Posts Tagged ‘mortality’
suNDaY ReAdiNG
* College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months. The Big ‘If.’ What If Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021? College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. Public Colleges Lose State Funding, Effective Immediately. I Teach at Rutgers and I Don’t Know If I’ll Have a Job This Fall. Rising expenses, falling revenues, budget cuts: Universities face looming financial crisis. ‘Pressure Is Turning Way Up’: College Presidents Plan Layoffs, Budget Cuts Due to Coronavirus, Says Survey. College Closures in the Wake of COVID-19: A Need for Forward-Looking Accountability. Pandemic Hits College Sports. Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online. The New Tenured Radicals. For the recovery, we need to spend like our lives depend on it.
* And at home: Faculty express concerns over university furloughs, financial decisions.
* NYU is not kidding around. Stanford Health Care to cut workers’ wages by 20%.
* Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. Life After Ventilators Can Be Hell for Coronavirus Survivors. Even Palliative Care Doctors Have Never Experienced Anything Like This Before.
* Zoom as “The Gift of the Magi.”
* Here are the unambiguous rules for what to do in this pandemic.
* ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege. These epidemiologists say let’s think about reopening daycares and elementary schools. After Coronavirus, Nearly Half Of The Day Care Centers In The U.S. Could Be Gone. You’re Not Homeschooling — You’re ‘Crisis Schooling.’ To Access Online Services, New Jersey Students With Disabilities Must Promise Not To Sue.
* America gets back to work: My Family Was Denied a Stimulus Check Because My Husband Is an Immigrant. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? The end of bars and restaurants. Trump Donor Hired Trump-Tied Lobbyists, Then Raked in Coronavirus Relief Cash. GOP Governors Will Push Workers off Unemployment by Reopening Early. A Step-by-Step Plan to Reopen California. Can We Really Make a Safe Vaccine in 18 Months? ‘No Evidence’ Yet That Recovered COVID-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says. Just 14% of Americans support ending social distancing in order to reopen the economy, according to a new poll. The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests. Coronavirus is spreading fast in states that may reopen soon, study finds. We Cannot “Reopen” America. What Reopening Georgia Might Really Be About. Reopening Has Begun. No One Is Sure What Happens Next.
“If the state narrowly defines suitable work and doesn’t include the implications of the virus and what that means for a workplace, then that might put those workers who are drawing unemployment insurance in a precarious position, where they would have to either lose their unemployment insurance or go back to work in an unsafe environment,” Camardelle says.
* The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. Understanding media bias.
* American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Small Business Rescue Earned Banks $10 Billion In Fees. With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November. Most people dying from Covid-19 are old. Don’t treat them just as statistics.
* Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan. Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections. Say It Loud, Say It Clear: Donald Trump Needs to Resign Over His Handling of the Coronavirus. And for the people in the back: The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It.
* All the Reasons This Will Be a Bleak Summer for N.Y.C. All Children.
* Tread *very* carefully, Joe — there are a lot of perverts in swing states.
* Pelosi’s Playing Hardball, Charlie Brown.
* A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. They didn’t even let him get interviewed for this!
It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.
* How the Supreme Court’s Progressive Minority Could Prevent a Stolen Election. Or the conservative majority could steal it! Who knows, really.
* We will not stand for the erasure of Wisconsin’s proud Confederate history. Or Michigan’s!
* Planet of the Humans pulled from Netflix.
* Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products. This would be an open and shut case if we actually had a government.
* Parks and Rec is back, baby!
* This fall on Netflix: Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer. Stay till the twist!
* Great, one more thing to worry about.
* And for your consideration: another Bible as D&D thread.
Quick ‘n’ Dirty Sunday Links
* I was asked by Marquette Today to provide an uplifting list of quarantine movies to watch instead of Contagion. It was counter to my instincts, but I did my best!
* Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Concert Version Online.
At the same time, we can already feel it piercing a hole in our daily lives, and we can see and feel our hopes, our professions, our homes, our ways of life leaking out into an inky darkness. We can already experience the ways it has decimated the meager funds we held, and savaged the safety nets even the luckiest among us had managed to weave. We can feel the future and our sense of normalcy and our grand plans withering and bleaching under the heat of this new sun. And while we are trying to adapt and survive both of these, the virus is already creeping closer and closer to those we love. Like a crowd watching a wave slowly roll in toward the shore, we can monitor its slow and implacable progress. The wave is rolling in. Some of us will flee; others of us will be drenched. But the biggest fear of all is that some of us, whose names and hearts and faces we have known so well, will almost certainly drown.
* Mike Davis: The Monster Enters.
* Coronavirus Testing Needs to Triple Before the U.S. Can Reopen, Experts Say. Researchers warn the COVID-19 lockdown will take its own toll on health. Patients in pain, dentists in distress: In a pandemic, the problem with teeth. Coronavirus and depression. Don’t bet on vaccine to protect us from Covid-19, says world health expert. The rightwing groups behind wave of protests against Covid-19 restrictions. Trump Encourages Protest Against Governors Who Have Imposed Virus Restrictions. Floridians Pack Beaches as Coronavirus Cases Continue to Increase. Heartland hotspots: A sudden rise in coronavirus cases is hitting rural states without stay-at-home orders. Life in Wuhan isn’t back to normal. For The Rich, A Dilemma: Quarantine With Staff, or Do Their Own Chores. Trump Calls For Reopening America’s Gyms Day After Call With SoulCycle’s Owner. Essential Jobs, Disposable Workers. In some areas of the US, Covid-19 is killing Latinos at up to three times the rate that it is killing white people, even as they are among the least able to access care. Due to COVID-19. It’s not just mortality. How experts see the future after coronavirus. “It’ll all be over by Christmas.”
* Approximately 9,200,000 workers in the US have likely lost their employer-provided health care coverage in the past 4 weeks, an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute concludes. The Trump Administration Is Writing a Death Sentence for America’s Most Important Restaurants. Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis. 5 lessons from World War II for the coronavirus response.
* In terms of crisis governance, the United States is not a country with a central bank. It is a central bank with a country. Today in kleptocracy.
* Coronavirus could complicate Trump’s path to reelection. You think?
* Michael Denning: Impeachment as Social Form.
* Please don’t stan Cuomo: How Delays and Unheeded Warnings Hindered New York’s Virus Fight.
* The WSJ dives deep into the wild plan to bring baseball back.
* Here’s What You Do With Two-Thirds of the World’s Jets When They Can’t Fly.
* Folks…
* Is the first person who will live to 150 alive today?
* Buttigieg political alignment chart.
* There’s an Eighth Chronicle of Narnia, and Now Is the Perfect Time to Read It.
Wednesday News Brief, This Is All the News Today
* The US is now on track to have the worst outbreak anywhere. In the end we will have handled this worse than any nation on earth, because our leaders lied to us, said it was under control, said it wasn’t a big deal, said we were doing great, privately sold their stocks, told us to *buy* stock, ignored science, ignored experts, lied.
* Vox has some details on the coronavirus bailout, including how UI will be extended to freelancers and the self-employed and when you’ll get your check. Here’s another read from Forbes. This thread on Twitter seems to have more information on how the UI expansion will work for the self-employed.
* Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Reclaim our homes. Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression. European countries are writing blank checks to save their economies from coronavirus.
* “Herd Immunity” Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism.
* On Monday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
* Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2. From the list let me recommend Four Futures by Peter Frase, which I thought was great.
* We are in a time of wild magical thinking: miracle cures, coronavirus parties, Disney reopening next week, return to work by Easter, life without fear. Meanwhile, as a direct result of Trump administration policy: Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies.
* New York has 5% of Covid-19 cases worldwide as city becomes battlefront. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. “We have 11,000. We need 30,000.”
* Trump Shrugged Off Repeated Intelligence Warnings About Coronavirus Pandemic. DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck. U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak. Coronavirus and Fox News.
* How the virus got out. How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It). What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus.
* A Day in the Life of an ER Doc. A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients. Nursing Home Worker: “Everything About This Is Designed for Disaster.”
* Higher Education in the Age of COVID-19. How Is Covid-19 Changing Prospective Students’ Plans? Here’s an Early Look. Central Washington University Board of Trustees declares exigency. “To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.” Embrace the Canavan plan for pass/fail.
* Amidst a global health crisis, porn finds a way.
* The Very Specific Reason We Shouldn’t Bail Out the Cruise Industry.
* We Need a Hard Pause, Followed by a Soft Start.
* That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Really Scares Me.
* It will only get worse: ICE Detainees Are Being Quarantined. DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency. ‘Terrified’ Package Delivery Employees Are Going to Work Sick. Coronavirus hits rural Kansas, Missouri towns. Many don’t have a single hospital bed. U.S. Hospitals Prepare Guidelines For Who Gets Care Amid Coronavirus Surge. White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up.’ Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus. Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals. “This week, it’s going to get bad.”
* Science you can use: the Great Depression and death rates.
* DoE won’t let this crisis go to waste.
* Africa’s mountain gorillas also at risk for coronavirus.
* In some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline.
* The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
* Comrade Britney Spears shares post calling for general strike and redistribution of wealth.
* Chess in the time of coronavirus.
* Joe Biden Pivots to Video. ‘There’s no playbook for this’: Biden trapped in campaign limbo. You know it’s bad when the political cartoons start agreeing with you.
* A really exciting new book series: Palgrave SFF: A New Canon.
Monday Morning Links That *Will* *Not* *Make* *You* *Sad*
* Caroll Spinney, puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird of ‘Sesame Street,’ dies at 85. My own mini Twitter thread. Meanwhile, in the other universe…
Such was the appeal of Big Bird that NASA asked Mr. Spinney to fly into orbit in costume, to interest young people in space exploration. Mr. Spinney agreed to go, but it was ultimately determined that the space shuttle was too small to accommodate the Big Bird suit. A New Hampshire teacher, Christa McAuliffe, went in his stead and was killed along with the rest of the crew when the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986.
And from the archives…
* Ali Sperling: On Futurity and Futility: Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts.
So, what does it mean to fight for a future you know may already be lost? In such a context, questions underlying our relation to futurity become less about whether or not one can maintain hope for a failing planet and its deeply corrupted social and political structures; instead, the novel explores other forms of responses to the problem of the Anthropocene. One could argue that this isn’t a book about any particular future at all; instead, it’s about a present that has already come to pass. For many, there is already no other option but to fight fate, an imperative that suggests the strange paradox that structures both Dead Astronauts and the seemingly impossible political and ecological challenges faced at this moment around the world. The novel suggests that even something broken can be useful: “They had failed in the last City, and the one before that, and the one before that. Sometimes that failure pushed the needle farther. Sometimes that failure changed not a thing. But perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.”
* CFP: Posthuman Global Symposiums.
* ‘I’m working until I’m 75’: Factory worker describes family’s student debt nightmare.
* The Class of 2000 ‘Could Have Been Anything’: The high school yearbook is a staple of teenage life. But for some, it reflects the devastating toll of the opioid crisis.
* Tinder, but for the master race.
* Why US is still bad for working parents.
* It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics.
* Biden! Biden! Biden! Buttigieg! And my global take on politics, more or less.
* Service, and sacrifice and heritage.
* “Blackness is a superhero origin story.” The Performative Horniness of Dawn of X.
* Counterpoint: every city, town, village, and hamlet in the United States is a universe unto itself.
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
* And in your heart, you know it’s canon.
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Friday Night Links!
* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!
* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.
* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.
* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.
* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.
* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.
* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.
* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.
* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.
* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.
* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.
* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.
* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.
* Meanwhile: some grim accounting.
* Weaponizing student evaluations, part I, II, III.
* Ecological Politics for the Working Class. Jane Fonda is arrested leading environmental protest at the Capitol. Capitalism and addiction. The new age of megafires. Crisis in the Amazon. The inequality of climate change. Global finance is funding 4C temperature rise. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. In 2025, the economic craze for millennials is going to be cheap housing in flood zones. Climate change and the end of the Olympics. Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. The New Green Scare. ‘They should be allowed to cry’: Ecological disaster taking toll on scientists’ mental health.
* I think a lot of academics have been plagiarized by mainstream outlets at one time or another — I certainly have — but this story is truly next-level.
* Aaron Bady interviews Jedediah Purdy at The Nation. David M. Perry interviews llhan Omar, also at The Nation.
* Chicago teachers are on strike today. A high school teacher explains to us why the strike is the union’s best tool to fight for better conditions in the city’s schools and an end to austerity.
* The class war is also an intergenerational war.
* In the future, “Frequent Flyer Miles” may refer to a tax penalty, or even a criminal misdemeanor.
* Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?
* Biden just isn’t very good at this. Neither is Beto. And Bloomberg won’t be either! Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Take Aim At Corporate Interests Gutting Journalism. I’m with Nobody.
* Trump’s Worst Betrayal Yet. Ethnic cleanser very excited about ethnic cleansing.
* This G7 thing is just wild. Truly not even pretending anymore. Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies. The 30-minute phone call that could end Trump’s presidency. Only once has Gallup seen more support for removing a president. Nixon was gone four days later. The Senate is likelier to remove Trump after impeachment than you think. Donald Trump Isn’t Julius Caesar. He’s Republic-Killer Tiberius Gracchus.
* Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter Feed Is a Boomer Conspiracy-Theory Sh*tshow.
* Once Trump is gone, the U.S. must completely reform the presidency. The Sick Video Played at a Pro-Trump Conference Is a Glimpse of the Dark Energy in American Politics. A lot of policy debates these days turn on Republicans threatening to kill a lot of people. Life Under the First Thousand Days of Donald Trump.
So we must build geography right into the analysis. Once we start looking at electoral college-weighted, county-level correlates of the Trump swing—Trump’s vote share less Romney’s vote share—a very different pattern emerges. The three strongest predictors of the Trump swing are college graduation rate, population growth rate, and growth in deaths due to drug overdoses in 2003-2017.
* A professor spoke about whiteness at Georgia Southern University. Students burned her book.
* California becomes first US state to ban animal fur products.
* Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants.
* Seven Supreme Court cases that will destroy America in 2020.
* California accidentally destroys freelancing.
* Try to escape the gig economy with this artist collective’s new video game.
* The X-Men’s New Age Is Here, and It’s Horny as Hell. Adding in a free love element when it seems like they’re all definitely being drugged or mind controlled might not be the best story decision, but let’s see where it goes…
* Science confirms Storm is main character of X-Men.
* Tesla is Enron, exhibit XXIV.
* But wait! A new competitor has entered the fray! WeWork shuts 2,300 office phone booths over health scare.
* Pickens County Schools pulls controversial transgender policy. This moral panic, ginned up out of absolutely nothing, just infuriates me. I’m not sure you can find even a single example of an inclusive bathroom policy harming anyone, while the ordinary operation of every high school in the country leads to rampant sexual abuse.
* A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago.
* The big business — and questionable effectiveness — of mass shooter trainings. “Questionable” seems… generous.
* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were left with nothing.
* The Midwest Is One of the Worst Places for African Americans to Live.
* Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon. Amazon Workers May Be Are Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* Truly horrible story out of Fort Worth. Fort Worth Officer Charged With Murder In Killing Of Atatiana Jefferson In Her Home. Policing just needs to be rethought completely in this country, on every level.
* UK to deport academic to Democratic Republic of Congo – which she has never visited. And here at home: The New War on Naturalized Citizens.
* Tough week for fans of the use/mention distinction.
* New federal data: suicide rate of children age 10 to 14 “nearly tripled” between 2007 and 2017.
* The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.
* The Joy of Being a Horrible Goose in a Time of Moral Crisis. Honks vs. Quacks: A Long Chat With the Developers of ‘Untitled Goose Game.’
* No, I simply refuse to admire Shep Smith, not even a little bit.
* Now NBC killed its Weinstein story.
* I think you could write a very interesting cultural history of contemporary America about the way it loses its mind every time the First Lady role seems like it might get disrupted. Today’s chapter: Rosario Dawson.
* A whole new twist on institutions abusing Title IX.
* A month away from 40, BA, MFA, PhD, professor for seven years, and I still regularly have dreams where it turns out I missed some requirement and have to go back to high school.
* God, you know, I just can’t stop thinking about this.
* A two-year-old’s reaction to seeing the Hulk go bananas for the first time.
* Miracles and wonders: A Drug Was Made For Just One Child, Raising Hopes About Future Of Tailored Medicine.
* Joker today, Joker tomorrow, Joker forever.
* I refuse to consider the possibility that Watchmen will be remotely good. I don’t care how many critics say otherwise! The Never-Ending Challenge of Adapting ‘Watchmen.’
* It’s back! How many European cities can you name?
* Ancient ‘lost city’ of the Khmer Empire uncovered in Cambodia.
* Paris zoo unveils the “blob”, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes. Take off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
* Spotted on Facebook, and it checks out.
* Gaming out season two of Picard.
* “One thing I like to do at Target is pretend their novelty coffee mugs are gravestone epitaphs.”
* And this Studio Ghibli news is (for a particular sliver of the population) a genuinely shocking development and a huge coup for HBO Max. I know for me it flipped from “lol no” to “well, I guess I’ll be subscribing to that” in an instant…
Thursday Night Links!
* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.
* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.
* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?
* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.
* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.
* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.
* Here come the esports majors.
* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.
* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.
* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.
* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.
* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.
* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!
* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.
* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.
* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.
* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.
* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.
* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”
* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.
* How they teach slavery, then and now.
* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.
* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.
* I suppose this is canon (again).
* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.
* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.
* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.
* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?
* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.
* Absolutely psychotic nation.
* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.
* get you a man who can do all three
* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.
* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.
* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!
* This one is a real america.jpg too.
* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.
* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.
* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.
Wednesday Links!
* How the US built the world’s largest immigrant detention system. A list of companies that contract with ICE.
* Checking in on Duke and UNC under siege.
* 2019 Genius Grant awardees, including Lynda F’ing Barry.
* Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group. The Whitesplaining of History Is Over.
* The kids are all right: Students protest demonstration policy, deliver letter to Zilber.
* Wisconsin students make up smallest share of UW-Madison freshman class in at least 25 years. The Great Decline.
* And on the China and college beat: US universities see decline in students from China. China’s Higher-Ed Ambitions Are at Odds With Its Tightening Grip on Academic Freedom.
* Impacts ‘accelerating’ as leaders gather for UN talks. Earth’s Oceans Are Getting Hotter And Higher, And It’s Accelerating. ‘Unprecedented Conditions’ Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The African Congo Is Quietly Being Deforested As The Amazon Rainforest Burns. Scientists Set Out to Drift With Arctic Ice for a Year to Study Climate Change. On white supremacy and green living. The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History. This is daytime. Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End. “You’re So Accustomed to the Erasure and the Normalization of Catastrophism.”
* Can a burger help solve climate change?
* The Bible may have a naming discrepancy, and a Duke researcher plans to correct it.
* I might have done this one already, but what the hell: Le Guin’s work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living.
* A real “hold my beer” moment for neoliberalism: A doctor and medical ethicist, who happens to be Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, argues life after 75 is not worth living.
* Chris Ware, whose Rusty Brown is finally out, about which I am very excited, celebrates Peanuts.
* Epic Disasters: Revisiting Marvel & DC’s 1980s Famine Relief Comics.
* What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
* Normal society that is definitely normal and good.
* Die a villain, or live long enough to rebound as a hero.
* Will Google’s quantum computing breakthrough change everything?
* The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century. Surprisingly solid #1 and #2 picks.
* And I’d like to see Ol Donny Trump wriggle out of this jam! Impeachment step by step.
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.
* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.
* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).
* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.
* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.
* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.
* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.
* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.
* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?
* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.
* When a woman ran for president in 1872.
* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.
* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.
* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.
* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.
* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.
* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.
* How not to mourn Toni Morrison.
Monday Night Links!
* CFP: ASAP11, “Ecologies of the Present.”
* A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report: Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people.
* Great Twitter thread on screenwriting from my old friend Tony Tost.
* And a great thread pitching a black Batman story.
* Thieves stole architectural gems from USC in a heist that remained hidden for years.
* Bennett, who a week earlier had been placed on indefinite administrative leave, was now barred from the university, the message said. Sandwiched between those assertions was a sordid allegation: Bennett’s “recent admittance to police of meth use and access to firearms.”
* Vox talks to Malcolm Harris about the kids today.
* When a utility files for bankruptcy.
* Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated.
* When Democrats actually propose popular progressive policies.
* Crimes against humanity without apology: Finding all migrant children separated from their families may be impossible, feds say. The utter shamelessness of these people.
* Executive time: How Trump’s schedule compares to past presidents.
* Trump wants another fake physical.
* African-American women were written out of the history of the woman suffrage movement. As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, it’s time for a new look at the past.
* In one Milwaukee school, on one day, what a difference a small class size made.
* Financial literacy is a kind of formation of its own. Such programs form us to believe that we can make up for one $40,000 decision with forty thousand other decisions that save a single dollar each. In retrospect, it seems fitting that Duke Divinity School required each of us to sit through a brief seminar on financial literacy prior to graduation. The school needed one last moment to shape us as individuals in control of our destiny through wise choices, hard work, and willpower. … Student debt thus exposes a farther-reaching cruelty in a system that treats people, in the end, as autonomous consumers. Until we recognize the deeper problem, we will be hindered from taking collective action to build better lives together. We spend so much time blaming one another and ourselves that we don’t have time to look at bigger, collective solutions like tuition-free higher education or the cancellation of student loan debt. We don’t ask what kind of society we want to see and what kind of collective political action it might take to win it. Our eyes haven’t been trained to see society and its institutions as something we can change. Our imaginations haven’t been formed to desire something better fitted for human flourishing.
* Y: The Last Man TV Adaptation Will Premiere in 2020. As we were chatting about on Twitter, it’s amazing how long this took, so long that they’re probably quite a bit out-of-step with the times now.
* When you’re looking on the bright side.
* Lots of white people having nervous breakdowns lately.
* Billionaires! They’re just like us our parents!
* How long could my murderer pretend to be me online?
* Can you trip so hard you never stop tripping?
* Another truly bananas story from the world of young adult publishing.
* And that’s we in the business call a “win-win.”
Tuesday Night Links!
* ST: TNG: TNG: Patrick Stewart to Return as Capt. Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series for CBS All Access. Well, that’s something! CBS All Access Is Laying the Groundwork for Non-Stop Star Trek.
* Celebrating Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and black creativity at the first-ever Wakandacon.
* Draft schedule for the Worlding SF conference I’ll be keynoting at this December. Looking forward to it!
* Poem of the day: “A Metaphor.”
* Pedagogy flashback: Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* How to Prepare for Class. Against the Grade. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Another list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English).
* That rare thing, a good Twitter thread: What is the most interesting and revealing and hard-to-believe/understand statistic you know?
* Gasp, shock: Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions.
* What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism.
* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”
* Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature.” How Not to Talk About Climate Change. No, we didn’t almost solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. When Will Capitalism Answer For Its Crimes?
* 2018 Was Probably Already Doomed, But We Might Have Saved 2030.
* ‘Many parts of Earth could become uninhabitable’: Study’s grim warning.
* These 360 Drone Photos of the California Wildfires Are Devastating.
* ‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’ by Alain Badiou.
* Brexit continues to give Trump a run for his money in the deliberate-national-suicide-Olympics.
* Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception. The rise of QAnon Is a Sign That Trumpism Might Not Be Primarily About Trump at All. After mainstream exposure, QAnon is starting to fracture.
* Trump just keeps confessing to crimes and it just keeps not mattering.
* Alejandra ultimately decided to “self-deport” to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her. U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants. Worker Charged With Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. Man Detained by ICE Claims He Went Blind in One Eye After Agent Didn’t Believe He Had Diabetes. How Trump Radicalized ICE. Border family separation isn’t “zero tolerance” – CBP looked for parents to charge so they could kidnap kids. New Jersey Jail is Holding Nearly Triple its Capacity in ICE Detainees. What happens after ICE tears your family apart: ‘The storm descended.’ Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Judge upholds ruling that DACA must be restored. The Power of Abolish ICE.
* “We Need to Fight for Aloha”: Hawaii congressional candidate and democratic socialist Kaniela Ing on taking on Hawaii’s biggest corporations, a bold climate change agenda, and the necessity of opposing US imperialism.
* I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.
* Markets in everything: More Schools Are Buying ‘Active-Shooter’ Insurance Policies.
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is: It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear.
* Meanwhile, in serious environmentalism: Trump Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific.
* Fields medal stolen moments after it was awarded.
* There’s so much corruption in the federal government at this point it’s impossible to keep track of.
* A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world.
* The Trader Who Made a Massive Short Bet Against Nintendo.
* NRA Legal Strategy / Fundraising Appeal Goes Viral.
* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.
* How the NYPD recriminalized marijuana after the state decriminalized it. Internal documents reveal how Bronx prosecutors are taught to slow down cases.
* Democrats do the darnedest things.
* How the Cold War Created Astrobiology.
* A small-town couple left behind a stolen painting worth over $100 million — and a big mystery.
* These The Last Jedi Fans Put on a Mock Court Martial for Poe Dameron.
* Missing the point is the point: Pre-reading Young Aragorn.
* You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead.
* Amazing arbitrage opportunity.
* Sexuality and gender in science fiction games.
* Somebody get me Michel Foucault on the phone: Open Office Plans Increase Employee Stress, Reduce Productivity.
* Ask your doctor if R’lhygrex is right for you.
* Facebook getting pretty brazen even by Facebook standards.
* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage.
* The Great Recession Never Ended.
* Well, if they’re really sorry.
* The end of the writers’ room.
* The next stage of the Tesla scam.
* Chilling Testimony in a Tennessee Trial Exposes Lethal Injection as Court-Sanctioned Torture.
* Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors.
* And now they tell me! Why punishing your children doesn’t work.
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!
Sunday Links!
* Nintendo Labo looks amazing. I’ve already preordered both kits…
* From the AAUP: A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics.
* Among the first-time nominees for the 1967 prize, writes M.A. Orthofer for Literary Saloon, are “future winners Saul Bellow and Claude Simon, as well as Jorge Amado, Jean Genet, György Lukács — and the (as best I can tell) last surviving nominee, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” Other names on the list include “Auden, Beckett, Ionesco, Kawabata, Mishima, Montale, Moravia, Neruda, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Simenon, and J.R.R.Tolkien.” Also on the list, writes Alison Flood for The Guardian, is “Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year,” 1968.
* The drought-stricken city announced on Thursday that it will begin marking 200 collection points where its 3.7 million residents will be required to queue for a rationed supply of water on “Day Zero” – currently forecast to be April 21. If it happens, Cape Town would become the first major city in the world to shut down entirely the supply of running water in all of its homes.
* Kylo Ren destroying the Millennium Falcon in the trailer is a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
* Break your phone addiction by turning your screen to grayscale.
* The sexual assault backlash is coming. Here’s how to respond.
* 14 on MSU staff got Nassar warnings over 2 decades.
* Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?
* Charter schools can never fail, they can only be failed.
* Too late, Delta tries to put the “comfort animal” genie back in the bottle.
* US border patrol routinely sabotages water left for migrants, report says. Deputy shoots, kills 16-year-old boy during scuffle at courthouse. This Is What a White Supremacist Department of Justice Looks Like.
* Within Reach: The transgender community fights for health care.
* New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy.
* Porn and the bomb, by the numbers.
* It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
* How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s.
* De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness at LARB.
* 9 Times People Were Actually Murdered By Their Clothes.
* What radicalized you? Calvin and Hobbes.
* And a happy, happy birthday to the Dax symbiont, born in 2018.
Closing All My Tabs Before the Nuclear War Links
* Welp. Here we go. To Launch a Nuclear Strike, Donald Trump Would Follow These Steps. Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single tweet? As one Republican Hill staffer said to me, “if we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war, a lot of us will count this as a win.” Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable? In North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting.’
* Meanwhile, in the war that stopped being fun.
* President Trump has sent private messages to Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. How Will The Mueller Grand Jury Handle Classified Information?
* Unlearning the myth of American innocence.
* ♫ Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high… ♫
* The modern suburb in America began as a means of providing abundant and comfortable housing to white Americans and has now evolved into a carefully tuned media surround — replete with ubiquitous screens running alarmist commercial media — that seeks to sustain that apartheid at any cost. But just as the media elevated a man to the presidency only to have him turn around and name it the “enemy of the people,” the built environment of suburbs is riven with contradictions that will ultimately be its undoing.
* It’s so strange to me that anyone talks about anything in The Handmaid’s Tale *but* the epilogue. That’s the whole thing.
* Say it again: The Problem Is Capital.
* Worrying development for academic freedom.
* The JCC Bomb-Threat Suspect Had a Client.
* Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* Can You Distinguish These Real British Places From Fake Ones an AI Made Up?
* Ideology at its very, very purest.
* I’ve said this about movies like Pacific Rim, and I think it’s absolutely the fantasy at the heart of Game of Thrones as well: The ultimate enemy of all humanity is coming—climate change—and we will stop it by dropping a nuclear bomb on it.
* Maybe the media should stop doing free promotion for all the worst creeps in the world.
* “Respondent did not realize that advertising a ‘women’s-only’ screening was a violation of discrimination laws,” the theater wrote to the city. “Respondent has a very strict non-discrimination policy in place, but this policy did NOT include a specific prohibition against advertising.”
* Another streaming service you’ll have to subscribe to. What does this mean for the Daredevilverse?
* This head-spinning optical illusion will melt your brain.
* American Chess Is Great Again.
* Finally, the movie you can barely remember has four sequels you’ve find incredibly stupid…
Gerry Canavan 