Posts Tagged ‘Nintendo Switch’
Friday Night Links!
UPDATE: oof.
* ICYMI: Grad School Vonnegut #14: Happy Birthday, Wanda June! This one is Aaron’s “Vonnegut and Africa” episode.
* CFP: Utopia and Tabletop Games. CFP: NeMLA 2021 Creative Session, “Speculative Figures and Speculative Futures: Our Uncanny Postapocalypse.”
* Two core pieces of Watchmen criticism from my Watchmen class this week: “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore” and “The Forgotten Story of Watchmen’s Unsung Hero.” The second one comes via my pal Jacob Brogan, who was kind enough to shoot some ideas about Watchmen, Higgins, and auteurship with me back and forth the other day.
When I ask Damon Lindelof, showrunner for the upcoming HBO series Watchmen, about John Higgins, his mind goes straight to the Beatles. “John Higgins remains one of the unsung heroes of Watchmen,” he says. “Certainly Moore and Gibbons were John and Paul, but Higgins was George and Ringo combined, and his striking colors reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.”
Higgins was indeed a hero of the graphic novel that Lindelof’s show riffs on, having been the man who did the coloring for the book. That makes him one of only three collaborators who created the Watchmen comic, along with writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and he is indeed underappreciated, even by the book’s supporters. But even that bold analogy isn’t enough: It’s more as if Beatles fans assumed the band consisted only of John and Paul and didn’t even know George and Ringo existed, much less that they created music of their own.
* Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate.
* Wisconsin’s daily COVID-19 case count breaks record again, tops 2,500. They had to rescale Marquette’s COVID Dashboard today. Outbreak Stresses Town-Gown Relations in Wisconsin. Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus—but not because of parties and bars. Laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey. Skippin’ and a-jumpin’.
Slippage between multiple concepts described as “lockdown” and “quarantine” really doesn’t capture what the students in these quarantined dorms are experiencing. They’re being asked not to leave relatively tiny dorm rooms; even bathroom time is scheduled. The yard went up *today* https://t.co/a2vbvYEdwq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
They’re the dog that caught the car, now, though — having lured these students here they can hardly disperse them to the winds now. So they find themselves with a duty of care they never should have volunteered for and cannot responsibly provide. https://t.co/Jlv1sPUjvZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Huge, if true: The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn.
* Federal judge temporarily blocks USPS operational changes amid concerns about mail slowdowns, election. The U.S. Commerce Department has announced it plans to block downloads of the Chinese-owned social apps WeChat and TikTok, beginning on Sunday. “The Trump administration argued against a challenge to its 2020 census plans by saying the Constitution requires a count but does not say it must be accurate.” Bill Barr’s Titanic Lack of Self-Awareness. Independently of Trump and this presidency, William Barr, his henchmen, and his Federalist Society supporters represent a powerful threat to the fundamental values of liberal democracy. The Department of Education as Right-Wing Troll.
What Trump calls "patriotic education" is racist education.
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) September 18, 2020
the call for an explicitly fascist national curriculum is just the logical extension of all the 'PC culture has gone too far' rhetoric of the past few years and every one of you who contributed to that discourse is culpable
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 18, 2020
* Only going to get worse: NYPD Crushes Tiny Anti-ICE Protest With Overwhelming Force And Bloody Arrests.
* The U.S. Is on the Path to Destruction.
when I hear it I think MY KIDS ARE GOING TO DIE YOUNG AND MISERABLE BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU MONSTERS DID https://t.co/SHMAiSafZQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Friends And Family Members Of QAnon Believers Are Going Through A “Surreal Goddamn Nightmare.” It Makes Perfect Sense That QAnon Took Off With Women This Summer. Meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news. The Toxic Slime Will End Us.
* Where Is Biden’s Ground Game?
knocking on doors doesn’t win elections, an unprecedented massive dropout of all your opponents on the eve of Super Tuesday wins elections https://t.co/q23qXjHB2K
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
For a club for pathetic sad sacks who love to lose, the idea of somberly turning the keys to the planet over to Donald Trump on a technicality for the second time must be intoxicating
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
Ok this is pretty huge: the NYT says that if polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, Trump will win. This means we should actually assume Biden is losing, not winning. The lead is a mirage based on assuming that the exact same thing we’ve already seen can happen will not happen. pic.twitter.com/OWJ0sGxbZD
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) September 18, 2020
also, when Trump won the first time he did it from a position of laughing-stock weakness, rather than being at the head of a cult-like fascist movement that will break any law or norm to win, and not having full control of the executive, the Senate, and the courts https://t.co/xKz2VA85BJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
every tweet on this website should be this tweet https://t.co/gZ4PjZJ7JH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
we are less than two months out from the final crisis, and democrats are too busy declaring themselves 99.5% likely to win to hear what Republicans are already saying about the vote
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Ugh, Tatiana Maslany is great casting for She-Hulk. I thought I was done with these!
* Academic freedom in action: U of T law school under fire for opting not to hire human-rights scholar after pressure from sitting judge. Search for new director of U of T law faculty’s International Human Rights Program leads to resignations, allegations of interference.
* BLM and the University of Chicago English department. I had some thoughts about this (blessedly left out of the article) the other day (and again the next morning).
* Big Ten announces football returning Oct. 23-24. No confidence at the University of Michigan.
So we're going to more-or-less intentionally infect a bunch of (disproportionately nonwhite) student athletes with COVID-19 by making them play sports for our entertainment, then use them to study the heart damage caused by COVID-19.
Tuskegee vibes https://t.co/K7TZ7Hkevl
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) September 16, 2020
* The Black Community in Indianapolis has been left reeling — as shocking and disturbing details released in the last 24 hours have emerged regarding a disgraced activist exposed for posing as a Black Woman. This one has exciting estate fraud on the side.
* Restaurants need a bailout. The Big Corporate Rescue and the America That’s Too Small to Save. Inequality Robs $2.5B from American Workers Each Year.
* Russia’s space agency chief declares Venus a “Russian planet.” Quick, someone wake up Rachel Maddow!
sometimes i remember that if a clown wants to trademark their makeup they have to paint it on an egg that is stored in a special clown egg warehouse and then i have to go lie down pic.twitter.com/5ltP6aQzL5
— jø mårius (@jo_hauge) September 16, 2020
the implication here is that the face breathes
which means it has lungs and blood pic.twitter.com/fymeQTIGrr— Heather Anne Campbell (@heathercampbell) December 14, 2017
* When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned during the pandemic, governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed? Meanwhile, in Wisconsin: Tony Evers firing DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman over unemployment claim backlog.
* Pedagogy corner! The Moment Is Primed for Asynchronous Learning.
* Dallas school district apologizes for assignment describing Kenosha shooter as ‘hero.’
Given the last tweet, I wanted to share this. It's a tinotype photograph ftom 1856, of three unidentfied women from Harvard's collection. Note their style, and think about how black women are too often styled during that era when portrayed on film. pic.twitter.com/jGH89cvL39
— Octavia Butler Predicted This MAGA Dystopia (@MsGo) September 16, 2020
* Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
* The Boys confronts real American Nazis better than most comic-book stories.
* Songs of Love and Hate: “Layla” and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas.’
* Patrick Blanchfield goes deep into the Call of Duty storyworld in my menchies.
* And it’s not all bad news: the sequel to one of the best Metroidvania games I’ve played in years is out on the Switch. And I’ve been loving Baba Is You, too! It’s a golden age for video games. AND NOTHING ELSE.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 18, 2020 at 6:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, Africa, America, anti-racism, apocalypse, asynchronous learning, autocracy, Baba Is You, bars, Bill Barr, Black Lives Matter, blackfishing, Call of Duty, Castlevania, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, clowns, COBOL, college football, college sports, comics, comics studies, coronavirus, COVID-19, Department of Education, disability, Donald Trump, drama, dyslexia, ecology, Electoral College, English departments, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fantasy, fascism, film, Fox News, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, Goodfellas, Grad School Vonnegut, Green New Deal, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda June, How the University Works, ice, income inequality, Indianapolis, Joe Biden, Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, lockdown, Marquette, Marvel, masks, mass shootings, MCU, Metroid, millennials, moral panics, MSNBC, my media empire, Nazis, NCAA, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Ori and the Blind Forest, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, plays, podcasts, police violence, politics, QAnon, quarantine, quit lit, race, Rachel Dolezal, racism, Republicans, restaurants, Russia, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, speed runs, Super Mario, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, The Boys, the Census, the courts, the law, the stock market, Thomas the Tank Engine, TikTok, trolling, Tuskegee, unemployment, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, USPS, Utopia, Van Morrison, Venus, Vonnegut, voting, Watchmen, whiteness, William Blake, Wisconsin, zunguzungu
Thursday Morning Links!
* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.
* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.
* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.
* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.
* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.
* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.
To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp
— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020
Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.
— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020
When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020
1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020
* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.
One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020
you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire
— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020
* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.
It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu
— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020
I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020
so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020
* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.
* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.
* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.
* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.
robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.
* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.
* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.
* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.
* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.
* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.
* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.
* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.
https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705
TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law
DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020
* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.
"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD
— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020
* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.
* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.
* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
* New York’s homeless students.
* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.
* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.
* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.
* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’
* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!
* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?
* When does a model own her own image?
* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.
* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.
Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020
someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020
* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”
* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.
* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.
* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.
* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.
* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.
* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.
Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing
It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?
Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL
Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU
— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019
* We stan.
* Time Travel as White Privilege.
* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.
* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.
* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?
* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.
* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, America, Ancillary Review of Books, animals, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Black Lives Matter, Bob Barr, California, capitalism, Caster Semenya, children, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, college, college football, college sports, Colorado, concentration camps, copyright, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darko Suvin, David Graeber, democracy, deportation, depression, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dune, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, education, epidemic, eugenics, Evo Morales, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, film, floods, food, Fort Hood, games, gender, Georgia, guns, heat ray, HHS, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Krug, Joe Biden, John Cage, Journal of Science Fiction, kids today, Legend of Zelda, liberalism, Louis DeJoy, Marquette, Michigan, movies, Muppets, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, necroliberalism, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Orlando, outer space, pandemic, paranoia, parents, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, photography, podcasts, politics, presidential election 2020, protest, QAnon, race, racism, reality TV, Rice, Robert's Rules of Order, science fiction, Scott Pilgrim, screen time, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, self-driving cars, serial killers, sperm donation, sports, teaching, Tenet, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, the Senate, the truth is out there, this is fine, time travel, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unemployment, universal basic income, Utopia, Venezuela, Venus, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Washington, West Coast, whistleblowers, White House, white privilege, white saviors, wildfires, Won't somebody think of the children?, wormholes, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, Zoom
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK
— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020
This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2020 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, a man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life, ADA, after America, air travel, Airbnb, Amazon, America, Animal Crossing, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, billionaires, Black Mirror, Bong Joon-ho, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Captain Pike, captalism, carbon, CFPs, Charlie Brooker, child abuse, class struggle, Cleveleand, climate change, coal, comics, commuting, coronavirus, COVID-19, cruises, democracy, disability, disease, Disney, Donald Trump, DoorDash, eating meat, education, Elizabeth Warren, environmentalism racism, essential workers, evil, Extrapolation, family, floods, games, Gargoyles, general strike, Georgia, grief, Hemingway, Huntington's disease, ice sheet collapse, Iron Man, Jaimee Hills, Joe Biden, John Brown, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Mother Nature, Muppets, murder hornets, my misspent youth, Nancy Pelosi, NASA, neural nets, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, organ donation, pandemic, Pentagon, Plain Dealer, podcasts, poetry, police dogs, politics, pollution, private prisons, psychology, quarantine, race, racism, remote learning, Republicans, resilience, restaurants, rich people, Rube Goldberg, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, seagulls, Seattle, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, SimRefinery, six-word stories, soccer, Sopranos, Spanish flu, sports, Star Trek, STEM, Strange New Worlds, strikes, submarines, the Arctic, the Constitution, the economy, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, The Onion, therapy, Uber, unemployment, unions, USPS, vaccines, Wall Street, war on education, wealth, wildfires, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, X-Men, Zoom
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.
That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, America, apocalypse, art, Big Oil, Big Soda, Britney Spears, Chicago, children's books, China Miéville, class struggle, college, college sports, condoms, coronovirus, crisis, cruise ships, Dan Albergotti, democracy, Democrats, depression, divorce, DNC, domestic violence, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Elon Musk, Extrapolation, federalism, Felix Guattari, film, financial exigency, Frosthaven, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, hippos, homelessness, How the University Works, Joe Biden, journalism, kids today, language, Last Supper, loneliness, mad science, magnets, maps, Mario, medicine, Milwaukee, my scholarly empire, NCAA, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, originalism, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, Picard, plastic, poetry, police, politics, postdocs, prison-industrial complex, recession, remote learning, Republicans, revolution, Rick and Morty, Samuel R. Delany, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, strikes, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The World's End, TNG, toilet paper, unemployment, Utopia, voting, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, xkcd, YA literature, Zoom
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin
older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:
-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019
What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci
— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will
— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/gGpowtXKGP
— Ree 🍯🍭 (@TTPrettyInPink) December 13, 2019
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 16, 2019 at 2:26 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2019, abortion, academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American Gods, animal experimentation, anti-Semitism, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, BDS, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Boots Riley, Brexit, bullshit jobs, Burisma, CFPs, charity, charter schools, chimpanzees, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, comics, Confederate monuments, corporations, critical thinking, cyborgs, dark side of the digital, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, ectopic pregnancies, Elizabeth Warren, empire, Episode 9, extinction, fandom, fascism, fatphobia, Finland, futurity, gay rights, gender, Generation Z, glaciers, Goldman Sachs, Google, grad student nightmares, graduate student movements, graduate students, Greenland, Greta Thunberg, HBO, health insurance, high school football, How the University Works, HR, Hunter Biden, ice sheet collapse, Infinite Jest, Instagram, intergenerational struggle, interviews, Israel, J.J. Abrams, Jacobin, Jaimee, Japan, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Joker, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Labour, Lube Man, lunch debt, Mario Maker, McKinsey, medicine, Michael Hardt, military-industrial complex, millennials, monkeys, my media empire, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nietzsche, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, one-book classes, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paw Patrol. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, podcasts, poems, poetry, politics, privacy, Proxima Centauri, PTSD, public health, race, racism, Randolph, religion, rich people, Richard Jewell, San Francisco, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Science in the Capital, self-help, SFFTV, Silent Sam, socialism, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, Stephen Miller, superheroes, taxes, Terminator, the 2010s, the archives, the Arctic, the economy, the fantastic, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the oceans, the university in ruins, They Live!, TikTok, Ukraine, UNC, United Kingdom, Utopia, Vietnam, volcanoes, voter suppression, war on education, Watchmen, web comics, white supremacy, William Gibson, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984, YouTube
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.
* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.
* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!
* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.
* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.
* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.
* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.
* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
If what you’re saying is true, that would be really bad! So it must not be true. https://t.co/QoBpMh2TCq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 18, 2019
* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT
* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.
* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.
* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.
If we restored public funding to the university system, then they'd only be linked to large abstract war machines instead of individual billionaire perverts
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) August 21, 2019
* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.
Environmental activists warn that if the Amazon reaches a point of no return, the rainforest could become a dry savannah, no longer habitable for much of its wildlife. If this happens, it could start emitting carbon — the major driver of climate change. https://t.co/ZLX0PMcZls
— CNN (@CNN) August 21, 2019
When Notre Dame was burning, the world's media covered every moment of it and billionaires rushed to restore it. Right now the Amazon is burning, the lungs of our planet. It has been burning for 3 weeks now. No media. No billionaires. #PrayforAmazonas pic.twitter.com/RkBLS8SiE8
— charlotte 🖤 (@magicmadnesss) August 21, 2019
Jay Inslee drops out of presidential race to spend more time helplessly awaiting human extinction
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) August 22, 2019
* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.
* Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.
* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.
These Nigerian teenagers are producing short sci-fi movies using a smart phone and other everyday items. pic.twitter.com/9dXhPGuD9z
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 16, 2019
* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.
* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.
* How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.
Pia Klemp, the German ship captain who rescued migrants in the Mediterranean, as she refuses a medal from the mayor of Paris. pic.twitter.com/8vWXn28NaQ
— Jodi (@jodotcom) August 22, 2019
* Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.
Biden will spend eight months defending his kids from increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories and lose by three points https://t.co/Hcbn0gCET4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 21, 2019
literally the slogan for Joe Biden https://t.co/IyITvSHCSa
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2019
* Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.
hard to experience this period as anything other than a years-long psychotic break https://t.co/yZ9WS9BwHd
— the norms misser (@cd_hooks) August 22, 2019
* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?
* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.
Your reminder that Democrats won a majority of votes for state legislative races in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina in 2018 yet a broken political system awarded them a minority of seats. pic.twitter.com/NHhSWQrXSZ
— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) August 19, 2019
* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.
* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.
* In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
* NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…
* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.
* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”
* I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.
* Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.
* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.
* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.
* A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.
* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.
* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?
* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.
* In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.
* California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!
* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.
* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.
* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.
* One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.
* There is no Africa in African studies.
* The dialectic of enlightenment.
* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.
* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?
* The language of Mario Maker.
* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 take on Sony-Disney https://t.co/XJ6DRPthEJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2019
* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.
* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 22, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoBan, 1619, academia, academic jobs, accidents, actually existing media bias, Africa, African studies, Alaska, alcohol, algorithms, Amazon, America, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, animals, apocalypse, arson, Art Spiegelman, asylum, Baby Boomers, Bob Dylan, Bojack Horseman, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Brexit, California, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, childhood, climate change, climate denialism, climate rage, Columbia, cruelty, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, designer babies genetic engineering, disability, discrimination, Disney, Donald Trump, donor sperm, DoorDash, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, electric scooters, elves, Eric Garner, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fan fiction, fantasy, fascism, FBI, film, financial exigency, free speech, Gamergate, games, gerrymandering, glaciers, Golden Age, Greenland, guns, Heroes, Hippocratic oath, history, Hootie and the Blowfish, How the University Works, Hugo awards, I Can't Breathe, Ibram X. Kendi, ice, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, immigration, India, Islamophobia, Jay Inslee, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, Kashmir, Keanu Reeves, kids today, Legolas, liberalism, life expectancy, loneliness, Mario Maker, Marquette, mass shootings, Matrix 4, MCU, meritocracy, Mexico, modernism, Monopoly, monsters, Nazis, neoliberalism, New Gingrich, New York Times, Nigeria, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Oregon, ouch, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Northwest, parenting, photo ops, photographs, Pia Klemp, poetry, polls, Portland, postdocs, pregnancy, priesthood, Princeton, progressives, Proud Boys, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, reconciliationpunk, Republicans, riots, science fiction, science fiction studies, short stories, Siberia, slavery, Slytherin, socialism, Sony, Spider-Man, Starbucks, Stephen King, students, suicide, superheroes, tacos, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Confederacy, the dialectic of enlightenment, the elderly, the flu, the humanities, the Internet, The Matrix, the Moon, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the Wachowskis, tips, Tolkien, truth and reconciliation, undocumented workers, unions, University of Alaska, Viagra, wage theft, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, white nationalism, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
Fascinating Lore: Nintendo Revealed That The Reason Mario Always Comes Back To Life After He Dies Is Because Both Heaven And Hell Reject His Soul https://t.co/RR0KBQQnxK pic.twitter.com/6ItMP9lE8M
— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 20, 2019
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
feeling a bit like we shouldn't have built a mass media-news-entertainment complex with openly fascist aesthetics and then elected as president one of its creatures https://t.co/Mua9Qfkwqq
— Max Read (@max_read) July 1, 2019
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
You should read this whole New Yorker piece about the conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas, but if you can't read the whole thing, at least read this paragraph: https://t.co/xWwHYvIMjb pic.twitter.com/Iujo3Pi2av
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 22, 2019
Homestead is hot and barren, with a completely enclosed fence. I saw children being marched from one building to another in single file lines. No laughing, no playing. These are children who are prisoners. pic.twitter.com/7WB4G8sI5n
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 26, 2019
Just left the first CBP facility. The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined.
15 women in their 50s- 60s sleeping in a small concrete cell, no running water. Weeks without showers. All of them separated from their families.
This is a human rights crisis.
— Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (@RepDean) July 1, 2019
"only four showers were available for 756 immigrants, more than half of the immigrants were being held outside, and immigrants inside were being kept in cells maxed out at more than five times their capacity." https://t.co/r3cHT3Xb3f
— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) July 2, 2019
One thing I had never heard, was that in the early days of the Nazi concentration camps, years before the death camps and Final Solution, the Nazi government actually prosecuted guards for abusing and mistreating detainees. Hitler came in and pardoned them all to send a message.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 2, 2019
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
This Oregon story is a slow-burn “worst news in the country” right now, rivaling both the Iran strike and the camps. The GOP openly making common cause with paramilitary groups and the Dems completely backing down is a very bad sign for the 2020s and beyond.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2019
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
Primary debate pic.twitter.com/soyz8tiUft
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) July 1, 2019
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
This is about as clear an encapsulation of the effects of gerrymandering as you’ll find: pic.twitter.com/mrrTIfvNvK
— Aaron Wiener (@aaronwiener) July 1, 2019
by contrast, what if American politics is fundamentally defined by white supremacy, partisan politics are ultimately epiphenomenal to that, and it's the job of people like Yascha to mystify that arrangement into nearly moralizing pap https://t.co/HXLrHKtSYC
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 23, 2019
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
This is why I’ve said that if geoengineering doesn’t work, there’s a real sense in which science fiction as a genre destroyed the world. It gave people a vision of Promethean possibility that was only ever, in China Mieville’s memorable phrase, capitalism’s bullshit about itself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019
SF is also the only thing that can save us, so you can see how conflicted I am
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019
♫ ♪ always look on the bright side of life ♪ ♫ https://t.co/xb0Ex965R7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2019
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
lmao at everyone who thought the rich would save a fancy building over saving the homeless or whatever
they won't even save the building https://t.co/0F6oIhLXVD
— donoteat, 'the molson normie' (@donoteat1) June 15, 2019
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
This Uber article is brutal. "Uber's most important innovation has been to produce staggering levels of private wealth without creating any sustainable benefits for consumers, workers, the cities they serve, or anyone else" https://t.co/BVnh8MxSGe pic.twitter.com/RsYYGgWPGJ
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) June 6, 2019
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
i'm still convinced that the most underappreciated important story in tech over the last 15 years was the amount of actual human labor that was going into systems sold as "automated" https://t.co/nLx8nuks7H
— Max Read (@max_read) June 19, 2019
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
Her serial rapist is HER UNCLE. Started raping her when she was 12. After 4 pregnancies, 3 live births, 1 miscarriage, 1 child deceased from a disease common in cases of incest, & 2 living kids, Alabama is forcing her to allow her rapist visitation w/the kids. Unconscionable https://t.co/KjbBu3JiqV
— BlackFeministThoughtiana (@divafeminist) June 15, 2019
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
Seems like a minor concern! https://t.co/sicDlX1p5H pic.twitter.com/e2PtlsL7f9
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) July 2, 2019
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 2, 2019 at 4:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #CancelColbert, 2001, 2008, 2020 Democratic primary, 63 Up, 7 Up, abortion, academia, accreditation, adjunctification, administrative blight, Adrian Tchaikovsky, air travel, Airbnb, Alabama, Alanis Morissette, Alaska, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, babysitting, Bangladesh, Bernie Standards, Beto O' Rourke, blindness, bosses, braille, Brazil, Canada, cancer, capitalism, carbon, cartoons, CBP, CFPs, childbirth, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, civility, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college closures, comedy, comics, comics studies, commercial real estate, concentration camps, corpocracy, CSU, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, Dalai Lama, Dark Phoenix, deepfakes, democracy, demographics, deportation, depression, diabetes, disability, disruption, dogs, dolphins, Donald Trump, dystopia, eat fresh, ecology, education, elephants, Elizabeth Warren, evolution, Facebook, fascism, feminism, feminist science fiction, fire, football, Fourth of July, Foxconn, free speech, friendliness, fully automated luxury communism, futureshock, Gaia hypothesis, gambling, games, gay rights, genre, geoengineering, gerrymandering, grade inflation, graduate school, Greek life, Harvard, He-Man, historically black colleges, hope, How the University Works, ice, Iceman, immigration, insulin, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Ireland, Jameson, Joe Biden, Kennedy School, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, life expectancy, Malcolm Harris, marijuana, Mario, Marquette, Marvel, Masters of the Universe, Medea hypothesis, medicine, mental health, meritocracy, Mexico, MH370, military-industrial complex, militias, millennials, Milwaukee, mindfulness, money, music, musicals, Naomi Wolf, neoliberalism, Netflix, neuroscience, New York 2140, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, North Korea, Notre Dame, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oberlin, Octavia Butler, oh no, optimism, Oregon, parenting, Philadelphia, phones, plastic, police corruption, police violence, politics, pollution, pornography, pregnancy, propaganda, protest, PTSD, race, racism, rap, rape, rape culture, Ravelry, real estate, recycling, redlining, reparations, Republicans, resistance, rich people, Robert Kirkman, SATs, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science, science fiction, segregation, Silicon Valley, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, social media, sororities, standardized testing, student debt, studies, Subway, success, suicide, Super Mario, Super Mario Maker 2, surveillance society, Ta-Nehisi Coates, taxes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tetris, Texas, Thai food, the Beatles, The Dead Don't Die, the economy, The Matrix, the Moon, the rent is too damn high, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the void, The Walking Dead, The Wandering Earth, they say time is the fire in which we burn, this is fine, Tony awards, Toy Story, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, unions, Universal Music Group, University of Alaska, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vonnegut, war, war on drugs, war on education, war tax, whales, white supremacy, whiteness, Will Smith, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, Yesterday, zombies
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
This is a genuinely incredible video of a senator scolding frightened children who are begging her for a chance to live, like it’s their fault for disturbing her. https://t.co/JyEs9UPxTt
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2019
This entire generation of ostensibly liberal leaders has failed in every conceivable way by every conceivable metric, their entire careers, and their final act on the global stage is this endless petulant temper tantrum that anyone has dared to notice.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2019
I don’t want to hear any Democratic politician say anything to children but “I’m sorry, and I will never stop fighting to make up for what we’ve done.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 23, 2019
The year is 2020. Democrats have won control of the White House and Congress. A new President declares a National Emergency on climate change and guns. Their bold plan: an exciting new web site where businesses and private persons can decide which tax-deferred advantage plan they
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 14, 2019
Decline in global population, past decade.
Butterflies: 53%
Beetles: 49%
Bees: 46%
Dragonflies: 37%
Flies: 25%(Biological Conservation)
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) February 12, 2019
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
In the debrief for that one I realized: my colleagues think they’re being taught how to survive.
They don’t know this technique is intended to slow down our deaths, to give law enforcement more time to respond
— Dr. Lisa Gilbert (@gilbertlisak) February 14, 2019
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
R2-D2’s career is also a century long legacy of failure and catastrophe, culminating in catatonic depression, while C-3PO’s nihilism allows him to attach himself to the ruling class of any political order he encounters.
The analogy is flawless. https://t.co/27TCF5QXV0
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 14, 2019
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
— matthew miles goodrich (@mmilesgoodrich) February 23, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
February 25, 2019 at 12:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, Amazon, America, animal cognition, animals, apocalypse, Arizona, Atlantic City, Aunt May, Bandersnatch, Barack Obama, basketball, bathrooms, Black Mirror, Bush, capitalism, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conferences, dark side of the digital, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic National Convention, Democratic primaries 2020, Democrats, deportation, diet soda, disability studies, Disney, DNC, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, ecology, education, Einstein, EJ Levy, Elizabeth Warren, email, empire, esports, extrasolar planets, Facebook, fascism, finance, Fortnite, Frankenstein, game theory, games, Google, Grand Canyon, guilty pleasures, guns, Hamilton, Harvard, Harvard Square, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income inequality, infrastructure, KKK, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literary criticism, living wage, Lyft, Marquette, mass markets, mass shootings, mere genre, migrants, Milwaukee, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, narcissism, Native Americans, NCAA, neoliberalism, Nintendo Switch, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, politics, race, racial slurs, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, segregation, Sesame Street, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA19, Silent Sam, slavery, snow, speculation, Spider-Man, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, strikes, strong female characters, student debt, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Tetris, Tetris 99, the courts, the Internet, the Knicks, the law, The Wandering Earth, theory, this is fine, Title IX, trans* issues, Uber, UNC, Utopia, war on education, windfalls, words, Wright State, YouTube
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn’t mean “like now, but 2C warmer”.
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 28, 2018
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Spartacus (1960)
Plot holeIn the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 2018, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air travel, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, anarchy, ancient aliens, apocalypse, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, asteroids, astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, austerity, Bayeux Tapestry, Beach Boys, Bernie Sanders, Bigfoot, Bird, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, books, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Buffy, bullshit, California, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, cars, Case Western, cats, centrism, CFPs, Charles Stross, child abuse, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, communism, conspiracy theories, corruption, crisis, cyberpunk, David Foster Wallace, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, design, disability, Disney, diversity, doctors, Donald Trump, driving, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, EPA, Episode 9, ethics, Europe, evangelical Christianity, Facebook, fact-checking, fake news, Far Side, film, Flight of the Conchords, Flint, fossils, four-day work week, fracking, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, ghosts, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Greece, Groupon, Guantánamo, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, happiness, happy endings, Heaven, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, inflation, infrastructure, James Gunn, Japan, Jesuits, Joss Whedon, journamalism, justice, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kokomo, labor, leftism, libertarianism, Locke and Key, Lyft, machine learning, maps, mass transportation, McDonald's, Medicare, medicine, memes, Michigan, misogyny, Mizzou, Moby-Dick, moderation, Monopoly, moral panic, mortgage, motherhood, Mr. Rogers, MSNBC, music, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, New York, New York Daily News, New Zealand, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, oil companies, optical illusions, Orwell, our brains don't work, outer space, paleontology, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passports, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, philanthropy, philosophy, plastic, Plymouth State, politics, Portugal, postfeminism, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, QAnon, race, race culture, racism, rape, recycling, rich people, Roe v. Wade, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, Scandinavia, science fiction, scooters, security state, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, Shazam, Sheriff Clarke, Shuri, slave revolts, slaves, soccer, socialism, Sorry to Bother You, spiders, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, surveillance society, survivalism, Sweden, Swiss army knives, Talking Heads, teaching, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Devil, the discourse, the economy, The Hobbit, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, the stock market, Tolkien, Topher Grace, trans* issues, trillionaires, trolls, Tronc, Uber, USC, Utopia, Venezuela, victimization, voting, vulture capitalism, water, white supremacy, wildfires, wiretapping, women, work, Worldcon, writing
Closed Some Tabs Today Links
* The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.
* Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?
* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.
* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.
* Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!
* Foundation #130 has been published.
* An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.
* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.
* Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.
* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.
* A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.
* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.
* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.
* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.
* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?
* Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.
INCREDIBLE.
Saw this at the National Portrait Gallery—titled “Behind the myth of benevolence,” by artists Guillermo Nicolas & Jim Foster. I’ll share this with my students. pic.twitter.com/Fkz657qBYw— KatherynRussellBrown (@KRussellBrown) July 16, 2018
* As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.
* White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.
* Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
* Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.
* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.
* Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.
* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.
* Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.
* What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?
* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.
Trump is about to meet with Putin for 90 minutes with no other Americans and hasn’t even come up with a perfunctory reason why
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 16, 2018
Imagine it’s 2012 and someone described to you everything we would know in 2018. Would this sound like a hazy, unclear state of affairs? Or would it sound like we actually knew more than enough — indeed, a terrifying amount?
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 16, 2018
the ridiculous obsession with the pee tape is people not wanting to realize that trump just agrees with putin. this isn’t a mystery
— alex (@betterbecoffee) July 17, 2018
* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.
* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.
* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.
* As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
Whatever game-changing thing you think happened today, Republican voters won’t even hear about it, and wouldn’t care if they somehow did. Same as all the other times and all the other times to come.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 16, 2018
The real political question is whether Donald Trump will voluntarily exit the Presidency on January 20, 2025, or whether he will try to avoid this by amending or suspending the Constitution.
— Steven Shaviro (@shaviro) July 17, 2018
‘There Are Things That Exist Which Are Not Good,’ Says Obama In Stunning Rebuke Of Trump https://t.co/BTuJKbd0RO pic.twitter.com/6CuB2HcRX5
— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 17, 2018
Live from @JeffFlake's office. pic.twitter.com/Bxb1a4Oz3w
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) July 16, 2018
* Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.
* Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.
* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!
* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.
* E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.
* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.
* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.
* In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.
* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!
It’s a DISCO spoiler but there’s actually a great brick joke in Discovery that ties in nicely here with regard to the Elon Musk worship @pefrase is talking about. #SFRA18 https://t.co/0WAZLAztgE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2018
* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.
* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.
* Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.
* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…
* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?
* Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.
* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).
* Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.
* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
* Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.
abdifference
the weird planet
planetary bodies
ghosts
the broken places
life after aftermath☝️
These are some of the concepts I theorize and use in these chapters. Some directly from the novels, some cobbled together from other scholarship, and some just made up.— Ben Robertson (@BenRobertson) July 14, 2018
* Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.
* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.
* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”
* Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?
* Incompetence all the way down.
* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.
* In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.
* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.
* The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.
* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.
* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.
* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.
* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.
* We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.
* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.
* Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.
Ask your next Uber/hail service driver what their life is like.
Many are teachers, or work retail, or have another job.
Unemployment isn’t the major problem for those folks.
It’s that, on one wage at 40 hours a week, they aren’t paid enough to live.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) July 17, 2018
* Raising a child in a doomed world.
* The second civil war just got interesting.
* In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.
| ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄|
There is plenty of
hope, infinite hope,
but not for us.
|__________|
(__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ#SignBunny— Jan Mieszkowski (@janmpdx) July 14, 2018
* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.
* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.
* And a plastic straw update: A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!
Written by gerrycanavan
July 18, 2018 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #J20, #MeToo, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing journalism, Afrofuturism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, America, antitrust, apocalypse, autism, Bangladesh, Barack Obama, Beatles, Black Panther, Blockbuster Video, border patrol, Brett Kavanaugh, Buffy, California, canonization, charter schools, child labor, citizenship, Civil War, Claremont Graduate University, class struggle, climate change, comics, cults, CVs, DC Comics, delicious Coca-Cola, democracy, Democrats, Department of Energy, deportations, Detroit, diabetes, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, Elon Musk, English departments, English majors, European Union, Facebook, fascism, film, films, Finland, Fortnite, Foundation, Founding Fathers, games, gig economy, girls, Google, guns, Haiti, health insurance, Helsinki, hope, I grow old, ice, immigration, incivility, India, Iowa, Isaac Asimov, Jared Kushner, Jeff Flake, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Lieberman, Joss Whedon, juking the stats, Kafka, Labour Party, Las Vegas, lies and lying liars, life, literacy, longevity, Looney Tunes, Lord of the Rings, many worlds and alternate universes, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, Marvin the Martian, Marxism, mass incarceration, mass shooting, math, medicine, memory, MGM, Milwaukee, misogyny, MLA, monopolies, morally odious monsters, morally odious morons, mortality, MS-13, N.K. Jemisin, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, novels, NRA, orcas, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, Peter Frase, Peter Watts, philosophy, plastic, plastic straws, podcasts, police corruption, police violence, politics, portnormality, prison-industrial complex, profiteering, Putin, rape, rape culture, recycling, Republicans, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, Sacha Baron Cohen, saints, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, science fiction studies, screenplays, Screw It We're Just Gonna Talk About the Beatles, sex, sexism, sexual assault, SFRA, SFRA Review, slave resistance, social media, socialism, Stanley Kubrick, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Starbucks, stop-and-frisk, stress, student debt, superbugs, Supreme Court, surveillance society, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the Army, the Constitution, the courts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, The Handmaid's Tale, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Ninefox Gambit, The Robots of Dawn, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, Tolkien, Treasure Planet, trolls, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, universal basic income, USSR, vaccination, Venmo, Vietnam, voting, war, war on education, war on poverty, whales, wildfires, Yoon Ha Lee
Tuesday Links!
* Eric Schneiderman will probably have resigned by the time this post goes up. (UPDATE: He did!)
* She likened the National Collegiate Athletic Association to overseers of a system similar to slavery or prison. Those are the only other models in which laborers aren’t compensated for their work, Carter said. The NCAA and its member institutions buy the talents of athletes but don’t let them share in the money, she said.
* Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?
* Climate-Change Deniers Are a Cult.
* A battle is brewing between Milwaukee and paint industry over lead poisoning of Milwaukee children.
* Privacy Is Dead. Here’s What Comes Next.
* A death. A cover-up. An immigrant meets a terrible end in the Bronx.
Insisting on the right to convert every US political leader into a heroic & noble saint upon death, while condemning critics as gauche & classless, is propaganda. It's easy to dismiss all the deaths McCain has caused because they're distant and invisible, but they still matter.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 7, 2018
* ‘Hamilton: The Exhibition’ by Lin-Manuel Miranda and his team will debut in Chicago in November.
* This recut of Groundhog Day from Andie MacDowell’s perspective is weird as hell.
* Mimi Mondal, India’s first Hugo nominee.
* Snikt.
* Nintendo Switch launches the cloud service it should have had all along, but shut up and take my money anyway.
* You might say I’m the reverse.
* And gas up the #problematic hashtag: Arrested Development returns at the end of the month.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 8, 2018 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, America, Arrested Development, bank error in your favor, border patrol, Chicago, child labor, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, denialism, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, Eric Schneiderin, first as tragedy then as farce, Fox, games, Groundhog Day, Hamilton, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ice, immigration, India, John McCain, lead paint, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Marvel, Marx, Milwaukee, misogyny, NCAA, New York, Nintendo Switch, obituary, pedagogy, politics, privacy, propaganda, sexism, Star Wars, surveillance society, teaching, X-Men
Monday Morning Links!
* Mary Karr Reminds the World That David Foster Wallace Abused and Stalked Her, and Nobody Cared.
* They Revealed Harassment Claims Against a Professor, and Were Disciplined.
* The Real Free-Speech Crisis Is Professors Being Disciplined for Liberal Views, a Scholar Finds.
* Millennials Are Way Poorer Than Boomers Ever Were.
* America’s teachers on strike: ‘We are done being the frog that is being boiled.’
* The think piece doesn’t so much diminish art as render it wholly incidental. The mere existence of a work—and the contemporary proliferation of work after work after work—is enough to justify the think piece. The fundamental problem with so much contemporary criticism is that the prospective critic is structurally encouraged to not care, to treat the value of one-or-another book/TV episode/movie as wholly irrelevant to the task of writing about it. Sontag wrote that desperate, interpretive searches for meaning constitute “the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius.” (One thinks of Henry James’s yearning lit-crit protagonist.) The think piece effectively inverts this formulation. Now it is more common to see genius (or perhaps “genius,” the work of people who, to nip a phrase from the controversial and cuttingly mean critic Armond White, “think they think”) pay compliments to mediocrity. The clarity of critical judgment alights on every rotten movie, grating pop singer, or paperback book written for awkward adolescents alive in the throes of their protean horniness, and dissolves, ultimately, into a sprawling field of meaninglessness. It’s not that, following Sontag, erotics has replaced bloodless hermeneutics. It’s that we’re now subject to soft, dopey forms of both. Enormously erudite and intelligent expositions about extremely stupid things have degraded both the standard for writing about serious things and the seriousness of those serious things themselves.
* Yeah, you better run: China bans Peppa Pig because she ‘promotes gangster attitudes.’
* University apologizes to Native American students detained on college tour.
People acting like the college admissions tour is an information process when it is a sales process. There are many reasons why a woman would feel empowered to interrogate two Native boys, to summon the police and to police the tour: she implied she had a valuable exit threat
— Tressie Mc (@tressiemcphd) May 5, 2018
* The man who cracked the lottery.
* Misreading the manufacturing statistics.
pundits love McCain b/c what he actually embodies is a principle they themselves live by: that if you can deliver a compelling story, and strike the right postures of seriousness and tradition, it doesn't matter what monstrosities you help make possible https://t.co/vRUeZN8PXn
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 6, 2018
* A team of scientists undertakes an ambitious experiment which could change thinking about welfare.
* “In America, you can be too poor to die.”
* And if you follow me on Facebook, you know that I’ve been raving all weekend about Nintendo Labo. Believe the hype! It’s truly great. Like Calvin’s magic cardboard boxes came to life. It’d buy three more kits if they were available, and might eventually buy a second robot one so my kids can play the Vs mode….
It's way too on-the-nose that there's a young woman named Reality locked in a cell incommunicado for trying to tell us about the current state of things and people keep forgetting about it.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) May 5, 2018
Had you asked me, 25 years ago, how Marx's 200th birthday would be greeted, I'd have said badly or not at all. If you're on the left and don't think the ideological climate has changed dramatically in our favor, you either weren't around back then or you've forgotten everything.
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) May 5, 2018
It’s been a while, has even a single person read and finished Comey’s book who wasn’t paid to do so
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 5, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
May 7, 2018 at 8:07 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, abuse, academia, academic freedom, America, automation, Black Panther, bullshit jobs, Calvin and Hobbes, centrism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, China, class struggle, criticism, David Foster Wallace, death, Dungeons and Dragons, games, gangster attitudes, Herland, How the University Works, Infinite Jest, intergenerational warfare, James Comey, John McCain, Junot Díaz, Killmonger, Killmonger's mom, lottery, manufacturing, Marx, Marxism, militarism, millennials, misogyny, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, outsourcing, Peppa Pig, politics, poverty, race, racism, Reality Winner, Satanism, sexism, stalking, statistics, strikes, Susan Sontag, teaching, the Moon, thinkpieces, Title IX, unions, Utopia, welfare, whiteness, writing
All Your Friday Links!
* The itself.blog Star Trek: Discovery event is underway! Star Trek: Discovery Is Optimism, But Not for Us. “Can you bury your heart”? Having feelings about Discovery. Star Trek: Discovery as the End of Next Generation Triumphalism.
* CFP: Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction (MLA 19).
* Jaimee Hills is officially a dangerous woman.
* The university in ruins: UW Stevens Point. The administration clearly doesn’t even understand what it’s proposing:
When releasing the plan, university officials said that English majors for teacher certification would continue. But Williams said that under the state Department of Public Instruction’s certification criteria, a person looking to become an English teacher has to have been an English major.
“They just both have to exist, or both have to be eliminated,” Williams said. “One depends directly on the other.”
The most salient fact of academia today is that low-cost humanities classes subsidize every other aspect of university operations. You will never hear a single administrator acknowledge this basic fact and indeed they insist that the money flows the other way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2018
* Professors earn about 15 percent less than others with advanced degrees, finds a study circulated Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Though perhaps some of us make it up in job satisfaction (really).
* Why Creative-Writing Programs Have Been Havens for Harassment.
* It has taken me two and a half decades to recognize that my experience of having a senior male nominal adviser and a female (usually more junior) actual adviser is common throughout academe. On Ghost Advising.
* Abusers and enablers in faculty culture.
* 5% raises in West Virginia. Onward to Oklahoma.
Today's front page is one worth saving pic.twitter.com/ig9SNqbpuZ
— Jake Zuckerman (@jake_zuckerman) March 7, 2018
* Snowflake students claim Frankenstein’s monster was ‘misunderstood’ — and is in fact a VICTIM.
* On the Blackness of the Panther.
* Loved this from Barbara Ehrenreich: Body Work: The curiously self-punishing rites of fitness culture.
If anything, the culture of fitness has grown more combative than when I first got involved. It is no longer enough to “have a good workout,” as the receptionist at the gym advises every day; you should “crush your workout.” Health and strength are tedious goals compared to my gym’s new theme of “explosive strength,” achieved, as far I can see, through repeated whole-body swinging of a kettleball. If your gym isn’t sufficiently challenging, you might want to try an “ultra-extreme warrior workout” or buy a “home fitness system” from P90X, which in 2016 tweeted a poster of an ultra-cut male upper body, head bowed as if in prayer, with the caption “A moment of silence please for my body has no idea of what I’m about to put it through.” Or you could join CrossFit, the fastest-growing type of gym in the world, and also allegedly the most physically punishing. The program “prepares trainees for any physical contingency,” the company boasts, “not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable, too. Our specialty is not specializing,” and the latter category includes the zombie apocalypse. The mind’s stuggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
* In this economy you’re either burned out, or you’re boxed out.
* The Secret NYPD Files: Officers Can Lie And Brutally Beat People — And Still Keep Their Jobs.
* A prosecutor who obtained a wrongful conviction that sent a Houston man to death row for nearly 10 years didn’t just withhold evidence but also denied under oath that he had information that supported Alfred Dewayne Brown’s alibi, court records show.
* Could Trump get a White House job if he weren’t president? Didn’t we already know Trump couldn’t get a loan before he was president?
For that reason win or lose I think the fights on the liberal-left will be a lot nastier after 2020 than they’ve been before. A huge part of the Democratic base is still living in denial about what this country has become.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2018
Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,— jesse farrar (@BronzeHammer) October 2, 2016
* Gratuitous cruelty by Homeland Security. Lying to the immigrant soldiers you promised citizenship.
* A Dozen Democrats Want To Help Banks Hide Racial Discrimination In Mortgages.
* Guess Who’s Not Coming To America? International Students.
— If you still feel pretty messed up about how they were just going to burn the Velveteen Rabbit, please mash all of the keys but mostly 2.
* White flight remains a reality.
[future history class]
Teacher: How did World War 3 start? Anyone? Yes, Khaleesi.
Girl: It started bec-
Teacher: No, I meant Khaleesi M. She had her hand up first.
Girl 2: It started because president Trump was hangry.
Teacher: Correct. [holsters gun]
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) March 3, 2018
* ‘50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.’
* The grim reality of job hunting in the age of AI.
* Wait, what exactly was Luke Skywalker’s plan in Return Of The Jedi?
* The opioid crisis has become an “epidemic of epidemics.” Meanwhile, a new study suggests opioids are no better than Tylenol for treating some kinds of pain.
* Kentucky’s ‘child bride’ bill stalls as groups fight to let 13-year-olds wed.
* False news stories travel faster and farther on Twitter than the truth.
* There’s no idea so terrible there isn’t someone in favor of it.
* York University philosophy professor and team submit brief supporting chimpanzee personhood.
* Ok, but you’re on a very short leash.
* Her name was Kanga and she was trouble.
I thought of how it all used to be, back when C.R. was young, when we still all believed things would get better. When we still had hope. In a way, hope is as powerful a drug as honey.
— Lavie Tidhar (@lavietidhar) March 7, 2018
* I Am the Very Important Longread Everyone Is Talking About.
* The United States of Middle-earth.
* And the arc of history is long, but.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 9, 2018 at 11:39 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, activism, actually existing media bias, advising, Amazon, America, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Barbara Ehrenreich, Black Panther, capitalism, Captain America, chimps, class struggle, consent, creative writing, cult film, dangerous women, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, English departments, fake news, Fight Club, film, fitness, Frankenstein, fraud, games, graduate student life, guns, harassment, homeland security, How the University Works, humanzees, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, international students, Jaimee Hills, job satisfaction, Kentucky, kids, liberals, Lili Loofbourow, longreads, Lord of the Rings, magic realism, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, McSweeney's, Middle-Earth, Milwaukee, MLA, mortgages, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Oklahoma, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pain, parenting, perjury, poetry, police brutality, police corruption, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Return of the Jedi, school shootings, science fiction, segregation, sex, sexual harassment, Sopranos, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, steel, strikes, Super Smash Brothers, taxes, teachers, Teju Cole, tenure, the gym, the humanities, the male glance, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Twitter, unions, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, West Virginia, white flight, Winnie the Pooh, Yale
Happy Valentine’s Day Links!
* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.
* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.
* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”
* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?
* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.
* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.
KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’
The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.
* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.
Star Wars in the 1980s: laser swords and magic powers and what a cool ship
Star Wars in the 2010s: loving your kids will not protect them from the world or from themselves, and their talents will destroy their lives in the same way your talents destroyed yours, if not worse
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2018
* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.
* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.
* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.
* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’
* The Olympic hero for our time.
* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.
deporting a veteran who started using drugs to cope with untreated PTSD after being induced to serve in a war we shouldn’t be fighting by a promise of citizenship the country didn’t deliver on, to serve the racist whims of a universally loathed fascist the country didn’t vote for
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 2, 2018
* Know your police rape loopholes.
* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.
* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.
science fiction novel where an incredibly advanced society invents extreme life prolongation, which results in a now-immortal class of ultrawealthy perverts voting in fascists who appeal to their dim memories of the way the world worked when they were children
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 9, 2018
* In the richest country in human history.
* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.
* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?
* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!
* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.
* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.
* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.
* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.
* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.
* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.
Reading an unpublished @GerryCanavan paper on the contradictions of Black Panther: pic.twitter.com/HKjUmGAyVl
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) February 7, 2018
* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.
* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.
* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?
My favorite weird found-poetry I’ve discovered on this trip: in Switzerland and Germany first-person shooters are called “ego shooters.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2018
* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.
* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.
* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.
* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.
* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.
* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.
* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.
* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.
* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.
* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.
* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.
* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.
* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.
* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 13, 2018 at 10:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #quitlit, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Aetna, Afghanistan, Africa, afterlife, aliens, alt-right, Altered Carbon, Amazon, Amierca, animals, Annihilation, Antonio Gramsci, apocalypse, Arizona, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Billy Mitchell, birds, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, border patrol, breakfast, Bruce Springsteen, capitalism, cartoons, Case Western, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civilization, Civilization 6, Civilization V, class struggle, climate change, Cloverfield, Columbia University, concussions, conspiracy theory, crayfish, debt, democracy, Democrats, deportation, diabetes, digital economy, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, Donkey Kong, Dumbledore, dystopia, English departments, English majors, Episode 8, Europe, expanded universes, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, fascism, FEMA, feudalism, Firefly, first-person shooters, football, games, gay rights, gerrymandering, gig economy, graduate student unions, Groundhog Day, Han Solo, Harry Potter, health insurance, Heaven, Hell, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ice, immigration, Instagram, insulin, Jameson, Journal of Dracula Studies, Kentucky, Kim Stanley Robinson, Klingons, Laurence Tribe, lesbians, loneliness, Marxism, McCarthyism, MLA, Monopoly, music, my brans, my scholarly empire, Nazis, Netflix, nihilism, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oklahoma, Olympics, orcas, organized sarcasm, paranoia, pardons, Pennsylvania, pets, philosophy, photography, podcasts, police state, police violence, politics, polls, pollution, Puerto Rico, quit lit, rape, rape culture, reproductive futurity, Rick and Morty, robots, Rod Serling, Russia, science fiction, Serenity, SFRA, SFRA Review, slavery, South Africa, sports, Stanford, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, taxi waste, the Anthropocene, The Culture, The Good Place, the humanities, The King of Kong, The Last Jedi, the Olympics, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Twilight Zone, TNG, Trump, tweeting, Uber, voting, Wakanda, water, wealth, whales, white supremacists, Whole Foods, Winter Olympics, Worf, Žižek
Sunday Links!
* Nintendo Labo looks amazing. I’ve already preordered both kits…
* From the AAUP: A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics.
* Among the first-time nominees for the 1967 prize, writes M.A. Orthofer for Literary Saloon, are “future winners Saul Bellow and Claude Simon, as well as Jorge Amado, Jean Genet, György Lukács — and the (as best I can tell) last surviving nominee, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” Other names on the list include “Auden, Beckett, Ionesco, Kawabata, Mishima, Montale, Moravia, Neruda, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Simenon, and J.R.R.Tolkien.” Also on the list, writes Alison Flood for The Guardian, is “Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year,” 1968.
* The drought-stricken city announced on Thursday that it will begin marking 200 collection points where its 3.7 million residents will be required to queue for a rationed supply of water on “Day Zero” – currently forecast to be April 21. If it happens, Cape Town would become the first major city in the world to shut down entirely the supply of running water in all of its homes.
* Kylo Ren destroying the Millennium Falcon in the trailer is a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
* Break your phone addiction by turning your screen to grayscale.
* The sexual assault backlash is coming. Here’s how to respond.
* 14 on MSU staff got Nassar warnings over 2 decades.
* Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?
* Charter schools can never fail, they can only be failed.
* Too late, Delta tries to put the “comfort animal” genie back in the bottle.
* US border patrol routinely sabotages water left for migrants, report says. Deputy shoots, kills 16-year-old boy during scuffle at courthouse. This Is What a White Supremacist Department of Justice Looks Like.
* Within Reach: The transgender community fights for health care.
* New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy.
* Porn and the bomb, by the numbers.
* It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
* How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s.
* De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness at LARB.
* 9 Times People Were Actually Murdered By Their Clothes.
* What radicalized you? Calvin and Hobbes.
* And a happy, happy birthday to the Dax symbiont, born in 2018.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 21, 2018 at 10:47 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic freedom, addiction, animals, artificial intelligence, backlash, Black Mirror, books, Calvin and Hobbes, Cape Town, cellphones, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, comfort animals, Dax, Day Zero, Deep Space 9, Delta, Donald Trump, drought, Episode 9, fantasy, freedom, games, gymnastics, Hang the DJ, harassment, Hawaii, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Jeff Sessions, labor, Larry Nassar, literature, love, medicine, mortality, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nobel Prize, police violence, politics, pornography, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Sierra Police Quest, Star Trek, Star Wars, transgender issues, Trill symbionts, true crime, war on education, white supremacy, work