Catching Up on My Open Tabs After an Incredibly Slow News Week in Which Nothing World-Historically Bonkers Happened

* CFP: And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python.

* CFP: The Films of Wes Anderson.

* Three on Dylan, Nobel Laureate. The Guardian reports.

breaking news Nobel Prize goes to prize committee's sense that literature is over

— Sarah Brouillette (@brouillettese) October 13, 2016

They're gonna give the Nobel to Pixar by 2030, don't kid yourself.

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 13, 2016

After much consideration my position on this event is that I’m formally opposed, but nonetheless personally delighted.

* Barack Obama for first president of the Federation.

* Le Guin in the Post, the Nation, and the New Yorker.

* PKD and the Problem of 2-3-74.

* An adjuncting career, by the numbers.

* Idiots Who Run Harvard Let Their Low-Wage Workers Go On Strike.

* 4 Professors Involved in Philosophy Brawl Find Feces in Their Mail.

* With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices.

* Why a Controversial Palestinian History Class at Berkeley Was Cancelled, Then Reinstated.

* I make a brief appearance at the end of this CBS58 story on Marquette’s incredible Tolkien collection. I also pop up in this review of the first few episodes of Westworld.

* The Trouble with Thanksgiving.

This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.

* Arrested Development Season Five (not really). Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. All of Donald Trump’s Accusers: A Timeline of Every Alleged Grope and Assault. Gerrymandering helped Republicans take control of Congress, but now it’s tearing them apart over Trump. A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House. Here’s the math. Inside the Bunker. Inside the Meltdown. How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall. Let’s never forget what a terrifying thing we almost did. Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat. I guess I need a new surgeon. If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections. The Evan McMullin Century. A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two. Even the Humane Society. Teach the controversy. Thank you for your idea about a political thriller but unfortunately we find the plot preposterous. Michelle Obama for President. And because we’re all still asking: What Happens If Trump Drops Out?

Here's what the map would look line if only women voted: https://t.co/sjVY67qouE pic.twitter.com/rrc3GuXmGl

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 11, 2016

Trump igniting national consensus that presidential candidates can’t be prosecuted seems like the first genuinely strategic thing he’s done.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2016

* Citizens United, all class.

* Eugenics in America.

* As a national prison strike enters its second month, the Department of Justice says it will investigate conditions in Alabama prisons. And some corrections officers are expressing support.

* Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.

* New Jersey Transit, a Cautionary Tale of Neglect.

* “We’d at least like to have it said of us that we tried”: Marvel and the civil rights movement.

* How Rock and Roll Became White.

* Atlanta’s lost Afrofuture.

* Brutalism is back.

* “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”

* Department of Precrime, CIA edition.

* The search for a true blue M&M.

* Whatever this is for, I am so completely in.

Now that's how you do a movie poster. pic.twitter.com/js6lYRVK46

— Fanton (@FantonEsquire) October 5, 2016

* Meanwhile, the Fantastic Beasts expansion of the Harry Potter franchise will top out at an economical and reasonable five films.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
2 Fantastic 2 Find
Fantastic Beasts: Rising
Fantastic Beasts: The Finding
Fantastic Five

— Erin Strecker (@ErinStrecker) October 13, 2016

* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.

* The four types of board games.

* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.

* Life with migraines.

* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.

* Generation Adderall.

* Poet at work.

* The end of Devin Faraci and the end of The Canon podcast (for now). There’s more at the Mary Sue.

* Huge, if true: Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.

“Billy Bush” was ridiculous enough, but now there’s a “Lauren Bush Lauren.” The simulation is obviously crashing.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2016

And on the subject of deranged tech madmen: Simpsons did it.

* Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad.

* The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever.

* The coming fight over “nonlethal neuroweapons.”

* What’s the Longest Humans Can Live? 115 Years, New Study Says. Challenge accepted.

* Now, I may have to move first.

Sometimes, a graph is so eloquent that commentary is superfluous:https://t.co/IYPqRkkWZx pic.twitter.com/QVsYrooDd7

— Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) October 10, 2016

* The kids are all right: Only 1 in 5 Millennials Have Ever Tried a Big Mac.

* On Delany’s Dark Reflections.

* App of the week: Really Bad Chess.

* The Perils of Becoming a Meme.

* The LEGO Yellow Submarine.

* Finally my condition has a name.

* And I told you, Mom: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.

Big Monday Links

(some links stolen from the great zunguzungu)

* It’s bad enough that I’ll never be asked to reboot Back to the Future—but it’d be utterly intolerable if the gig goes to two guys I went to high school with. Jon says it’s all a big misunderstanding but you know he’s just trying to throw me off the scent.

* There is no fresh start: The Return of Mad Men and the End of TV’s Golden Age. A metafictional reading of the series. And for fun: The Foreign Language of Mad Men: Do the characters really talk like people from the ’60s?

* Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.

* Arundhati Roy: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

* In his novel “2066: Red Star Over America,” Han, China’s premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike. The seas around New York rise, the Twin Towers crumble and the U.S. is plunged into pandemonium. You had me at “Go.” Via io9.

* Do professors get paid too much for too little work? Obviously. More here.

* Related: “College Professors Demand Right to Be Mean.”

* Facebook asserts trademark on word “Book.” Can’t see that being controversial.

* It must be an election year, because suddenly the Obama administration is talking about the environment.

* Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday. “Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming,” Reuters reports. “It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. Why didn’t anybody warn us!

* Government spending is good in a recession? Why didn’t anyone tell us!

* Why is horseracing even allowed? Via MeFi.

* Rules: This is a very specific contest. Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.

* If They Directed It: The Hunger Games. I don’t think anything I’ve written on Twitter has gotten as many retweets as my brief reading of series as a utopia.

* Imagining The Wire Season Six.

* On not calling Rich Santorum “crazy.”

* Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes up his visit to the wonderful conference I was at last weekend, ICFA 2012.

A highlight of ICFA was China Miéville’s talk “On Monsters.” I am a fan of Miéville’s work; The City and the City is one of my favorite books. His narratives are always beautifully written as well as philosophically challenging. Besides possessing an astonishing vocabulary (he sends me to the dictionary, and makes me wonder how they ever gave me a PhD), he is a writer widely read in theory — though his books never turn into allegories for lit crit. They always trace problems, and stay away from anything easy. Miéville brought up Quentin Meillassoux and speculative realism, for example, during his paper (dismissively: he is not a fan of SR or object oriented philosophy, which surprised me). China’s presentation started off as straightforward account of how the uncanny might be broken into various subcategories: the ab-canny, the sur-canny, the sub-canny, the post-canny, the para-canny, and onwards. His account began seriously but spiralled into a proliferative joke. His point was that classification is not analysis, and that such a “taxonomic frenzy” (as he called it) mortifies: “the drive to translate useful constructs into foundations for analysis is deadly,” because it violently takes away the potency and possibility of the terms it organizes. What was interesting to me, though, is that China’s talk performed something, um, para-canny (right beside itself, there but unseen) that I’ve also learned from studying medieval encyclopedists: taxonomic frenzy might produce a desiccated system of emplacement in which everything gets filed into a cabinet and drained of its vitality. Or it might actually be so creative in its proliferative energy and so limned by the necessity of its own failure that it undermines its own rigidity in the very process of articulation, becoming an envitalizing and innovative act — an act of writing — rather than a system of deadening inscription. China’s multiplication of canniness had a power that he walked away from, I think: why abandon your monster like that?

* Honoring the 20th anniversary of Apollo 18 the only possible way: interactive fiction.

* This American Life: What kind of ideology?

* “He Was a Crook”: Longform.org remembers Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.

* Haiti: Where did the money go?

* Support for Afghan War falls. Support for NC anti-gay amendment rises.

A recent Elon University poll found that 58 percent of North Carolinians oppose the amendment, with 38 in favor of it. That poll surveys adults statewide, while the WRAL News poll includes the results only of likely voters.

Despite the broad amendment support in the WRAL News poll, only 37 percent of voters said same-sex couples deserve no legal recognition in North Carolina, according to the poll.

So you have no idea what you’re voting for and won’t bother to find out. Got it.

* Because the 2012 campaign hasn’t been tedious enough: 2016.

* Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching. The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin’s Killer Go Free. On Trayvon Martin as innocent victim.

* Why Obama’s Healthcare Law Is Constitutional. Absolutely everything you need to know about health reform’s Supreme Court debut. What the Supreme Court Could Do About Obamacare, Explained. Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare.’

* If I didn’t know better I’d say this little video has some sort of message.

* MLA Job Information List data back to 1965.

* Infographic of the night: Doomsday Predictions Debunked.

* The headline reads, “UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters.” Huh! I really thought they’d give themselves hell.

Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: “A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes.”

You’re a university, for Christ’s sake. My god.

* What could possibly go wrong? Has Obama put us on a permanent war footing, even in peacetime?

* And what could possibly go wrong? Tacocopter could be the unmanned future of food delivery. Some should have read more Jenny Rhee.

FNL

* My students last summer insisted Mass Effect was important science fiction. Now io9 is telling me the same thing.

* American University’s adjunct faculty have voted to unionize.

* How to design a movie poster.

* You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. What could possibly go wrong?

* Gay marriage passes in New Jersey, only to be vetoed by Chris Christie. Meanwhile marriage equality looks likely to pass the Maryland state legislature. Meanwhile Obama announces it won’t defend laws that ban same-sex couples from receiving military benefits.

* WTFEverywhere: Sweden is only one of 17 countries that require transgender people to undergo sterilization.

* Apple still trying to find some way to make the Foxconn scandal go away.

* And Springsteen explains Wrecking Ball.

“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.”

So Good I Had to Break Radio Silence

Movie Posters from an Alternate Universe. Via io9.

Friday Fridays On

* Man arrested after threats to Rep. McDermott. Man arrested after threats to Sen. Bennet. Hedge fund manager arrested after threats to 47 government officials. And then there’s this. It’s been a tough week.

* I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack. I bet you’re wrong!

* Climate change makes the sun rise earlier in Greenland. It’s either totally true, or someone trolling the climate debate really effectively.

* Speaking of really effective trolls: Ladies and gentlemen, the Washington Times.

* The Assange hook is weird, but the overall point is right. Two spaces after a period: just don’t do it.

* Everyone is talking about the Joseph Conrad / Ford Maddox Ford science fiction novel I’ve had sitting on my shelf all semester. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg.

* In nuclear silos, death wears a snuggie.

* Writing as an act of faith. Via Steve.

* Flowchart of the day: Should I work for free?

* Tweet of the day, by a mile.

Take out the vowels in Reince Priebus’ name and you get “RNC PR BS.”

It’s the only thing that makes losing Michael Steele any easier.

* If you’re ask sick of people talking about astrology as I am, you might enjoy Adorno’s “Theses against Occultism.” Via Vu.

* And I think I’ve done this one before, but what the hell: alternate universe movie posters.

What If Stanley Kubrick Directed ‘Iron Man’?

Get all you can stand here. Via io9, which also points to an earlier effort: what if David Lynch directed Spider-Man? and steampunk Batman.

Sunday Night Lights

* The Wrong Side of the Heart: this weekend’s dose of vintage movie poster greatness.

* AskMetaFilter has all the huge-nerd podcasts I crave.

* Dr. Metzinger first proposes his thesis: there is no such thing as the self. The subjective sense of being a conscious person – the sense of being a self that is distinct from the body and present in a single, unified reality – is not a separate, coherent brain function but rather the result of many different systems running at the same time. I was telling you people this years ago!

* Four lesser-known members of the Fantastic Four. I’d never even heard of She-Thing.

* Pension war update: “…public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.”

* Marco Roth vs. the “neuronovel.”

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology. 

Via MeFi, which also links to the Jonah Lehrer’s response.

* And what Harlan Ellison makes, the world takes. Also via MeFi.

All the Links

* Does the Daily Show have a women problem?

* Democracy Now covers the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

* Elaine Marshall already within one point of Richard Burr.

* The elephant in the room: Republicans want the economy to fail.

* Democrats still pretending they’ll pass climate legislation. It’s adorable.

* Because you demanded it: A Harold & Kumar 3 script synopsis.

* Science proves gelatinous cubes can think.

* Nate Silver: Why we have U.S.-Ghana at even money.

* Minimalist science fiction film posters.

* Collective nouns, illustrated.

* The 20 most “anticipated” science fiction films of 2011. Things don’t look good.

* How I learned to stop worrying and love my homemade nuclear reactor.

* Will humans go extinct in 100 years?

* And you had me at “ragdoll cannon game.”

Wednesday Night

* The economics of the World Cup.

* The importance of the World Cup.

Life is too short to miss any games to be played this summer in South Africa. A sad fact of human existence is that an average life seldom contains more than 20 World Cups—our games are tragically numbered.

* Why did nearly all life on Earth die 250 million years ago?

* And if films retained their original casting. It’s a true shame we never got David Bowie as Captain Hook.

Pulp Fiction Inglourious Basterds

13 pulp Inglourious Basterds posters.

Albert Exergian’s Modernist TV Posters

Click here. Awesome find, Fiona!

A Few More

* Another day, another new social media platform to waste your time.

* The Senate has apparently reached a deal on a jobs bill. The sticking point was that deficit-hawk Republicans want to delay the return of the estate tax—because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

* Climate Progress is pissed at the New York Times.

* It may seem incredibly stupid, but there’s something about The Gary Shandling Movie Poster Project that’s impossible not to love.

* Kurt Vonnegut, humanist Santa.

Movie Poster Mashups

Movie poster mashups.

Sunday Night Links 1

Sunday night links.

* Is Twitter the Drudge Killer? We can only dare to hope.

* The Art of the Movie Poster. (Thanks, Ron!)

* Accusations from the left that Obama was behind Honduras’s coup seem completely unfounded.

* Sanford says he won’t resign. Okay, then, impeachment.

* Steve Benen against bipartisanship. Also at Washington Monthly: early movement towards fixing the Democratic primaries for 2012 and beyond.

* Krugman has had a very good series of posts this weekend trying to bash denialist talking points on climate change. Here’s the chart that dismantles the “we’ve been cooling since 1998” canard:

Film Noirstalgia

Film noirstalgia, vis RaShOmoN.