Posts Tagged ‘North Carolina’
Sunday Reading!
* CFP: Folk Horror. CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2022.
* Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.
* The Future Is Black, Not Bleak: On Afrofuturist Poetry.
* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.
* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members arenât leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away.
* Hustling to get by: side jobs in grad school. Great Books, Graduate Students, and the Value of Fun in Higher Education.
* Microsyllabus: The History of Campus Policing.
* They fought critical race theory. Now theyâre focusing on âcurriculum transparency.â
* Two years since Covid was first confirmed in U.S., the pandemic is worse than anyone imagined. Americaâs second pandemic winter: More virus, less death. Parents and caregivers of young children say they’ve hit pandemic rock bottom. Students are protesting covid policies â and the adults who wonât listen to them. America’s youth turn left.
* Families are in distress after the first month without the expanded child tax credit.
* âIf I Die, I Dieâ: Meat Loaf Spurned COVID Rules Before Death. Inside Meat Loaf’s Health Troubles, Including Vocal Strain, Alcoholism and Onstage Collapses. Meat Loaf Was My Softball Coach.
* Americaâs shift to the right in 2021 is worse news for Democrats than it seems. The long slide: Inside Bidenâs declining popularity as he struggles with multiple crises. âThe Lowest Point in My Lifetimeâ: How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America. Joe Biden Promised Change. He Hasnât Delivered.
* What Does It Mean If Republicans Wonât Debate?
* Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines. Georgia Has a Very Strong Case Against Trump. Would Trump Throw His Own Kids Under the Bus to Save Himself? We May Soon Find Out.
* Florida Advances Bill That Would Ban Making White People Feel Bad about Racism, and No, That’s Not a Joke.
* Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has âProbably Startedâ. How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts. Donât Look Up Is Missing What We Really Need From Climate Change Movies.
* Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tongaâs Volcano. Tonga volcano: islands covered in ash as three deaths confirmed.
* âWhen my last movie UHF came out in 1989, I made a solemn vow to my fans that I would release a major motion picture every 33 years, like clockwork. Iâm very happy to say weâre on schedule,â said Yankovic in a statement. âAnd I am absolutely thrilled that Daniel Radcliffe will be portraying me in the film. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for.â
* The Moon Knight moment.
* The Star Trek century.
* Do you know what’s cooler than One Ring?
* Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Looks Absolutely Incredible, But… Crunch and TT Games.
* Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
* Smedley Butler Helped Build American Empire. Then He Turned Against It.
* The Fall of NC Mutual.
* Mother sues Meta and Snap over daughter’s suicide.
* Where’s the snow? Milwaukee is nearly 15 inches below its average this season.
* At-will employment in Wisconsin apparently means that you can be fired at any time for any reason but you need your boss’s permission to take a new job.
* Acting Mayor Johnson announces public safety plan to tackle gun violence, car thefts and reckless driving in Milwaukee.
* Discrimination has cost Black home owners of billions of dollars of generational wealth. What can change that?
* Huge, if true: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme.
* Shakespeare Noir. The Tragedy of Macbeth Is a Cinematic Feast for Starving Film Lovers.
* 6 Dysfunctional Family Roles and Their Characteristics.
* New Bad Art Friend / West End Caleb mashup just dropped.
* Alcohol consumption can directly cause cancer, new genetic study finds.
* The Medieval Vegetarian.
* The Battle over Howard the Duck.
* This is your only friend in the world right now. It’s gonna be a long night.
* tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life
* They stan.
* We stan.
* What are the most compelling and readable “plotless” novels you’ve ever read? My answer.
* And it’s hard to imagine it wouldnât be better with the pizza in hand.
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in âThe Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butlerâs Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
*Â El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
*Â Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College footballâs leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain WhyâNot Just Howâto Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be âhighest riskâ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
*Â The Closure.
*Â What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Canât Have Both. This Isnât Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. âOne Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.â âI Canât Keep Doing This:â Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trumpâs incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isnât anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nationâs Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didnât Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. Californiaâs slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
*Â Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
*Â Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to âNormal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
*Â The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
*Â Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeerâs âDead Astronautsâ and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: âHamilton: the Musical:â Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders⊠and Itâs Not Halloween.
*Â Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started âinnocently enoughâ and just âgot out of hand.”
*Â Illiberalism Isnât to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. âThe Flag is Coming Downâ: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schoolsâ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
*Â How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
*Â According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have ânational interestsâ they carry out in the international arena. But ânational interestsâ is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countriesâ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientistsâ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
*Â How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This âEquityâ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When Youâre Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* âYou Could Literally See Our Shit From Spaceâ: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trekâs Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the âzone of avoidance.â My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
*Â A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ainât the answer â it censors Black professors like me.
*Â Big Scrabbleâs decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
*Â Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
*Â The Life-Threatening âRideâ That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
*Â Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal âHamiltonâ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
*Â Halloween and Stranger Danger.
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevinâs speech declining to concede to Beshear was âappropriate.â He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad:Â Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of âUntold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: Californiaâs Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is BurningâNationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it canât recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall:Â Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
*Â How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
*Â We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
*Â âItâs Time To Break Up Disney,â Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Arenât Cinema. Let Me Explain.
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kidsâ brains.
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
*Â The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
*Â Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak:Â As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentineâs Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
*Â McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
*Â If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, Theyâd Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
*Â Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Jul 24, 2019; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; A cat disrupts play in the second half between Tigres UANL and the Real Salt Lake during their Leagues Cup game at Rio Tinto Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – 13095176
Wednesday Night Links!
* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwoodâs âThe Testamentsâ a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!
* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.
*Â The coming death of just about every rock legend.
* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.
* The job so nice they posted it twice:Â Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.
* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.
* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: âThe poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.â But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.
* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.
* âThe grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to societyâs most powerful peopleâas a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.â
* Liberalism can’t defend itself.
* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.
* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.
* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.
* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.
* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.
* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.
* Another free speech exception.
âWeâre not a school; weâre a real estate hedge fund,â said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Libertyâs finances. âWeâre not educating; weâre buying real estate every year and taking studentsâ money to do it.â
Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.
* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.
* âUVA has ruined usâ: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”
*Â Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.
*Â Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.
* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.
* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.
* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.
* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.
*Â UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.
* Climate change is here. Climate change isnât an intangible future risk. Itâs here now, and itâs killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isnât Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.
*Â Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.
* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!
* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia:Â Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.
*Â Agribusiness against the Amazon.
* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.
* Today in the wisdom of markets.
* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.
*Â When the State Enforces âStraight Pride.”
* And speaking of white fragility.
*Â Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.
*Â TWO MONTHS BEFOREÂ my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companionâs arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.
* The rise of anti-trans âradicalâ feminists, explained.
*Â Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.
*Â In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.
* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.
* Donât Be Fooled â Kamala Harrisâs âCriminal Justiceâ Plan Is Not Progressive.
* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Bidenâs Candidacy.
* Joe Biden canât stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionairesâ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.
* Imagine if we had a democracy.
* Trump’s already cancelling elections.
* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.
* The case for changing the voting age to zero.
*Â The Fall of the Meritocracy.
*Â Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.
* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.
* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is
* extremely normal very normal
* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.
*Â Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.
* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.
* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.
*Â How We Shut Down the Nationâs Largest Child Detention Center.
* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!
* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldnât exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.
* The struggle to save Day-Glo.
* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?
* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.
* A history of Tetris randomizers.
* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.
* 44 African Architectural Styles.
* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.
* A people’s history of labor history.
* They solved the Geedis mystery.
*Â The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truogâs Animal Man From 1988 â âDominion.”
* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.
*Â Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.
*Â Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.
* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.
*Â We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.
* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on âpermissionâ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
*Â No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesnât mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. Thatâs where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author canât manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
*Â How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news:Â Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trumpâs golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
*Â The protesters engaged in a ârolling picketâ on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-oldâa crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isnât old enough to consentâcould also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. âIt is so broad,â he says of the legislation, âthat anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or thereâs the potential for that to occur.â He described the law as âblatantly unconstitutional.â
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
*Â South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
*Â Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news:Â North Carolina Court Says The Stateâs Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
*Â Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of todayâs self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
*Â She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
*Â In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerryâs new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
*Â This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
* And there’s no idea so bad you can’t make it worse.
Saturday Morning Links!
So intelligent species burn out too quickly to make intergalactic headwayâI have to ask, do you think thatâs what will happen to us?
I donât know. We used to think that the biggest threat we faced as a species was nuclear war. Now it looks like itâs global warming. If we survive that, itâd be tempting to think that itâll smooth sailing afterwards, but any consideration of this question is primarily a reminder of how much we donât know.
* A math equation that predicts the end of humanity.
* The struggling US media industry is facing its worst year for job layoffs in a decade as news organizations continue to cut staff and close shop, according to a new survey. And this is before the coming recession hits.
* University Of Alaska Readies For Budget Slash: ‘We May Likely Never Recover.’ Alaska Isn’t a Bellwether. It’s a Swan Song.
* Remembering the strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead.
* Defeated in the courts, Trump may issue an executive order to try to rig the Census. There are no laws in America, only power.
* The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator â though he had plenty â but an inevitable byproduct of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chanâs founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become. He was just a kid.
* These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 Border Security Expoâessentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expoâs marketing materials, to âidentify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.â
* Former ICE Chief Counsel Gets 4 Years In Prison For Stealing Immigrants’ Identities.
* Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border.
* DHS watchdog details dangerous conditions for migrants at border centers. What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse. The Treatment of Migrants Likely âMeets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity.’ âThe Whole Facilityâs Culture Is Rotted From the Coreâ: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saw Inside the El Paso Camps. The department is seeking 20-year leases for most of the sites, signaling they don’t expect challenges to fade.
* Trump administration ending in-person interpreters at immigrantsâ first hearings.
* The Exceptional Cruelty of a No-Hugging Policy.
* Drawings by migrant children in detention show them in cages.
* ICE Threatens Immigrant in Sanctuary in Chapel Hill With $314,000 Fine.
* “Seth Donnelly was one of the many inmates Texas prison officials use as prey for dog hunts. He died from heatstroke after collapsing on the job in Abilene.” I’m gonna need you to start from the top.
* Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museumâs Rejection of Historical Analogy.
* Happy 4th! Here are some readings on concentration camps.
* What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
* Europe’s Bold Plan for a Moon Base Is Coming Together. How will we deal with squatters on the Moon?
* World’s most full of shit people nearly terminally full of shit.
* Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazilâs rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sunâs radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.
* If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* “Plan to ban seagulls from the sea suspended.”
* Deep-sea mining to turn oceans into ânew industrial frontierâ.
* Heatstroke warnings in Anchorage.
* How Washingtonâs Elite Learned to Love Policy Wonks.
* When your email spies on you.
* The arc of history is long, but.
This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like âveggie burgerâ or âvegan hot dogâ on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like âburgerâ and âhot dogâ would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers â but given that the phrase âveggie burgerâ hasnât been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.
* Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.
* Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option.
* Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isnât a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddlerâs building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, âWeâre in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.â Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.
* The Impact of a World Without The Walking Dead.
* The Harry Potter franchise is going to take another crack at a prequel.
* What’s missing in Spider-Man: Far from Home.
* Another take: Far from Home as metafiction.
* And nothing gold can stay: The end of MAD.
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Call for Papers: Series Books and Science Fiction (National PCA Conference). CFP: Contemporary American Fiction in the Age of Innovation. CFP: Indigenous lands, waters, and ways of knowing.
*Â The Labor Movementâs Newest Warriors: Grad Students.
*Â Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming.
* Appeals court consider whether youth can sue the government over climate change. A Levee Fails and an Illinois Town Is Thrown Back in Time. White House blocked intelligence agencyâs written testimony saying human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it. The Democrats are climate deniers too. And some more good news: Industrial methane emissions are underreported, study finds. 130°F heat index in South Texas, 13 days from the start of summer.
* Border Patrol is confiscating migrant kids’ medicine, U.S. doctors say. Reports reveal âegregiousâ conditions in US migrant detention facilities. US opens new mass facility in Texas for migrant children. Third undocumented migrant in 3 days dies after being apprehended at US-Mexico border. ICE is struggling to contain spread of mumps in its detention centers. âHe gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay…He did a bad thing.â
* In 2014, China released sweeping plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Local trials covering about 6% of the population are already rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, with Beijing due to begin its program by 2021. There are also other ways the state keeps tabs on citizens that may become part of an integrated system. Since 2015, for instance, a network that collates local- and central- government information has been used to blacklist millions of people to prevent them from booking flights and high-speed train trips.
* YouTube is a radicalization engine for fascists.
* Prez in 2019: Are These Teenagers Really Running a Presidential Campaign?
* The heroes are split on opposing sides, and among the key matchups was a Wolverine vs. Mr. Fantastic battle that ended with Reed Richards pinning Wolverine down, extending his hands until theyâre one molecule wide, and using them as scissors to cut the mutantâs arms off. You know, for kids.
* When it comes to westerns, the difference matters. Especially in the streaming era, the words “television” and “movie” have gotten disconnected from their origins; no one watched the Deadwood “movie” in movie theaters (and the old “television” show lives in the same HBO app, on the same computer, as I watched the movie). But television Westerns are all about the gap between one event and the next â and the random vagaries of life that get lived in the interval â while it’s film Westerns that tell the Big Stories about History, epics about Beginnings and Endings and Grand Historical Transitions (with plenty of capital letters), with ordinary people getting swept by the tides of modernity and progress.
* John Wick as modern fairy tale. John Wick 3 Delivers the Justice We All Crave. I’m so out of touch I haven’t seen one of these.
* John Rieder reviews Nisi Shawl’s New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color.
*Â A more honest show, I think, would acknowledge that there isnât that much of a difference between Serena and Commander Lawrence. Â Theyâre both smart people who created a hell on Earth to justify their own twisted notions of superiority, and they both realize that fact, on some level, and are tortured by it (though not nearly as much as their victims are and have been). Â I think episode 3 is trying to draw a distinction between them when it has Lawrence continue his mind games with June (and his casual acceptance of female fawning from the dependent members of his household) while Serena at least opens herself up to the idea of rebellion. Â It might be rooting that distinction in gender, in arrogance and humility, and even in religious faith. Â But I donât buy it. Â A person who did the things Serena has done (notice how her orchestrating Juneâs rape has simply been memory-holed? Â Not just ignored for the sake of expediency, but completely forgotten) wouldnât be as open to remorse as she is. Â You donât just wake up one morning and think âyou know, maybe creating a fascist, theocratic rape-dystopia was a bad idea.”
* The New Yorker remembers How To Read Donald Duck.
*Â The Importance of ‘Godzilla’ Cannot Be Overstated.
* A Joe Biden Nomination Would Solidify All Our Worst Fears About the Democrats. I mean really.
*Â Inside the Fight to Define Extreme Poverty in America.
*Â Pfizer had clues its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer’s. Why didnât it tell the world? Give you one guess.
* Why aren’t states doing more to lower the cost of insulin ONE GUESS
*Â Reflections of an Incarcerated Worker.
* Star Trekâs characters, like all of us, live in a universe full of injustice, suffering, and struggleânot a utopian vision, but an optimistic one, because they also live as if that better world is possible. We have to do that. We have to. When someone tells us that theyâre in distress, in pain, in danger, or in a time loop, we have to say âI believe you. Iâll help however I can.â
*Â Catholic Church spent $10 million on lobbyists in fight to stymie priest sex abuse suits.
* The new American religion of UFOs.
*Â Ultimate limit of human endurance found. Me at the end of spring semester, am I wrong folks.
* 108 Womenâs World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything.
* Dodgeball is a tool of âoppressionâ used to âdehumanizeâ others, researchers argue. As an incredibly unauthentic and uncoordinated kid, I was unusually good at dodgeball — so I’ve got mixed feelings here to say the least.
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
*Â Lies About the Humanities â and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
*Â What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
*Â Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Hereâs the Reality.
*Â Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Hereâs How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isnât Ready, Report Says. Americaâs Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isnât Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise arenât a mark of adult politics â theyâre a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
*Â The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But itâs actually happening before our eyes. And itâs led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
*Â Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in Americaâs Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think Itâs Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as Americaâs Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didnât need to leave the Durham church where heâs been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after âzero toleranceâ was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trumpâs Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
*Â Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
*Â What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
*Â The Pentagonâs Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
*Â Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
*Â 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
*Â Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
*Â Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
*Â He won Powerballâs $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
*Â GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
*Â An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
*Â @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
*Â School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place:Â Chinaâs plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
*Â Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin:Â Â âIâm writing about dragons as a black woman, and itâs fucking political.â
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
*Â ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoroâs Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
*Â In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!
* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Childrenâs Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.
* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.
* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!
* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.
*Â A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.
* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.
*Â Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.
* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphereâa concept called ânegative emissionsââchiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such âmethods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.â… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.
* The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Canât Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.
*Â Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.
* The suffocation of democracy.
* The president sure did some crimes.
* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?
* And how will they solve securities fraud?
* KSR:Â The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.
*Â The Bossesâ Constitution:Â How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
* NCâs Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur âGenius Grantâ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!
* The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.
*Â A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.
*Â Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economyâand Voter Turnout.
* Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isnât when theyâll rebuild â but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.
*Â Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.
* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.
* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US.  ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Oldâs Day in Immigration Court.
*Â Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. âIâm sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,â he said. âMight have? I did.â
* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.
* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.
* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.
* How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.
* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.
* I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.
*Â Geological time versus capitalist time.
*Â The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.
*Â The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.
* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.
* âThe comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers donât understand the extent of that reality,â Cain says. âCertainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers donât. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they donât get to work for anyone else â but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it⊠Iâve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. Itâs astonishing.â
*Â On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.
* On raising a non-neurotypical child.
* The filmâs real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggersâthe gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.
* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.
* I’m here only to present the facts.
*Â The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.
* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.
* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.
*Â You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96âless than 1 percentâhad their debt erased. And it gets worse.
*Â How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.
* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.
* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.
* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
*Â Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
*Â The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
*Â David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
*Â Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
*Â Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
*Â Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolinaâs massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes âhugeâ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
*Â No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future âHothouse Earth.â
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Hereâs who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didnât care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasnât enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to âtrapâ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. âYo me quiero morir,â the boy says. âI want to die.â 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
*Â When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong â and Why It Still Matters.
*Â Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Playerâs Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Footballâs Rotten Culture.
*Â âPurdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.â
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter:Â UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But theyâre wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
*Â U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isnât a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
*Â When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
*Â The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
*Â How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels:Â What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs â but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a âfecal time bomb.â Hereâs one manâs idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I donât think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now:Â DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
*Â Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in Americaâs jails.
*Â âAbolish Prisonsâ Is the New âAbolish ICE.â
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish objectâand so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TVâs Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: Youâve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
*Â Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
*Â Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesnât Matter⊠and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Finely Curated May Fifth Links (Aged to Perfection)
* I’ve had a couple of short pieces of writing go up in the last few weeks: a piece on the often overlooked epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale at LARB and a followup piece on Infinity War and franchise time at frieze.
* Maybe my favorite Infinity War take. Bady! Nussbuam! Loofburouw! Scalzi! Dreyfuss! We’re the good guys, right? Pop Culture Wonât Save Us. How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism.
* There’s also been a couple other good pieces lately pushing on whether Handmaid’s Tale really should have had a second season.
* Two from Jaimee: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* The 2018 Marquette Literary Review is up. And so is SFRA Review #324!
* CFP: An Anthology on Carrie Fisher.
* CFP:Â Special Double Issue: Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.
* Twitter thread: we already live in a boring dystopia.
* Most-Liked Tweets of Famous Poets.
* Fred Moten in the New Yorker!
* Janelle MonĂĄe in Rolling Stone!Â
* Maybe the best “there’s just one story and we tell it over and over” I’ve ever done.
*Â Channeling the anti-Trump #Resistance, a slew of recent books seeks to reduce democracy to a defense of political ânorms.â But overcoming todayâs crisis will take more political imagination.
* Three Identical Strangers, a dark documentary about identical triplets who were separated-at-birth. Amazing story. I wish I’d waited for the movie before Googling it.
*Â How a tiny protest at the U. of Nebraska turned into a proxy war for the future of campus politics.
* Just in time for my summer syllabi: Junot Diaz #MeToo Accusations Surface. No Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018.
* Michigan State. Michigan State. Michigan Goddamn State. SIU. Columbia. University of Illinois at Chicago. George Mason. UNC. And in some rare good news: Oregon.
* There is no campus free speech crisis: a look at the evidence.
*Â âThe root cause of the F.B.I. investigation are the N.C.A.A. rules limiting â actually, prohibiting â compensation for players,â he said. âAnd none of the recommendations speak to them â none of them.â
*Â What does a non-academic job search look like for a rhet/comp PhD student? I put compiled some numbers to illustrate my experience over the last 3 months.
*Â What Jack Kirby proposed for the plaques on the Pioneer space probes.
* Infiltration into left-wing groups is just the sharp edge of an entire armory of political policing.
* Chicagoâs drinking water is full of lead, report says. Newark Water Tests Show High Lead Levels, Prompting Threat of Lawsuit.
* Vaccine refusal is contagious —Â and there’s no cure.
*Â What’s Wrong With Growing Blobs of Brain Tissue?
*Â One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true.
* The arc of history is long, but Somehow, Jaxxon the Ridiculous Green Space Rabbit Has Made It to the New Star Wars Canon.
*Â How a Genealogy Site Led to the Front Door of the Golden State Killer Suspect.
* New Documents Reveal How ICE Mines Local Police Databases Across the Country.
*Â Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?
*Â LEGO crime boss busted in Portland. No jury in the world would convict him.
*Â $5,751.
*Â Lessons From Rust-Belt Cities That Kept Their Sheen.
*Â The Mighty Thorâs conclusion signals the end of a Marvel Comics era. What an odd comic this was. And meanwhile: This is the Dark Side of the Rainbow of our time.
*Â Enjoy a tarantula burger in Durham, North Carolina.
* In New Jersey, the top lobbying spenders are from the following industries: energy, healthcare, insurance, and… balloons.
*Â A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.
* eFterlife. Batmen and Robins. Natural selection. Good grief.
*Â âChoose Your Own Adventureâ Interactive Movie in the Works at Fox.
* Two years old, but who cares: âIt smelled like deathâ: An oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course.
* And sure, let’s make ice-nine, at this point why not.
First Day of School Links!
* Some late but very nice press for my Octavia Butler book: I was on an episode of the nationally syndicated radio show Viewpoints Radio this week, and the book had a lovely review in LARB!
*Â CFP: Artificial Life: Debating Medical Modernity (April 19-21, UC Riverside).
* $75 million dollars to philosophy at Johns Hopkins.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
*Â 12 People Face Misdemeanor Charges for Giving Food to The Homeless in El Cajon.
*Â A girl-power moment for Medieval Times, where a woman has the lead for the first time. I have wanted to take my kids to Medieval Times ever since listening to the Doughboys episode about it a few months ago.
* Like the story about the sexual assaults of the US gymnastics team, there is something about Eliza Dushku’s story of being abused as a child by adults who were trusted with her care that is just so heartbreaking.
* Meanwhile, McKayla Maroney is facing a $100,000 for violating her NDA with USA Gymnastics.
*Â ‘Every day I am crushed’: the stateless man held without trial by Australia for eight years.
* ICE Keeps Raiding Hospitals and Mistreating Disabled Children. Feds planning massive Northern California immigration sweep to strike against sanctuary laws. DHS and DOJ Want to Arrest Mayors of Sanctuary Cities.
* How one employee âpushed the wrong buttonâ and caused a wave of panic. Americaâs emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didnât anticipate how media works in the smartphone era. These are fascinating but I still have every confidence that the explanation we have been given for this event is bullshit and that the truth will come out in a decade or so. Pandemonium and Rage in Hawaii.
* “Wisconsin school apologizes for slavery homework assignment.”
* Foxconn boondoggle nearing $4.5 billion.
* “Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn. It has haunted her ever since.”
*Â Activists charged with Confederate statue toppling no longer face felonies.
*Â Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland.
*Â The True History of Luke Skywalkerâs Monastic Retreat.
*Â Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea.
* How the Female Stars of The Breakfast ClubFought to Remove a Sexist Scene, and Won.
* Tired of winning. So tired.
* And of course you had me at “Gorgeous Images of the Planet Jupiter.”
Gerry Canavan 