied on the journalistic summaries (classic blunder) didn’t realize how bad the base research was. North Carolina is still not a legitimate democracy, though.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Constitution has strangled American democracy for long enough. We need a constituent assembly.
* Drexel, Twitter and Academic Freedom.
* Oh boy: A Turning Point in the Campus Culture Wars? For Some, Trump Raises Hopes.
* Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA.
* Why saving the congressional ethics office isn’t as big a victory as it seems. At least it was a win!
* Here’s How We Prepare to be Ungovernable in 2017. Six policy ideas that can lay the groundwork for a more progressive America.
* Why liberals need to get a grip on Russia.
* The coming restaurant crash.
* The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.
* Rogue One editors reveal which scenes were part of reshoots. Women’s Health and the Fall of the Galactic Republic.
* An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton.
* The 16 Black Panthers Still Behind Bars.
* Twilight of the curly quote.
* 47% of Jobs Will Disappear in the next 25 Years, According to Oxford University.
* Counterpoint: Why Star Trek: Discovery Belongs on CBS All Access.
* An oral history of the Sokal hoax.
* Towards an abolition ecology.
* Darkest timeline watch: Wisconsin Senate leader says he’s open to toll roads.
* And with 2016 over, a toddler has now shot a person every week in the US for two years straight. We did it, everyone. We did it.
Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against or What You’re For
* Saturn devours his young: President Trump.
* So weird to see Donald Trump going through all the traditional rituals of assuming the presidency, like the ceremonial settling of your $25 million fraud cases.
* When Mike Pence Went To See Hamilton. (UPDATE: God forbid me, I don’t think this is absolutely insignificant.)
* The Problem of Judas in Amos Oz’s new novel.
* Film analysis minute: Indiana Jones and the collaborators.
* Dan Berger in Jacobin: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.
* Suicide contagion in the Age of Trump. The Banality of Trump. While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. Hey, just out of curiosity, are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?
* Let me tell you a story about a major party’s nominee for President of the United States.
* I come to you now, at the turn of the tide: Finally, the MLA speaks.
* What the: Minnesota Woman Sues Her Trans Teenager for Transitioning Without Her Consent.
* Pokémon originalism is a thing now.
* What kind of New Jersey accent do you have? What’s the most New Jersey thing you can think of?
* Two days after Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the Canadian government quietly tweaked our immigration system to make it easier for many Americans to move to Canada.
New Fall Syllabus #2: INFINITE JEST!
And here’s the Infinite Jest syllabus. This one turned out to be a surprisingly difficult puzzle to put together, just because I felt strongly that the book absolutely had to be finished by the class period before the class period before Thanksgiving (and later determined that we really needed a whole week to talk about the book just as a whole) — while I also felt (after the experience of the Tolkien class was so great) that it would be really good to have a slow start where we talked a bit about Wallace as a thinker and read some of his other work. This seemed especially urgent to me because of the fact of the suicide, which really does seem to risk retrospectively poisoning some aspects of the book and Wallace’s larger career (I’ve included the MLA panel we’re doing explicitly in the course as a last-day exercise, though I realized yesterday while prepping the course that I seem to have completely cryptomnesically ripped off Tom Bissell in my panel abstract — very embarrassing).
I decided early on that “beginning with the end” was the way to do this course, discussing the suicide openly and concretely at length at the very start of the class. My workshopmates in my Jesuit pedagogy seminar last semester very helpfully suggested some strategies for making the course a comfortable place to talk about some very uncomfortable things, and strongly suggested that I include an explicit content note in the syllabus (which as you can see, I did, a fairly lengthy one; I don’t think I’ve ever done one before, except in briefly offering the possibility of an alternate assignment for Lolita in a sophomore-level survey).
The result of all this is a syllabus that I’m pretty happy with and that I hope won’t be too demanding. I’ve thought a lot about not just trying to generate buy-in and a spirit of shared endeavor, but also how to make sure I don’t lose a ton of people along the way. In the end, with a MW class meeting trying to read a 1,079-page novel in nine weeks while leaving space at the beginning and end for other conversations about Infinite Jest, I decided I just couldn’t do much better than around 50-70 pages per class period for the long haul, especially in the back half. I hope the assignments and the structure of the course pull them through, and give them space to get something valuable out of it, even if (as seems inevitable) some number of them completely hate both the book and me by the end…
As before, full syllabus with course procedures and all assignments at the link, but here’s the day-by-day schedule:
| M | Aug 29 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
audiobook: “This Is Water” (Commencement Address to the Kenyon College Class of 2005) (in class) |
| W | Aug 31 | “Alas, Poor Yorick” monologue from Hamlet, Act V, sc. i [D2L]
George Saunders, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008” [D2L] Jonathan Franzen, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008” [D2L]
roundtable discussion: How to Talk About Sad Things, Together
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #1 |
| M | Sep 5 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS |
| W | Sep 7 | David Foster Wallace, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984) and Afterword by Kevin J. H. Dettmar (2016) |
| M | Sep 12 | David Foster Wallace, “Octet” (1997/1999)
Guest Lecture: Tom Moore
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #2 |
| W | Sep 14 | David Foster Wallace, “Octet” discussion continues
Infinite Jest forewords by Dave Eggers (2006) and Tom Bissell (2016) [D2L]
roundtable discussion: How to Talk About Literature, Art, Artists, Genius, Greatness, Pretension, Ambition, “Trying Too Hard,” Success, Failure, Annoyance, Fondness, Commitment, Honesty, Community, Solitude, Work, Intellectual Experiences That Might (or Might Not) Change Your Life, &c.
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #3 |
INFINITE JEST
| IJPPD(A)(NCF)* | |||
| M | Sep 19 | Infinite Jest through p. 17
brief primer: How to Read Infinite Jest [in class] |
14 |
| W | Sep 21 | Infinite Jest through p. 63 | 46 |
| M | Sep 26 | Infinite Jest through p. 127 | 64 |
| W | Sep 28 | Infinite Jest through p. 171 | 44 |
| M | Oct 3 | Infinite Jest through p. 226 | 55 |
| W | Oct 5 | Infinite Jest through p. 283 | 57 |
| M | Oct 10 | Infinite Jest through p. 342 | 59 |
| W | Oct 12 | Infinite Jest through p. 398 | 56 |
| M | Oct 17 | Infinite Jest through p. 450 | 52 |
| W | Oct 19 | Infinite Jest through p. 503 | 53 |
| FALL BREAK | |||
| M | Oct 24 | Infinite Jest through p. 589 | 86 |
| W | Oct 26 | Infinite Jest through p. 648 | 59 |
| M | Oct 31 | Infinite Jest through p. 711 | 63 |
| W | Nov 2 | Infinite Jest through p. 775 | 64 |
| M | Nov 7 | Infinite Jest through p. 845 | 70 |
| W | Nov 9 | Infinite Jest through p. 911 | 66 |
| M | Nov 14 | Infinite Jest through p. 981
“CONVERGENCE” DUE |
70 |
| W | Nov 16 | Samuel Cohen, “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History”
N. Katherine Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest” OPTION #3 PROSPECTUS DUE BY TODAY |
|
| M | Nov 21 | Research Workshop with Heather James (Raynor)
Bring in the general topic you think you might want to write about, as well as some useful research questions. |
|
| THANKSGIVING BREAK |
* Infinite Jest pages per day (approximate) (not counting footnotes)
CODA: AFTERLIVES
| M | Nov 28 | OPTION #1 and #2 PROSPECTUS DUE TO ME ON D2L
Michael Pietsch, editor’s note, The Pale King (2011) [D2L] David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon” (2001) [D2L] |
| W | Nov 30 | Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief” [D2L]
Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” [D2L] |
| M | Dec 5 | Ed Finn, “Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception” [D2L]
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network” [D2L] MetaFilter.com, “RIP, DFW” [Web] The Howling Fantods, Wallace-L, etc. |
| W | Dec 7 | FINAL THOUGHTS: MLA 2017 panel: “Infinite Jest at 20” [D2L]
PROJECT WORKSHOPS Bring in four copies of the prospectus for your final project.
LAST DAY OF CLASS |
| W | Dec 14 | FINAL PROJECT DUE BY 12:30 PM |
Close Every Tab from the Semester or Die Trying Links
* Some nice conference acceptance news: My semester of David Foster Wallace will end with a panel on “Infinite Jest at Twenty” with Lee Konstantinou, Carrie Shanafelt, and Kate Hayles at MLA 2017. I’ve put the full panel description in the comments for anyone interested…
* David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen. Guest appearance from my friend from grad school, Meredith Farmer!
* It’s been such a busy week I haven’t had time to crow about Jaimee’s poem appearing on Verse Daily.
* An obituary for my friend and Marquette colleague Diane Long Hoeveler.
* CFPs from Foundation: The Essay Prize (for graduate students and adjuncts) and a special issue on SF theater.
* Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor.
* For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER: Nigerian players dominate tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible.
* Want to See Hamilton in a City Near You? Buy a Subscription and Wait Two Years. Okay, maybe I will!
* How Hamilton Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda Is Building A Brand For The Ages.
* google d&d player’s handbook truth: The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist.
* Burlington College Will Close, Citing Longstanding Financial Woes. What Killed Burlington College?
* Ending HBCUs in North Carolina.
* Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. And on the Harry Potter Social Justice Wizard beat: a genderqueer student comes to hogwarts and…
* How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth.
* More data on learning and laptops — but you’ll never convince me that students benefit more from pen-and-paper notes than from a searchable, permanent archive of their entire academic career Spotlight can access and retrieve instantly.
* Big-Time College Sports Neglect Academics, Deflect Blame.
* Huge, if true: In other words, the rush to embrace entrepreneurship is ideological rather than practical.
* Diversity defunded in Tennessee.
* UW English Chair Caroline Levine: Enough with Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m leaving.
* Texas School District Votes to Build Totally Tasteful $62 Million High School Football Stadium.
* A new documentary, Agents of Change, describes the five-month SF State protest and a similar strike at Cornell University through the voices of former students like Tascoe who were involved. The film is a gripping case study of the meticulous organizing, community engagement, and careful planning that went into two of the most effective student strikes in American history. Black Studies Matter.
* I was seriously thisclose to writing a #TeamCap blog post to comicsplain Civil War to the confused, but Mightygodking got there first.
* Milwaukee in the ne — oh for fuck’s sake.
* Wisconsin communities dominate “Drunkest Cities” report.
* Wisconsin woman has confirmed case of Zika virus.
* “Rare detailed personal memory a burden, and ultimately a gift.”
* “This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager.”
* “Why do all old statues have such small penises?”
* Probably the most honest thing ever said about this election: 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead. Meanwhile, this is just totally bananas: Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself.
* What Would It Take for Donald Trump to Deport 11 Million and Build a Wall?
* A First-Person Account of a Texas Artist’s Deportation.
* From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent “burn it down” turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I’ve seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it’s not clear that this time we have any countervailing force – adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.
* Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election.
http://mobile.twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/732583842175975428
* Almost starting to see a pattern here, Disney: Shane Black reveals Iron Man 3 scrapped a female villain because of toy sales. Why Disney needs a gay princess.
* A brief history of the giraffe.
* “When you have a child with a life-threatening illness, you have an irrevocably altered existence,” Barbara Sourkes had told the Levys, and Esther feels that is true. She had always felt in control of her fate, but now she believes this to be a fiction. She finds it difficult to reconcile bitterness over the blight of Andrew’s illness with gratitude for the reprieve. “We are the luckiest of the unluckiest people in the world,” she says. “I truly believe that.”
* Can Graduate Students Unionize? The Government Can’t Decide.
* After all this time, who can say really who sent whom to Robben Island for 27 years.
* I too like to live dangerously: Uber Says Riders Will Pay the Most When Their Phone Battery Is Dying.
* Small Beer Press to Publish 400-Year-Old SF Novel.
* On Kim Stanley Robinson and “solarpunk.”
* Nate Moore, 37, is the lone African-American producer in the film division at Marvel Studios. And elsewhere in Marvel news: Agents of SHIELD Star Says Marvel Doesn’t Care Enough About Its Own TV Show.
* DC has, to all reports, done something utterly crazy. Big shakeup in their film division to boot. Can Booster Gold save the DC Cinematic Universe?
* Not even $100 million can make Daniel Craig give a fuck about James Bond.
* World-famous ethicist isn’t.
* What terrible luck! The CIA has “mistakenly” destroyed the sole copy of a massive Senate torture report in the custody of the agency’s internal watchdog group, Yahoo News reported Monday.
* Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions.
* University title and salary generator.
* Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals.
* Attempt no landings etc: Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected.
* Outrageous slander: The Warriors Still Aren’t the Best Team Ever.
* Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets. Bruenighazi.
* Against the Crowdfunding Economy.
* In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.
* What Kinds of Difference Do Superheroes Make?: An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz. Part Two.
* NCDOT tries something new to thwart Durham’s Can Opener bridge.
* The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut.
* The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.
* Ted Chiang vs. Chinese logograms.
* An unorthodox anthropologist goes face to face with ISIS. Is the payoff worth the peril?
* CBS All-Access gets a second show. And that’s why The Good Wife had a terrible ending!
* Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen.
* I’m feeling pretty on board with Luke Cage, I have to say.
* As with the comic before it, the film version of The Dark Tower will likely detail a different, later iteration of the series’s defining time loop.
* “Perfect” Donkey Kong score achieved.
* The only Twitter account you need: @LegoSpaceBot.
* No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before. Get with the program, Great Lakes!
* What drought? Nestle plans $35 million plant to bottle water in Phoenix.
* Alas, Venezuela: There has never been a country that should have been so rich but ended up this poor.
* Project Earth is leaving beta.
* In the back room of the morgue.
* But it’s not all bad news: Our Solar System Could Remain Habitable Long After Earth Is Destroyed.
Happy graduation day, Marquette!
Friday Links Are Just a Party and Parties Aren’t Meant to Last
* Out today, a project very close to my heart: my edited 2016 rerelease of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Here’s the Amazon order page, for you or your favorite academic library!
* The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s. The Mobile Academic.
* The strange story of Hugo Gernsback, who brought science fiction magazines to America.
* Just in time for finals! MLA Eighth Edition: What’s New and Different.
* At LARoB Rebecca Evans reviews the reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Green Earth. David Perry reviews The Secret Life of Stories. Against Star Wars. Inside the Coetzee Collection.
* My desire to see The Twilight Zone has boomeranged on me in the most ironic possible way.
* An independent researcher claims to have discovered a lost civilization in China.
* Existential Depression in Gifted Children.
* Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man. Buzzfeed’s The Most Powerful Writing about Prince. Nation Too Sad To F*ck Even Though It’s What Prince Would Have Wanted.
* The Secret Life of Novelizations.
* The Hidden Economics of Porn.
* Five Hundred Years of Utopia.
* Harriet Tubman once staged a sit-in to get $20. The Treasury just gave her all of them. You have no idea how hardcore Harriet Tubman really was.
* The smug style in American liberalism.
* How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.
* How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated.
* How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months.
* Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.
* Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem. Related: 25 Best Wisconsin High Schools: U.S. News Rankings 2016.
* For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress.” Bernie Sanders offers a different way forward. How Sanders fell short. The real scandal.
* 12 Reasons Not to Write Lord of the Rings.
* I Talked to the Kid Whose Mom Used Craigslist to Find Him a Feminism Tutor, and It Got Weird.
* Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea. Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric.
* Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors. But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
* Details arise about U.S. Bank robbery in the Alumni Memorial Union.
* Behold, the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
* The Tragic History of RC Cola.
* U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.
* Hamilton just won the Pulitzer for drama. Here’s why it matters for American musicals. And congrats to Emily Nussbaum!
* This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress.
* Milwaukee’s Appeals, Vibrant and Cheap.
* First Criminal Charges Handed Down After Flint Water Crisis.
* A man once described as a “perfect donor” at an August, Georgia sperm bank and who fathered at least 36 children around the world is actually a mentally ill felon whose lies on his donor forms went undiscovered for more than a decade.
* We owe Rey and Finn’s friendship to Harrison Ford’s broken leg.
* Love It Or List It sued over shoddy renovations, ridiculous falsehoods.
* As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters.
* Hello, from the Magic Tavern watch! There’s two noncanonical podcasts from Foon-16 over at One Shot. There’s also a band new, slightly less… rigorous improv podcast from some of the principals involved called Siblings Peculiar.
* The U.S.’s Best High School Starts at 9:15 a.m.
* Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science.
* New Evidence Suggests That Limbs and Fins Evolved From Fish Gills.
* And rejoice, comrades! Twilight Struggle has come to Steam.
