Posts Tagged ‘Neil deGrasse Tyson’
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…
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Tuesday Links!
* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.
* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.
* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.
* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.
* The Church of Science Fiction.
* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just nightmarish.
* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.
* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.
* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.
* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.
* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.
* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.
* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.
* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.
* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.
* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.
* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.
* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.
* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”
* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.
* The rise of the noncompete clause.
* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”
* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.
* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.
* Review getting picked up: five stars.
* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Supervillain
Read between the lines. They’re setting up a classic heel turn.
‘On Mars, with only 38% of Earth’s gravity, the Vault & other spring-assisted leaps would resemble circus cannons’
The only good thing on the Internet today was Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tweeting of the Martian Olympics. Go to bed early and let’s all do better tomorrow.
Sunday Links
* Why they occupy: University of California edition.
* The recession comes home to Morris County.
Morris County has experienced a sharp increase in motor vehicle burglaries throughout 2011, according to Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi, who said the increase can be attributed to independent trends that have emerged in small geographic areas in the county at different times and committed by different individuals.
* MetaFilter has your Neil deGrasse Tyson Overdrive.
* Get me Val Kilmer: Christian Bale says he’s done playing Batman.
“I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”
* Also on the Occupy beat: “Pre-Occupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street.” And also at the New Yorker: Was anti-Keystone activism the real political movement of 2011?
* Something Is Happening: Notes on the First Two Months of Occupy.
* Mary Roach: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Orgasm.
* Aaron Bady: “When everything that can be recorded is recorded, our means of protecting privacy must fundamentally change.”
* Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison. But the prototype looks so friendly!
Thursday Night
* An asteroid buzzed us yesterday, but the real terror (as Neil de Grasse Tyson reminds us on this week’s Nerdist podcast) remains Apophis in 2036. Get me Bruce Willis!
* Some perspectives on the Keystone XL delay: We’ve been sold out! We’ve won (for now)! We’ve won!
* “We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.” Please, stop making us beat you!
* Occupy Oakland’s Big Challenge: The Mayhem Factor.
* Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will be a musical.
* The next Cold War will be fought with greenhouse gas.
* Naomi Klein: Capitalism vs. the climate.
* And ladies and gentlemen, for the last time anywhere: the Western Black Rhino.
Gerry Canavan 