Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’
Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!
- ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”
- 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
- Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
- Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
- “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
- This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.
- It’s still Christmas somewhere.
- Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
- The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
- A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
- China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
- Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
- Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
- Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
- The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
- Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
- Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.
- Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
- Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
- A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
- El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
- The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
- Effective altruism takes an L.
- It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
- An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
- to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
- Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
- Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
- Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
- The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
- America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
- They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
- Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
- If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
- Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.
- Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
- Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
- Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
- Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
- The Dark History of Hysteria.
- Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
- We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
- The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
- Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
- Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
- With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
- If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?
- The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
- So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
- I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
- LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
- Testing LEGO Investments.
- Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
- Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
- Film History According to Tarantino.
- The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
- Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
- It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
- I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
- A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
- Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
- A Century of Serious Difficulty.
- Is It Art?
- So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
- MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
- I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
- Fitting.
- And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!
Fall Break Links? In This Economy?
I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...
- A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
- I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
- A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
- Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
- CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
- The CoFutures Prizes.
- Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
- Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
- Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
- How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
- Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
- From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
- Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
- Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
- Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
- Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
- Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
- The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
- Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
- Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
- Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
- The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
- To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
- ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.
- What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
- U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.
- All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
- Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
- Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
- Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
- Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
- The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
- Legally defining Peter Parker.
- Marvel adjective chart.
- Art Is Not Therapy.
- The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
- Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
- A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
- Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
- Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.
- Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
- At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
- This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
- Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
- Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
- If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
- Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
- Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
- Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
- The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
- The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
- Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
- Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…
- “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
- Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
- Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
- Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
- What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
- Equal population mapper.
- The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
- Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
- Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”
- A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
- The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
- War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
- When Chess Gets Weird.
- Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
- America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
- From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
- The United States of Abandoned Places.
- A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
- An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
- An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
- The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
- Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
- Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
- New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
- The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
- In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
- How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
- Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
- We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
- By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
- Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
- Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
- Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
- The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
- Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
- An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
- As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
- As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
- Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
- Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
- Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
- Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
- The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
- The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
- More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
- Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
- Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
- Anthropocene Gothic.
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
- Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
- Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
- It can always get worse.
- They say time is the fire in which we burn.
- How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
- And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.
New Year, New Pandemic Links
* Brace for Omicron. Wisconsin COVID-19 case counts matching levels not seen since November 2020. Omicron is spreading at lightning speed. Scientists are trying to figure out why. Where are hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? Look up your state. After Vaccines: Where Covid Death Rates Have Risen. Omicron Is Pushing America Into Soft Lockdown. “Things will likely get worse, experts warn.” As Omicron Looms, These Colleges Will Start Their January Classes Online. Junior year. You don’t say. In this Midwestern diner, patrons are sticking with coronavirus.
* The pandemic killed so many dialysis patients that their total number shrunk for the first time in nearly half a century.
* Flood of Creative Works Enter the Public Domain on Jan. 1.
* Absolutely beautiful, don’t even care if it’s true.
* How Will the History Books Remember 2021?
* Retired general recommends wargaming potential coup scenarios. That’s just prudent!
* America’s Electoral Future. What elections?
* Redistricting is Going Surprisingly Well for Democrats. Oh, honey.
* The Twitter Putsch. The Big Lie.
* John Roberts, Democratic hero. Joe Biden Has Been Very Good for the Military-Industrial Complex.
* Milwaukee ranks 2nd in poverty level among top 50 most-populated cities in U.S.
* Non-Mortgage Household Debt in the United States, 2003-2022.
* Fast-Moving Wildfires Burn Hundreds of Homes in Denver Area. ‘We Are in a Climate Emergency.’
* ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All. The climate apocalypse is real, and it is coming. The trap of climate optimism.
* We stan.
* We’re preparing for apocalypse wrong — and that could make things even worse. What The Marvel Movies Don’t Say About The End Of The World.
But taken together, at the 100,000-foot level, the fact that each property is basically about someone doing what they were doing anyway, then having to deal with some new iteration of surreal but familiar external forces invading, and never having any time to really think about what it all means because the next thing is already happening, as it turns out — now that we really do live in a notable historical period of continual surreal events that could make you question the foundations of society — everyone has to continue doing what they were doing anyway when the world is ending, and you’ll never have that much time to think about what it all means because the demands of the next thing will be upon you.
What does it feel like when the world ends? It just feels like aliens invading until something else happens.
* The Subversive Playfulness of the ‘The Matrix.’ ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ captures the real crisis of our post-truth era. ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Is the Anti-sequel Sequel. The Matrix Resurrections is a messy triumph. Too many movies right now are “about trauma.” The Matrix Resurrections actually does the work. Why trans fans connect to ‘The Matrix’. On the Matrix Resurrections. Blank Check. Even Neo Can’t Log Off.
* Another person discovers the terrible truth about jazz in the Star Wars universe.
* The case against the trauma plot.
* Placement games were 2021’s most calming trend. Black Games Studies.
* LARB’s top-ten most-read of 2021.
* The Radical James Baldwin.
* The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?
* Space Colonists Will Likely Resort to Cannibalism, Scientist Says. Henry Kissinger: AI Will Prompt Consideration of What it Means to Be Human.
* Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world.
* Why am I being hurt?
* The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts school, still uses electric shock therapy to punish disabled students. How can an entire field of mental health accept this as fine?
* Death Drive Nation.
* I’m older than Frasier. I’m older than Cliff Claven.
* Behold: Star Trek: Coda.
* What are you doing? Listen to Man Bites Dog.
* And the news just gets worse: Exercise necessary for older people later in life, study says.
Wednesday Night Links!
* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.
* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!
* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.
* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.
* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.
* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.
* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.
* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.
* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?
* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.
* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.
* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.
* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.
* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.
* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.
* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.
* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.
- Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?
* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.
* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.
* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.
* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.
* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?
* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.
* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.
* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.
* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.
* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.
* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?
* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.
* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.
* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.
* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.
* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.
* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.
* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.
* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.
* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!
* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.
* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.
* The world’s riskiest project.
* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…
* The Oral History of A Different World.
* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.
March Links!
- SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
- My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
- I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
- My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
- Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
- And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.
- CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
- A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
- How to Build a World.
- How to Land on Mars.
- Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
- “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
- The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
- Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
- I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
- An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
- From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
- The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
- The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’
- President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
- The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
- Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
- Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
- New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
- The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.
- ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
- When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
- English departments rethink what to call themselves.
- A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
- Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
- Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
- What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
- Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
- More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
- The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
- ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
- Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
- Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
- Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.
- The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
- Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
- The Tyranny of Parents.
- Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
- A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
- Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
- Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
- The realest tweet.
- Chess is bad now. This is good.
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
- The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
- Finally, someone is making sense.
- Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
- Bring back the nervous breakdown!
- Is This the End of Tipping?
- The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
- I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
- All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
- And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21
- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Ye Old Link Roundup!
- I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.
- Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.
- Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
- Remember? Remember? We had fun, didn’t we?
- Panel: People over 75, essential workers next for vaccines. Some more details from the New York Times.
- New ‘worrying’ Covid strain found in South Africa is ‘more severe among young adults.’ Holiday Travel Breaks Pandemic Record Despite Dire Covid Warnings.
- At long, long last: gimme that stimmie.
- Congressional Deal Would Give Higher Ed $23B. Stimulus deal delivers billions in pandemic aid to colleges, but much more is needed, advocates say.
- Congress finally moves to stop surprise medical billing as part of spending deal.
- The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony.
- Unsanitized: Congress Again Taxes the Time of Benefit Recipients. 35% of Americans Could Lose Their Home in Next Two Months, Census Report Says.
- When do you think would be a good time?
- Dragonlance Writers End Lawsuit Against Dungeons & Dragons Maker. I was hoping for Dragons of Fifth Season Postnormality but someone on Twitter pitched prestige Dragonlance TV and now I’m all in on that.
- Kylo Ren Is the Real Hero of Star Wars, The Stand edition.
- The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.
- After 25 years, I’m retiring from ‘takes.’
- And they say love is dead: The Journalist and the Pharma Bro.
- Early humans had the right idea I think.
- Chinese Jesus goes hard.
- Discovery roundup. Architecture roundup. Genre theory roundup. Email etiquette roundup.
- I never promised you an LCD factory.
- Divorce as a tool of class struggle.
- 19 years.
- Star Wars, explained.
- And the flood is gonna get here any day.
Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday
* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…
* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”
* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).
* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!
* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.
* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”
* A Message from Future Generations.
* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.
* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”
* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.
* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.
* Which doesn’t count the die-in.
* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.
* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.
* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.
* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.
* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”
* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.
* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.
* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America’s Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.
* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin’s record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.
* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America’s future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and ‘Triggering the Libs,’ Former Classmates Say.
* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. “When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society.” Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven’t killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission.
* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD’s Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.
* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.
* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after ‘rapid spread’ of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed’s Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here’s What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I’m weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I’ve got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students’ positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don’t Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.
* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We’re Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.
* Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here’s what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.
* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University’s Debt—And Who’s Paying for It.
* Legionnaire’s Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.
* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.
* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.
* Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.
* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.
* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we’re not talking about a government shutdown, are we? ‘We shouldn’t have to beg’: Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.
* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but “pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower” actually made me wince in pain.
* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.
* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens’ anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.
* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here’s why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.
* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.
* The Literature of White Liberalism.
* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada’s COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.
* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.
* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.
* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.
* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series’ real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.
* Why Uber’s business model is doomed.
* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season.
* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.
* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).
* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on ‘Black Panther’ Without Chadwick Boseman.
* All roads lead back to All My Children.
* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it’s about time.
* Stan Lee’s American pantheon.
* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.
* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.
* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.
* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you’re feeling positive enough to get through your day.
* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labor Organizing Threats.’
* Understanding Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.
* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).
* Development ceases on Amazon Prime’s CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.
* Ah dinnae ken this: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots.
* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season to introduce franchise’s first transgender, non-binary characters.
* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive ‘jumping’ earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.
* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!
* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.
* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…
* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.
* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.
* USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.
* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.
* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.
* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.
* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.
* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.
* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.
* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.
* Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.
* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.
* 9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.
* Are You Overpraising Your Child?
* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.
* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.
* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?
* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”
* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.
* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.
* Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.
* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.
* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.
* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.
* The Evolution of Ransomware.
* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.
* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.
* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.
* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.
* How UFO culture took over America.
* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.
* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!
* (Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.
* What about the bad job offers?
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.
* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’
* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.
* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.
* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.
* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.
* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”
* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.
* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.
Gerry Canavan 