Posts Tagged ‘NFL’
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.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!
* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Children’s Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.
* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.
* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!
* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.
* A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.
* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.
* Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.
* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.
* The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Can’t Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.
* Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.
* The suffocation of democracy.
* The president sure did some crimes.
* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?
* And how will they solve securities fraud?
* KSR: The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.
* The Bosses’ Constitution: How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
* NC’s Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!
* The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.
* A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.
* Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economy—and Voter Turnout.
* Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isn’t when they’ll rebuild — but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.
* Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.
* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.
* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US. ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court.
* Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”
* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.
* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.
* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.
* How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.
* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.
* I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.
* Geological time versus capitalist time.
* The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.
* The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.
* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.
* “The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”
* On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.
* On raising a non-neurotypical child.
* The film’s real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggers—the gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.
* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.
* I’m here only to present the facts.
* The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.
* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.
* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.
* You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96—less than 1 percent—had their debt erased. And it gets worse.
* How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.
* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.
* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.
* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* CFP: Darkness.
* Never Tell Them Your True Name: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin.
* The Demanding, Essential Work of Samuel Delany: The Atheist in the Attic.
* Games for a Fallen World: On the Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene.
* Why we march: a then and now look at Marquette student’s involvement in protests.
* Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability. The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.
* A grim new angle on the intergenerational struggle: Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors.
* Harvard study estimates thousands died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria.
* Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger.
* The Criminalization of Knowledge.
* A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student. Niall Ferguson, amazingly. Niall Ferguson quits Stanford free speech role over leaked emails.
* It’s Not Liberal Arts And Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed.
* Inside the NCAA’s years-long, twisting investigation into Mississippi football.
* Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty.
* Here’s every Star Wars movie, ranked by female screen time. Should Donald Glover Have Played Han Solo? Disney and Star Wars: An Empire in Peril? The growing emptiness of the Star Wars universe. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves.
* Isaac Cates on Infinity War‘s False Conclusions.
* How Tolkien created Middle-earth.
* Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls. White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them. TMZ Goes MAGA. Can the Rule of Law Survive Trump?
* Three tweets on impeachment from Corey Robin.
* thread re: how NYT has now basically locked out Congressional Dems from commenting on Trump news.
* Trump’s ‘Forced Separation’ of Migrant Families Is Both Illegal and Immoral. Separated at the border: A mother’s story.
* After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back. Customs stole a US citizen’s life savings when he boarded a domestic flight, now he’s suing to get it back. Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood. This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk.
* Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google.
American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?
* In the richest country in the history of the world: Nine year old raises thousands of dollars at lemonade stand to help pay brother’s medical bills.
* Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself agreeing with David Brooks.
* Bear’s Dairy Queen ice cream treat earns zoo $500 fine.
* Archaeologists uncover remains of man crushed as he fled Pompeii.
* Why Isn’t Asbestos Banned in the US?
* Choose-Your-Own-Security-Disclosure-Adventure.
* Meet the Rising New Housing Movement That Wants to Create Homes for All. Tenant and Squatters’ Rights in Oakland.
* We compared Milwaukee police reports on Sterling Brown’s arrest with the video. They don’t match.
* Jury Leaves $4 to Family of Man Killed by Sheriff’s Deputy, Along With Many Questions.
* LARB reviews Dirty Computer.
* How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language From a Terrible One. How to Build a World.
* Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a “residential” zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I assume the rivers of meat blood come later.
* A weather report from an alternate universe, in which science is real and people aren’t idiots.
* Climate grief in the classroom.
* Banning straws won’t save the oceans.
* Bet this won’t either: Trump Prepares Lifeline for Money-Losing Coal Plants.
* Summah. Don’t kill your wife with work. If these trends continue. Teach the controversy. Dads & grads. When you’re almost forty.
* “Says he had to stage his own murder in order to capture someone, apologises to his wife.”
* How #MeToo Impacts Viewers’ Decisions on What to Watch.
* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.
* How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking.
* The art of the grift in 21st century Manhattan.
* Shockingly, ‘impossible’ EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all.
* New podcast watch: Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes. The Good Place: The Podcast.
* An oral history of the Muppets.
* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.
* We’re not prepared for the genetic revolution that’s coming.
* And you can’t argue with the facts: Wearing glasses may really mean you’re smarter, major study finds.
people and nature
Thursday Links!
* * The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.
* My colleague C.J. Hribal’s essay “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” has won a Pushcart Prize.
* Sure! Why not.
* We did it! Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes.
* CFP: Indiana Jones and the Edited Collection. CFP: Blackness and Disability. CFP: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom.
* WISCON 42! “Doing Justice To The Archive: The Octavia E. Butler Papers.”
* There is only one Trump scandal.
* Stolen election pays big dividends.
* No one could have predicted this shocking turn of events.
* I’ll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy’s net returns to the University. Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish. Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA’s Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million). There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period. There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated. More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements. (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.) And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.
* Profession: The Sky Is Falling.
* Scandal after scandal focuses scrutiny on USC leadership, culture.
* The Best Question To Ask on the Last Day of Class.
* ‘Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay’: the rise of the religious left.
* Traditional Disobedience: Renewing the Legacy of Catholic Activism.
* After decades of dwarfs and elves, writers of color redefine fantasy.
* Magic: The Gathering and capitalism.
* Killing All Humans: A Flowchart.
* David Foster Wallace was terrible to women.
* The Two Crucial Filmmaking Elements Causing All Your Movie Feuds.
* Arrested Development season five has been managed so badly by Hurwitz and Netflix that it’s practically begging to be boycotted. More here.
* Marvel and the End of Counterprogramming.
* HBO’s Watchmen series sounds worse than I imagined.
* What Deadpool 2’s fridging controversy says about comics culture’s gender gap.
* Two Americans were detained by a Border Patrol agent after he heard them speaking Spanish. Gay Army chaplain struggles to save husband from deportation. Trump Gang Dragnet Caught a Teen Who ICE Said Looked Like He Was in MS-13. He Wasn’t. “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
* Breaking #MAGA: A man posed for months as an ICE agent. A traffic stop led his girlfriend to unravel the truth.
* Jordan Peterson, The Intellectual We Deserve.
* Shock: 2013 Chicago School Closings Failed To Help Students.
* The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica. Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system.
* Milwaukee cops abuse NBA star Sterling Brown. New York Jets chairman, brother of Trump ambassador, says he’ll pay fines for team players who protest during anthem.
* He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill.
* Immortality. Statement of teaching philosophy. Can YOU hit the bullseye?
* And huge, if true: America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
All Your Sunday Reading™
* Call for applications: Postdoctoral Scholar for Futures of Literary and Cultural Knowledge, UCSB.
* Call for Papers: “Binge-Watching and the Future of Television Research: A Workshop” Sept 13-14, 2018, at Anglia Ruskin University.
* Studying Tolkien fanzines at Marquette University.
* I make a by-the-way appearance on this massive roundup of Infinity War links.
* What is an English professor?
* The Enduring Anger of Joanna Russ.
* Bonkers Wisconsin tax policy error in my favor.
* Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services. UC Workers on Strike. After 3-Day Strike, University Of California’s Service Workers Vow To Keep Fighting.
* A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired. The icing on the cake. Well, actually, this is.
* If you’re worried about free speech on campus, don’t fear students — fear the Koch brothers.
* Why universities became big-time real estate developers.
* Stephen Kuusisto on ableism in the university.
* White student calls police on black student napping in Yale dorm. When Calling the Police Is a Privilege.
* Academia’s #MeToo moment: Women accuse professors of sexual misconduct. 45 Stories of Consent on Campus. The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time.
* (Another) progressive case against the progressive case for the SAT.
* Never-ending nightmare: why feminist dystopias must stop torturing women.
* In 2011, Minnesota got a liberal governor and Wisconsin got a conservative one. Who was better off?
* What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
* Your workplace is killing you.
* Intrigue and Drama on the Han Solo Set. Catch the fever!
* One of the most purely destructive things Trump has yet done. Early days though, early days. Evergreen.
* Taking parents from their children is a form of state terror. Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance. An upcoming Supreme Court ruling could force all workers into forced arbitration, deprived of the right to class lawsuits. Trump Administration Wants to Train Teens in ‘Hazardous’ Jobs. Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab. A taxonomy of Michael Cohen and potential Trump corruption. How Michael Cohen Cashed In. It’s harder to pay off foreign governments than the US one. Breaking Down Gina Haspel’s Tense Confirmation Hearing. Trumpism Is Having Its Best Week Ever. We know a lot about Trump’s misdeeds. But most of all we know there’s more to come.
* How bananas is this Schneiderman story going to get? Man.
* And isn’t it pretty to think so?
* ’We Can Make Him Disappear’: The Power of County Sheriffs.
* In One Year, 57,375 Years of Life Were Lost to Police Violence. Plainclothes NYPD Cops Are Involved in a Staggering Number of Killings.
* How to Survive the First Hour of a Nuclear Attack. Wow, a whole hour!
* The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse.
* Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings.’
* Democrats against the gig economy. The Politics of Full Employment.
* It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.
* The Brooklyn Comedian Whose Joke About ICE Got Him a Visit From Homeland Security. ICE Breaking into Home: “We’ll Show You the Warrant When We’re Done.”
* The “Maddening Labyrinth” Aging NFL Players Face for Dementia Compensation.
* England revving up for a Corbyn prime ministership.
* There’s No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal. Almost as if… there’s no excuse at all…
* From blood diamonds to blood healing crystals.
* It sounds like my dream of a Bill & Ted parody of the trend towards grimdark 80s revivals is gonna come true.
* What CBS found when it bought four random used photocopiers.
* How political and media elites legitimized torture.
* #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable.
* You Won’t Like The Consequences Of Making Pluto A Planet Again.
* New York Court Says Chimps Aren’t People—But a Judge Is Not Happy About It.
* The dream of communism is the elimination of wage labor. If AI is bound to serve society instead of private capitalists, it promises to do so by freeing an overwhelming majority from such drudgery while creating wealth to sustain all.
* Imagine that it’s 2044, and everyone is still listening to Duran Duran.
* Sometimes you just need two men.
* And in the advanced Turing test, the machine convinces you that it is conscious and you aren’t.
Holy Thursday Links!
* William Strampel, Nassar’s former boss at MSU, charged with criminal sexual conduct. MSU Spent Half A Million Dollars Monitoring Nassar Victims’ And Journalists’ Social Media Accounts. Every single member of the upper administration at MSU must resign.
According to MLive, investigators in February found dozens of photos of nude women as well as pornographic videos and a video of Nassar with a young patient on a computer in Strampel’s office.
* Sexuality, childhood, and spanking as sexual assault.
* UW-Stevens Point may reconsider proposed humanities cuts after student protests.
* A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that congressional races are so heavily rigged in favor of Republicans that the United States can barely be described as a democratic republic. The upshot of their analysis is that, to win a bare majority of the seats in the U.S. House, Democrats “would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points.”
* Who Foots Most of the Bill for Public Colleges? In 28 States, It’s Students.
* “Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive.”
* This is a strike to save higher education.
* Oklahoma teachers say they’re going on strike next week.
* Fred Walker’s Career May Not Be Over. But His Presidency Is.
* I heard you like obstruction so I got you some obstruction in your obstruction.
* ‘Deeply weird and enjoyable’: Ursula K Le Guin’s electronica album.
* Here’s how Popular Science covered ‘Star Trek’ in 1967.
* Civilization Player Gets Space Race Victory In 90 AD.
* A Scheme to End the World’s Worst Acid Trip.
* Race, Gender, and Disability in Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time.
* Stormy Daniels Directed a Cyberpunk Porn Thriller That Predicted Our Current Dystopia.
* The Vikings got a billion dollar stadium, and tax payers paid half of that cost. And now…
* Something Happened on Television.
* A California sheriff is posting inmate release dates to help ICE capture undocumented immigrants. ICE gained access to Santa Clara County inmates, breaching sanctuary policies.
* Whatever the potential merits of the arguments might be, it’s tortuous, to say the least, to read anguished warnings about “fake news” from someone who was in the West Wing during the heyday of Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, fictitious attempts to buy refined uranium from Niger, and completely nonexistent alliance with Al-Qaeda; to hear about the threats posed by presidential incompetence from a former staffer of the same White House that so brazenly let New Orleans drown; to be lectured on the perils of executive belligerence and polarizing rhetoric from the man credited with coining the phrase “Axis of Evil”; or to be subjected to sermons about kleptocracy and calls to decency, honor, and the rule of law from someone whose former political boss spent eight years oozing nationalist machismo to champion torture, extrajudicial detention, and aggressive war and who possibly became president in 2000 because his brother just so happened to be the governor of Florida.
* The Newest Frontier in American Jurisprudence Is Trump’s Twitter Feed.
* Hey, Wired — leave those kids alone.
* It shows just how far a man of means will go to get something he can’t buy: the right to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in America.
* Seems pricy, but I’ll allow it.
* Advertising will destroy the auto industry next.
* Scientists say they’ve discovered a new human organ. Behold the interstitium!
* Well, when you put it that way.
* Bulgaria Alleges Julia Kristeva was State Security Agent.
Don’t Fall Behind, Spring Ahead with These Sunday Morning Links
* The R.D. Mullen Fellowship is calling for applications. The deadline this year is April 2, 2018.
* Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector.
* For Your Consideration: African Speculative Fiction Society Nommos 2018.
* I had a few bad parents during my time in One Hour, One Life but only one of them outright abandoned me. Most of them, even if they could barely care for themselves, tried to keep me alive. “We’re going to die,” one mother told me when I spawned into the game with her in the middle of a barren wilderness. We did, but she carried me with her every step of the way through our brief lives. ‘One Hour, One Life’: This Game Broke My Heart and Restored My Faith in Humanity.
* We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake.
* Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future.
* Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they’re not actually left-wing places at all.
* Fewer foreign students exacerbate financial challenges for some U.S. universities.
* What passes for intellectualism on the right.
* Unpaid internships are back.
* All The Movies I Didn’t See.
My guess is, having elected, much to their surprise, a lunatic as the most powerful man on the planet, a man who boasts of ‘his’ nukes being bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, a man who could actually be crazy enough to unleash a nuclear warhead on millions, the Americans are sorely missing a time when the white man did something right.
* A slow, cerebral, Miracleman depiction of Barry Allen losing all touch with his humanity Dr.-Manhattan-style seems like the only way for The Flash to proceed from here.
* Black Panther crosses $1 billion.
* “President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.”
* Echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today’s immigration debate.
* We’ll Never See This Politically Themed Black-ish Episode Because of ‘Creative Differences.’
* How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps.
* This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town.
* YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.
* Super Mario as it was meant to be experienced.
* The Singularity in theory and practice.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* I Felt Despair About Climate Change—Until a Brush With Death Changed My Mind. “Leukemia and climate change have more in common than you might think.”
* Remembering The Hobbit: The Text Adventure.
* And a much-too-long-delayed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The oceans are warming. It’s altering turtle reproduction so that the vast majority of offspring are female. It was mistake to drop acid with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Pure evil. I’ll do anything for a good grade. Dear science. Dr. Bees. On sequels. I have this nightmare where a giant monster chases me. I’m going to give you a pill that’ll double your intelligence. Welcome to robot heaven. Penguin have a much happier version of the Titanic story. Finegan’s Wake. You are watching The Nihilist Channel. Where do you think all these fossils come from? Get me a scientist! Purposelessness is the only real super villain. Daddy, can I ask you something? The fundamental kid utility function. And my whole life has been one string of failures. Please send help.
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
No Bad News Today Links
* The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.
* Where Black History and Floods Intertwine.
* I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords.
* CFP: The David Foster Wallace Conference has extended its deadline to January 15.
* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.
* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.
* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.
* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.
* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.
* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.
* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.
* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.
* The birthering of the Democrats.
* Japanese American Historical Plaza.
* The smoke break and solidarity.
* Robots and literary criticism.
* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.
* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.
* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.
* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.
* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.
* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.
* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.
* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.
* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.
* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.
* This is some Black Mirror shit.
* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.
* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.
* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Tuesday Links! Too Many of Them! Send Help!
* Don’t forget! Just two weeks until the “Global Weirding” deadline!
* And tomorrow night in Missouri! Marquette Professor to Present ‘After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction.’
* CFP: Radical Future and Accelerationism.
* Evergreen headlines: The Shrinking Ph.D. Job Market.
* Last year’s Pioneer Award winner: “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.”
* The Anthropological Unconscious, or How Not to Talk About African Fiction.
* AfroSF Now: A Snapshot, Seven Novels and a Film.
* Africa Has Always Been Sci-Fi.
* Cost Control Is a Progressive Value.
* Grade Inflation, Forever and Ever Amen.
* Dueling letters: President Lovell. Professor McAdams.
* Cheating Incidents Blemish NCAA’s Marquee Event.
* Honors Colleges Promise Prestige, But They Don’t All Deliver.
* The Humanities in the Anthropocene.
* Extinction: A Radical History.
* Art in the Age of Economic Inequality.
* Manifesto of a Future University.
* 30 Cities Where America’s Poor Are Concentrated. You know where this is going.
* It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention. And a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Jeffrey Dahmer’s House Is Up for Rent During the Republican National Convention.
* More politics watch! The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election. Sanders +2.6! Trump -4.1! Go vote Wisconsin!
* It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates.
* My analysis of the latest federal data shows that, on average, these families’ income — including tax credits and all sources of welfare — is about $9,000 below the poverty line. That means ensuring no children grow up in poor households would cost $57 billion a year. (To put that in perspective, that’s how much money we’d get if Apple brought back the $200 billion it has stashed overseas, and paid just 29 percent tax on it – it’s a big problem, but it’s small compared to the wealth of our society.)
* Unionizing Pays Big Dividend for Professors at Regional Public Universities. What Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges Made in 2015-16.
* The villain gap: Why Soviet movies rarely had American bad guys. Risk time in the gulag by reading about Soviet-era underground media. Cold War board games explore the conflict’s history, spycraft, and humor. Soviet sci-fi: The future that never came.
* This Genius Twitter Feed Is Turning Classic Kids’ Books Into Nightmares.
* Superman And The Damage Done: A requiem for an American icon. An oral history of Superman. A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Death to All Superheroes. Yes, chum, there’s more links below the picture.
* The Antonin Scalia School of Law, or…
* Retirees Are Handing Wall Street Billions For No Good Reason.
* All politics is local: I grew up being compared to my overachieving cousin. Now he’s a Supreme Court nominee.
* Imagine living in a cell that’s smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate.
* Up to half of people killed by US police are disabled.
* “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
* The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore.
* Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. But I say that’s not thinking big enough! 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* This Is How We Could Hide Our Planet From Bloodthirsty Aliens.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Just Reappeared and Nobody Knows What Happened to It.
* Researchers Just Discovered a New State of Matter.
* Hot take watch: Aaron Burr, Not So Bad? I wish I knew the Hamilton soundtrack well enough to make a proper joke here.
* Statistical Analysis Has Revealed Game of Thrones‘ True ‘Main’ Character.
* Data suggests a mere 94% of Tor data is malicious.
* Indigenous video games you should download.
* Scientists bemoan SeaWorld decision to stop breeding orcas.
* Dark, gritty ad absurdum: The Tick in 2016.
* Trumpism in everything, Wal-Mart edition.
* NFL Sends Threatening Letter To New York Times, Demands Retraction Of Concussion Investigation.
* The Ultimate List of Weapons Astronauts Have Carried Into Orbit.
* Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly. The end of Florida. These Maps Show What Washington Will Look Like When Antarctica Melts.
* Ambiguous utopias: In Pod-Based Community Living, Rent Is Cheap, But Sex Is Banned.
* Can an outsider become Amish?
* The strange case of Jennifer Null.
* Whatever happened to utopian architecture?
* Miracles and wonders: Treating Huntington’s With Gene Knockout Might Be Safe For Adults.
* Terry Gilliam tempts fate, again.
* The best Star Wars character you’ve never heard of.
* And the arc of history is long, but the MLA has changed its style guide again.
Easter Monday (Hardly Knew ‘Er)
* Marquette suspends McAdams through the fall 2016 semester. Marquette’s statement. McAdams has some interesting comments specifically with regard to the the apology requirement on his blog. What a mess.
* Alien vs. Predator: Connecticut Politicians Want to Tax Yale Endowment.
* Husband and wife HMS students seek treatment for her fatal disease. It isn’t Huntington’s, though it’s very similar, and Huntington’s research does play a minor role in the story.
* Good Friday in Middle-earth.
* Batman v. Superman: you know, for kids. But, honestly, at this point I almost feel bad.
* For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it’s at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It’s the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been 15 years in the making. We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.
* Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. The Long March of Bernie’s Army.
* For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.
* These Are The Phrases That Sanders And Clinton Repeat Most.
* Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat. The links keep coming after the picture.
* The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors: The most unusual colors from Harvard’s storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.
* The woman who can see 100 times more colors than you can.
* Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience.
* The emergency managers Snyder imposed on Detroit and Flint had no chance of restoring those cities to solvency. Forced austerity can’t solve financial problems caused by a low tax base and a lack of revenue sharing. Meanwhile, in Illinois: How to destroy a state.
* Civic leaders in Portland, Oregon, want to start busing homeless people out of town. The city council there quietly set aside $30,000 to buy one-way tickets for certain homeless individuals last week, the Portland Mercury reports.
* Fighting over my vote: Who’s the Most UFO-Friendly Presidential Candidate? Related: Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs. And in local news: Aaron Rogers Describes Seeing a UFO in New Jersey in 2005.
* Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam.
* N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry. Jerry Jones: Absurd to Link Football to CTE. Absurd!
* The True Story Behind the Legendary “Lost Ending” of The Shining.
* How 4chan and 8chan turned that chatbot racist. How Not to Make a Racist Bot.
* 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life.
* Happily ever after? Advice for mid-career academics.
* About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
* Somehow I’d forgotten Netflix is actually doing Voltron, and that wasn’t just a joke about the creative bankruptcy of our times.
* This, however, I’m 100% in favor of.
* Mr. Speaker, this is not a perfect bill. I never said it was. I saw Hamilton, so now I’m going to orphan my son.
* With The Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling Shows Us Harry Potter’s Future Isn’t What You Expected.
* Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026.
* Harrowing tales of true crime.
* Secret history of the Clinton email scandal.
* They stole Shakespeare’s skull!
* To Boldly Go Provides a Rare Look Behind the Scenes of Star Trek.
* Bedrock City in Ruins: The rise and fall of the Flintstone empire.
* Just the thought every parent wants in their mind on the happy occasion of their daughter’s fourth birthday: I had a baby in my 40s. Part of my job is preparing my daughter for life without me.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Red Mars TV Series Now On Hold After Showrunner Suddenly Departs.
Gerry Canavan 