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.

most of SF is 😢 https://t.co/uK9A4ZatBD

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2022

* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.
* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members aren’t 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 they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.’

nice to just lay it all out like that https://t.co/alaaxYSedE pic.twitter.com/eT6tc4BxPj

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 21, 2022

* Two years since Covid was first confirmed in U.S., the pandemic is worse than anyone imagined. America’s 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 — and the adults who won’t listen to them. America’s youth turn left.
* Families are in distress after the first month without the expanded child tax credit.
* ‘If I Die, I Die’: 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.

only in the work of meat loaf do we see the dialectical co-constitution of what is “cool” and what is “uncool,” precisely how what is cool is always deeply uncool and what is uncool is always, in its way, cool https://t.co/KyAElUgrXn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 21, 2022

Huck Finn’s “All right then, I'll go to hell” is for my money one of the absolute greatest sentences ever written and it’s sort of funny how many of Meat Loaf’s songs are elaborations on that theme but exclusively about getting laid.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 21, 2022

submitted for peer review pic.twitter.com/SrrfFWKWlK

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 21, 2022

rock legend, actor, covid denialist — two out of three ain’t bad

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 21, 2022

* America’s shift to the right in 2021 is worse news for Democrats than it seems. The long slide: Inside Biden’s declining popularity as he struggles with multiple crises. ‘The Lowest Point in My Lifetime’: How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America. Joe Biden Promised Change. He Hasn’t Delivered.

hard to believe there’s just 367 days until Kamala Harris becomes president of the United States

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 20, 2022

* What Does It Mean If Republicans Won’t 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 ‘Probably Started’. How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts. Don’t Look Up Is Missing What We Really Need From Climate Change Movies.
* Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tonga’s Volcano. Tonga volcano: islands covered in ash as three deaths confirmed.
* “When 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. I’m very happy to say we’re on schedule,” said Yankovic in a statement. “And 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.”
* The Moon Knight moment.
* The Star Trek century.
* Do you know what’s cooler than One Ring?

we’re gonna see Gandalf breeding Hobbits as a Ring-containment device in an illegal laboratory in the valley of Anduin

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2022

GIMLI: ORIGINS

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2022

Sexy Sauron, what have you done?
You made a fool of everyone
You made a fool of everyone
Sexy Sauron, what have you done?

Sexy Sauron, you broke the rules…

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2022

* 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 wouldn’t be better with the pizza in hand.

A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

• Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.
• (There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter thread if you’re needing more.)
• I also have a harder-to-get piece in this handbook to comics and graphic narratives about why Jimmy Corrigan is (hear me out) just a really great comic. Cancel me if you must!
• The current issue of SFFTV, on sf and games, was really great — read the interview section for free!
• The current issue of Extrapolation is great too — but no freebies there.

this but for all of science fiction #SFRA21 https://t.co/lSf60ivJxP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2021

• I have a nice little cameo in this great Butler story at LARB: Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher. And I was interviewed for this piece on quantum mechanics and science fiction at The Quantum Daily.
• Hit me up Hollywood! Adaptations coming of Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Fledgling, joining Wild Seed and Dawn.
• In addition to having a ton of great stuff in it, SFRA Review 51.3 is a very important issue of SFRA Review, including candidate statements for the fall election and proposed revision of the bylaws.
• CFP – Strange Novel Worlds? Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture, 31 Aug 2021. Call for submissions: Just Utopias. CFP: Tabletop Teaching: Board Games and Social Justice. CFP: Dissenting Beliefs: Heresy and Heterodoxy in Fantasy. CFP: Religious Futurisms. CFP: Extrapolation: Special Issue on Speculative Fiction’s Intersections with Posthumanism and New Materialism. CFP: SFFTV, “Oversights.” New book series: Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture.
• A messy utopia is all we get. The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction. From the depths of the pandemic towards an ecosocialist utopia.
• Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. Dangerous Heat Wave Is Literally Melting Critical Infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest. 72% of the western US is currently in “severe” drought or worse. This is now the most extensive severe drought in recorded history. Six of California’s seven largest wildfires have erupted in the past year. Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle. Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse. The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. Drought deeps in Minnesota. By the mid-2030s even the moon won’t save us from regular floods as sea levels rise, says NASA. The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’. Joe Biden Is Already Failing on Climate Policy. There’s no going back, so what can be saved?

"Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year."https://t.co/C41QGnwWCi

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 29, 2021

"According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, tells the @latimes. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling." https://t.co/IbpzNgQrgB

— Michael Hawthorne (@scribeguy) July 12, 2021

Lots going on but for me the big story is the environment on which all human society depends is undergoing a collapse so staggeringly rapid there are now multiple climate disasters across the US every week and you still can’t get representative democracy to even pretend to care.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2021

do you ever think about how the proposition that the Earth should remain inhabitable is an absolutely fringe position in US politics, without representation in either political party and routinely mocked by essentially all mass media of any sort

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2021

"The Climate Change Review of Books" has a nice ring to it https://t.co/Ry4SkA8ElH

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2021

As meteorologist @EricHolthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 29, 2021

• The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
• I Am Supposed To Be Writing.
• DC11 becomes a site of acute thermodynamics, as server heat multiplies server heat. If anything, the true threat comes from within, not without, as unchecked servers would overheat themselves into oblivion. Put bluntly: the tech industry makes our planet hot in the service of keeping its computers cool. This, I suggest, is what makes DC11 a specifically atmospheric media object. DC11’s reliance on and manipulation of air contributes to the cloud’s formal tendencies toward displacement and (re)centralization. Air expedites the transformation of data centers into climate bunkers. Furthermore, the air’s perceived insubstantiability, compared with other subjects of environmental media study, such as rare earth metals or wastewater, makes its pollution that much more challenging to account. Faced with these atmospheric operations, media studies must develop analytical techniques that pierce through the data center’s security veil to reveal how the cloud now programs the atmosphere against itself.
• The humanities are shrinking, except at community colleges.
• IHE profiles my Greensboro pal Jillian Weise. And another Greensboro friend is hitting the big time with a great new memoir.
• Trees as more-than-human collectives.
• Let’s Rank Every Ted Chiang Story Ever Published.
• How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.
• A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.
• Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.
• You can now listen to “The Three Body Problem” as a serialized podcast.
• The Futuristic Stink of Amazon’s Science Fiction.
• 75 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi and Fantasy from African Authors.
• Doctor Who is Anglofuturism.
• The Anarres Project.
• Very cool things happening at ASU.

Time travel is always developed as society crumbles, prompting the rich to flee into the past. There they assume positions of power, which makes the timeline even worse, while also speeding up the development of time travel. Each loop is shorter and nastier than the one before.

— Micro Flash Fiction📖 (@MicroFlashFic) July 4, 2021

• Remembering Climate Change: A Message from the Year 2071.
• How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.
• Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents. Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings.

It’s very easy to imagine asking a room full of students “How is Frodo’s story like that of Beren?”, filling a white board with correspondences, asking, “Wait, if Frodo is like Beren, then who is his Luthien?” And then everyone’s eyes go wide as they realize the implications. 6/7

— Jason Tondro (@doctorcomics) July 1, 2021

• Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts.
• The Economic Recovery Is Here. It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Seen.
• Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear.
• The Clintons Had Slaves.
• California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter? How We’ll Know It’s Finally Time to Stop Masking.

Pretty damn impressive
Thanks Darren Lu @Reddit pic.twitter.com/ST6ueaaoY1

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Every piece of data from real-life shows the vaccines work very, very well— yes, even against Delta. Just checked US vaccine breakthrough hospitalizations. It's 6,587 people among the ~163,000,000 vaccinated: or 0.004%. Three fourths are elderly— as happens with other diseases. https://t.co/TmZkxRlETk pic.twitter.com/fUaTyXprey

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2021

• What this implies is that, while liberal democracy witnessed a struggle for recognition, neoliberalism converts this into a struggle for reputation. The cultural achievement of commercial society, according to Honneth, drawing on Hegel, was that it enabled individuals to confront one another on the principle of equality via exchange. The rise of criticism in the bourgeois public sphere saw artworks judged on a principle of aesthetic autonomy—that is, independent of status. The ideal critic resembled the ideal consumer in the spot market, determining the value of each product on its intrinsic merits. But if, as Feher argues, neoliberal capitalism reconfigures social relations around the template of financial investment, the public sphere becomes governed by a very different temporality. Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation. Every artefact, identity, moral action and political demand becomes viewed as an addition to an archive of prior behaviour, revealing a pattern to be projected into the future. The present is only ever a new data point. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media.
• Luxury Surveillance.
• Things of Beauty: The Politics of Postmillennial Nostalgia for Mid-century Design.
• Utopia of Quirk: Mystery Men (1999) and the Fate of the Nerd.
• Our World, Our People: Nationalism and Sovereign Power in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”
• Regulation as near-mystical abstraction.
• The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism. Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists.
• “Cat Person” and Me.
• Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn.’
• How Marvel conquered culture.
• WandaVision Not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen.
• The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk.”
• Time For The End Of The Teen Gymnast.

The decentring of the He-Man/Skeletor binary paves the way for the universalist ecological struggle to save Eternia’s magic; or the cultural logic of Mattel in the age of disaster capitalism… https://t.co/dht0sd9Wv6

— Historicizing Matt is Negating the Negation ⵄ ⭕️ (@MattFlisfeder) July 26, 2021

• Strange Plaque Piques Interest On North Farwell In Milwaukee.
• Still thinking about this tweet from Juneteeth.
• How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire. The Miseducation of White Children.
• Catholic colleges ignored faculty handbook provisions in layoffs, report alleges. Unlivable faculty wages put Catholic higher education in existential crisis.
• The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21. The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas.
• Academentia: the Organization Insanity of the Modern University. The Work of Culture: Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University.
• For College Finances, There’s No ‘Return to Normal.’
• The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did.
• What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money?
• Antiracism in the contemporary university.
• Betrayed by the Dream Factory. The Master’s Trap: What makes a graduate program predatory? ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.
• The end of the NCAA.
• The other freshman class.

Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet. pic.twitter.com/1lHiCfT8Vk

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) August 7, 2021

• So, most people are unaware that One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the novel, has a bonkers sequel called The Starlight Barking.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me.
• Amanda Knox: Who Owns My Name?
• The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick.
• The Green Imagination in Board Game Landscapes. Mother Lands is a tabletop role-playing game free of slavery and colonialism. Board games have a colonialism problem.
• One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets.
• 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
• Who will police Mars?

Every Gen Xer loves The Goonies, because we really wanted to believe there was some treasure or redemption or some kind of meaning in our abandonment

— The Actual, Real Cormac McCarthy (@_Shan_Martinez_) June 21, 2021

• Adjunct hell: the rise of the new campus novel.
• Generational politics is a socialism of fools.
• He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence.
• There will be blood: women on the shocking truth about periods and perimenopause.
• ​The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
• The beauty of Earth from orbit.
• Aliens could have spotted Earth cross the sun from more than 1,700 star systems. A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The new American religion of UFOs. What if the truth isn’t out there?
• With UFO report making headlines, Wisconsin has its own history with the paranormal.
• Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams.
• And don’t cry for me, I’m already dead.

pic.twitter.com/j2NWCkNdoy

— Against late capitalism ☭ Ⓐ (@Inhumansoflate1) June 26, 2021

GSA #3: NO LONGER AT EASE!

Sixty years later, Gerry and Aaron are joined by Keguro Macharia to talk about No Longer at Ease! Should it be illegal to teach Things Fall Apart without also teaching its sequel? Find out within…

Grad School Achebe #2: 2 Things 2 Apart!

Gerry and Aaron are back for more Things Fall Apart, talking about parts two and three of the novel! We also talk The Sopranos, Watchmen, Breaking Bad, bad fans, The Things Fall Apart film, just a little Vonnegut, and Achebe’s 1973 essay “Named for Victoria, Queen of England”…

Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy

this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021

Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...

First, just a few things I’ve been doing:

• I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
• I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
• I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
• We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
• I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
• I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
• My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
• I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
• I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
• And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…

“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973

“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:

Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021

• SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
• Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
• Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
• Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
• CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
• The war on critical race theory.
• The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
• The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
• Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
• Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
• Ground operations.
• Reflections on the Market.

I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.

— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021

• Dark academia.
• How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
• The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
• The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
• Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
• Firsting in Research.
• A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
• “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
• Reagan broke everything.
• The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
• Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
• Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
• All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
• A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
• University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
• The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
• ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
• Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
• Every day a new sadness.
• Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
• How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
• Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
• Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.

Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021

this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ

— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021

if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021

• How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
• Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
• We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
• Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
• The Airline Safety Revolution.
• Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
• Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
• Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
• It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
• No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
• A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
• Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
• Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
• The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
• The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
• Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
• The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
• How much money does a writer need?
• Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
• The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
• Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
• The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
• It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.

My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."

— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021

• Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
• So you want to acknowledge the land?
• Decolonize Oregon Trail.
• Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
• Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
• Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
• How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
• There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
• Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.

https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC

— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021

• We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
• How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
• Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
• America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
• A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
• What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
• Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
• 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
• The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
• The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
• I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
• How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
• Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
• “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
• ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• Two from Ted Chiang:  “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
• Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
• Sertãopunk.
• The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
• Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
• Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
• The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
• The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
• The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
• Top 20 Irishisms.
• Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
• 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.

it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities

— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Closed Some Tabs Today Links

* Some kinda life.

* The evolving English major.

* 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.

* Black AfterLives Matter.

* 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.

* slaveresistance.tumblr.com

* 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?

* The Sci-Fi Sex Scene That Changed My Life: Before I was old enough to fully understand I was transgender, I found Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn.

* 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.

* The Trump administration’s policies on family separation and abortion are driven by one view: A woman’s pain is fitting punishment.

* 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.

* A farewell to Twitter.

* 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.

* The Last Blockbuster.

* 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?

* Another superbug.

* 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.

* Bad typo.

* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?

* College-level mathematics.

* 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

* Reality-based recycling.

* 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.

* Historical memory and moral witnessing have given way to a bankrupt nostalgia that celebrates the most regressive moments in US history.

* 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!

It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy

* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.

* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.

* The part I was born to play.

* Race and Zootopia.

* Rick & Morty and theodicy.

* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.

* The novel in the age of Obama.

* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.

* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.

* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.

* Student evaluations: still bad.

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.

* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.

* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.

* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.

* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’

* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.

* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.

* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).

* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?

* UBI already exists for the 1%.

* 26, 171.

* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.

* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?

* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.

* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.

* The End of the Rural Hospital.

* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.

* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.

* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.

* Seems legit.

* This one too.

* But this one takes the cake.

* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…

* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.

* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.

* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.

* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?

* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.

* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).

* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.

* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.

* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.

* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.

* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.

* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.

* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.

* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.

* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.

* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.

* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.

* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.

* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.

* Neanderthals were people too.

* When a Video-Game World Ends.

* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.

* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.

* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”

* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”

* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.

* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.

* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.

* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.

* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.

* Superheroes and the kids today.

* Episode 8 has a name.

* Autism causes vaccines.

* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.

Tuesday Links! Just for You

* My review won’t appear in The New Inquiry for a couple weeks, but Liu Cixin’s Death’s End is finally out today. I read it this summer and it’s great. Go get it!

* A local talk I’ll be giving this Saturday afternoon at the Milwaukee Public Library: 150 Years of H.G. Wells in Milwaukee.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee Public Library beat! Milwaukee Public Library to forgive fines for patrons who visit the library.

* CFP: Flannery O’Connor and Popular Culture. CFP: Modern Fiction Studies: The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies. CFP: Essays on the Evil Dead Anthology. CFP: ICFA 2017.

* Star Trek: Discovery Has Been Delayed Until May 2017. I never saw how they’d make January, even before it was nearly October and they didn’t have a cast yet.

* ‘It’s like hitting a painting with a fish’: can computer analysis tell us anything new about literature?

* Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever.

* Professor Cottom’s Graduate School Guidance.docx

* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.

* Too Much and Too Little: A History of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

* With outcomes so uneven, it is no wonder that MFAs are the bastard children of English departments.

* Victory at LIU.

* Saint Louis University must pay $367,000 in damages to a former professor who alleged she was denied tenure because of her gender. That’s what a Missouri court decided late last week following a trial by jury. The university says it’s “disappointed” in the verdict and is reviewing its options.

* Dozens of higher education institutions in New York state will stop asking applicants whether they have past criminal convictions.

* What does it cost to run a department at UCLA for a year? or, who will pay the salary of the English department?

* This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program’s criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament.

* New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity.

* Haitian-American Roxane Gay Becomes First Black Woman Writer for Marvel Comics.

* From 2014: The Future According to Stanisław Lem.

* Parenting and moral panic, 2016.

* If You Change a Baby’s Diaper in Arizona, You Can Now Be Convicted of Child Molestation.

* “Very pessimistic.” The idea that they could actually somehow manage to blow the lead they’d built up over the summer is horrifying.

this is fine https://t.co/zGp0PVwqX6

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 15, 2016

* It Sure Seems Like Hillary Clinton’s Tech Guy Asked Reddit for Email Advice.

* The law, in its majestic equality: Defendants who can’t afford bail more likely to plead guilty as a way out, studies show.

* Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester. After court threat, state of Michigan removed Flint’s power to sue. WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer). 37 Years in Solitary Confinement and Even the State Can’t Explain Why. Nation’s largest police union endorses Trump. And right here in Milwaukee: An Inmate Died Of Thirst In A Jail Run By A Loudly Pro-Trump Sheriff.

* A Prison Literature Syllabus.

* The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.

* How the failed politics of “humanitarian intervention” were born in 1980s Afghanistan.

* Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.

* Twilight for C.M. Punk.

* The Fall of Chyna.

* Romeo and Juliet in Wisconsin.

* The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult ‘trash.’

This is the most important news of the year. https://t.co/D7o4PddWH0

— Gabriel Baumgaertner (@gbaumgaertner) September 19, 2016

* “I await an apology from Chancellor Dirks, and Dean Hesse,” explained Hadweh. “The university threw me under the bus, and publicly blamed me, without ever even contacting me. It seems that because I’m Palestinian studying Palestine, I’m guilty until proven innocent. To defend the course, we had to mobilize an international outcry of scholars and students to stand up for academic freedom. This never should have happened.”

* I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke.

* The Woman Who Is Allergic to Water.

* Feral Cats and Ecological Disaster.

* Never talk to journalists.

* The name of the character in the excerpt, GBW Ponce, comes actually from the Ponzi scheme, among other things. There’s a Thomas Frank piece that I once read somewhere (I think it was Harper’s), where he said that civilization is basically a gigantic ponzi scheme. With our obsession with data and with predicting the future, it’s as if we were trying to cancel the future and its uncertainties, in order to make the present feel safer. The IMF has projections for the growth of EVERY economy on the planet which stretch to two-three-four and even more years: why let reality run its course when we can model it and predict it, right? So, the idea behind that character was that by “scientifically” predicting every inch of life, it’s as if we borrowed against our unknown future to live the present with fewer uncertainties and anxieties. But that’s precisely what causes more anxiety, this idea of a life that could fit entirely in an Excel spreadsheet.

* Moderator Announces Topics for First Presidential Debate.

America's Direction
Achieving Prosperity
Securing America
America's Prosperity
Securing Direction
Securing Prosperity
America's America

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 20, 2016

* Definitely, definitely, definitely aliens.

* All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. Shame to get all the way through 312 and then swap #1 and #2…

* Elsewhere in the numerical sublime: Every He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figure, ranked.

* Teach the controversy! “Peter Thiel Would Make A Great Supreme Court Justice.”

* Booze against pot.

* The Bonkers Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe.

* Someone Removed The Music From ‘Dancing In The Street’ And I Can’t Stop Laughing.

* Run it like a sandwich: After Texas high school builds $60-million stadium, rival district plans one for nearly $70 million.

moreover, wealthier school districts are reducing taxes (that have to be shared) and spending more via bond-funded projects (that don't).

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 19, 2016

* The luxury suites in modern stadiums are reminders that capitalist society values elite consumption over public enjoyment.

* Class size matters a lot, research shows.

* Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?

* Page B13: Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates.

* Don’t tweet your heroes.

* And never forget that the Monkees are DCU canon.

Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag

* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.

* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.

Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU

— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016

* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.

* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.

* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.

* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.

* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.

* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.

* On Utopia and Reaction.

* Poetry and Class Struggle.

* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.

* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.

* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.

* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.

7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.

— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016

* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.

* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.

* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.

* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.

* Quebec’s massive student strikes emerged from an organizing model that constantly trains new generations of activists.

* Retirement Plan Roulette.

* The First Trans*Studies Conference.

* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

A bit more here.

* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.

* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.

* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.

* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.

* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.

* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.

* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?

* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.

* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.

* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.

* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.

Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016

* Raymond Chandler and Totality.

* Writing Like a State.

* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.

* Capitalist Saboteurs.

* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.

* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.

* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.

* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.

* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.

* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.

* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.

* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.

* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.

* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?

* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.

* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.

* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.

* Being Nadja Spiegelman.

* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.

* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.

* Defining Unarmed.

* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.

* Against Theory.

Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.

* The largest strike in world history?

* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.

* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.

* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”

* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.

* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.

* The clash of eschatologies.

* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.

* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.

Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016

* Atwood and comics.

* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?

* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.

* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.

* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.

*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.

* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.

* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.

* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.

* Yes, Here Comes Trump TV.

* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.

* Black Teachers Matter.

* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.

* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.

* Understanding Hellboy.

* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.

* What’s the Matter with Liberals?

* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.

* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.

* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.

* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.

* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!

* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.

* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.

* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.

* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.

* Mike Konczal on Eviction.

* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.

* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.

* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.

* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.

* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.

* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.

* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.

* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.

* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.

* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.

* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.

* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.

* Earth First: The Musical.

* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.

* Hitchens wept.

* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.

* Finally.

* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.

* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.

So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!

* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”

* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”

Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?

The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.

* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.

* Marquette will pilot a J-term.

* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?

* The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.

* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.

* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.

Trump status:
–38%, down 7 pts
–outspent 100%-0 on TV
–$1.3m COH, v. $42m for Clinton
–30 staff membershttps://t.co/UaHpJLICJt

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) June 21, 2016

But this one is still my favorite:

So as it turns out, I was booted from the Trump rally because a woman saw me do the Hunger Games salute to a group getting thrown out.

— Jackson Pearce (@JacksonPearce) June 16, 2016

* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.

In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.

* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.

* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.

@gerrycanavan @Lollardfish lotta people cursing both Senate rejection of watchlist for gun control and Strieff majority's 4A logic today

— Nick Fleisher (@nickfleisher) June 21, 2016

* Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.

* Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.

* The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’

* The hack that could take down New York City.

* Rethinking teaching evaluations.

* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.

* What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?

* Saying victims are to blame, at least in part, for their sexual assaults is a legal tactic used by many colleges accused of negligence.

* How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.

* Once they killed a president with a diet of beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk, whiskey and drops of opium, delivered rectally.

* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.

* On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.

* Missing Barnes and Noble.

* It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?

* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.

* The mind behind UnREAL.

* We’re All Forum Writers Now.

* Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.

* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.

* At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.

* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.

* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.

* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.

* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.

* Homeless in Seattle: five essays.

* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.

* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.

"Our fathers were all evil men." Happy Father's Day from Game of Thrones!

— Sarah Galo (@SarahEvonne) June 20, 2016

* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.

* The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!

* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”

* Death of a startup.

* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.

* The Pixar Theory of Labor.

* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.

* Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.

* The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.

* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.

* That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.

* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.

* There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.

* In praise of She-Ra.

* Two thousand miles away from the U.S. A-bomb tests in 1945, something weird was happening to Kodak’s film.

* Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.

* Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.

* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.

* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.

Every Possible Monday Link

* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.

* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.

* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.

* The university-as-such is a criminal neoliberal and neocolonial institution. It cannot be reformed. It must be abolished and reinvented.

* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.

* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.

* Decolonizing Yale English.

* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.

* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.

* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.

* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.

* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.

* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”

* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.

* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.

* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.

* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.

* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.

* Genes Are Overrated.

* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.

* Being Peter Thiel.

* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.

* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.

* The Case Against America.

* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.

* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.

* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.

* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.

* The case for abandoning Miami.

* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.

* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.

* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.

* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.

* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.

* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.

* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.

* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.

* The CW Century.

* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.

* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”

* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.

* A Goldsboro, North Carolina woman bought her neighbor’s used freezer for $30, not realizing it contained frozen parts of the seller’s dead mother.

Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.

* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.

* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.

Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.

Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.

Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.

For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.

* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.

* Power and the typo.

* The Chinese government and science fiction.

* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.

* Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Race: Time-travel narratives and bygone bigotry in “11.22.63” and ‘Back to the Future.’

* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.

* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?

* Liberate late sleepers.

* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.

* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.

* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.

* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.

* Rich people, y’all.

* A Shakespearean Map of the US.

* Tornado Town, USA.

* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.

* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.

* Every Californian Novel Ever.

* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.

* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.

Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost

* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.

* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.

* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.

* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.

* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.

* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.

* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.

* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.

* TurnItIn doesn’t even work.

* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.

* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.

* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.

* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.

* Hobbes v. Snoopy.

* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.

* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.

* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.

* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!

* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.

* Coca-Cola and the denialists.

* Life extension and prison.

* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.

* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.

* What If Stalin Had Computers?

* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.

* On average, it’ll take four minutes for you to get to the end of this piece, and quite frankly you should be spending those four minutes asleep.

* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.

* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.

* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.

* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”

* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.

* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”

* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”

* Understanding Neal Stephenson.

* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.

* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.

* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.

* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.

* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?

* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?

* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.

* The climate hackers.

* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.

* In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

* The bail trap.

* The end of Columbia House.

* An oral history of Six Feet Under.

* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.

* Being Stephen Colbert.

* Happy Earth Overshoot Day.

* The new Cold War is a Corn War.

* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.

* Banksy’s Dismaland.

* Twilight of the Bomb.

* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.

* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.

* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.

* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?

* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.

* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.

* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.

* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.

* Here comes Star Wars Land.

* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!

* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.

* Hell, with same-day delivery.

* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.

* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.

* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.

In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”

* Science proves the universe is slowly dying

* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.

* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.

* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.

* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.

* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”

* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.

* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.

* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.

* Don’t bring your dogs to work.

* Today in Wikipedia hoaxes.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.

* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.

* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.

* Don’t say it unless you mean it.

* And we shall Truffle Shuffle no more forever.

Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!

TGIF RT @iycrtylph: Capital's final victory is to have produced a humanity unworthy of liberation.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2015

* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!

* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.

* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.

* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.

* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.

* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.

* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.

* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!

* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.

* Rich Kids Study English.

* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.

* Towards a New Common Sense.

* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.

* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?

* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.

* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”

* The Verdict on Charter Schools?

* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.

* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?

* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.” 

* Social networking and the majority illusion.

* Reddit in chaos.

* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!

* Is Bail Unconstitutional?

* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.

* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”

* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?

* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.

* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.

* Dear Alice Sheldon.

* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.

* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.

* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.

* Shadow work and academia.

* Art and the wage.

* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.

* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].

* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.

* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.

* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.

* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.

* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.

* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.

* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.

* At least it’s an ethos!

* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.

* Salaita, one year later.

* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.

* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.

* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.

* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.

* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.

* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.

* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.

* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.

* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)

* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.

* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.

* When adjuncts go union.

* So you want to announce for the WWE.

* When I Was White.

* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.

* I’m not happy about this either.

* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.

* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”

* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.

* Another round of the polygamy debate.

* RISK: Game of Thrones.

* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.

* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.

* And then there’s Whitesboro.

* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.

* Armed police in England and Wales only fired their weapons twice over the course of 14,864 operations that took place from 2013-2014.

* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.

* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.

* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.

* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.

* A gendered history of LEGO.

* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!

* And there’s nothing sweet in life.

Super Ultra Mega Monday Links

* That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it. The American Justice System Is Not Broken.

* Why Should Anyone “Respect” the Law?

* Autopsy: Milwaukee cop shot mentally-ill black man from above and behind, 14 times. Wave of Protests After Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Officer in Eric Garner Chokehold Case. But they did manage to indict the man who filmed the murder. Worse Than Eric Garner: Cops Who Got Away With Killing Autistic Men and Little Girls. Prosecutors throwing grand jury inquiries to save killer cops. NYPD Abuse Increases Settlements Costing City $735 Million. Rookie NYPD cop who shot unarmed black man texted union reps before radioing for help. The cop who murdered Tamir Rice should never have been a cop. Grand Jury Clears Two Former Jasper Cops Who Beat Woman in Jail. Seattle Cop Who Punched a Handcuffed Woman in the Face Won’t Be Charged. Coastal Carolina students detained after writing unapproved chalk messages about Ferguson on campus sidewalks. Cop Fired for Beating a Non-violent, Handcuffed Man On Video, Gets Job Back AND Back Pay. Inside the Twisted Police Department That Kills Unarmed Citizens at the Highest Rate in the Country. The Deadly Self-Pity of the Police. Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose. Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. Where Are All the Good Cops? Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a riot. If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces. The real scandal of police violence is what’s legal.

* But body cameras that the cops can freely turn on and off and whose footage they completely control will definitely solve it. You don’t have to take my word for it.

* Hey! My tuition bought you that shotgun. More links under the photo.

* Stories of unseen lives and the effects homelessness in Milwaukee.

* Racial inequality is objectively worse than 30 years ago. And another deBoer instant classic: Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.

* On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014. Chris Rock vs. the industry.

* Marquette University response to Westboro Baptist Church protest.

* Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims. What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie’s fault. Blame Rolling Stone. The lesson of Rolling Stone and UVA: protecting victims means checking their stories. Reporters are not your friends.

* And just when I was thinking The Newsroom had actually gotten pretty good: Emily Nussbaum on The Newsroom‘s Crazy-Making Campus-Rape Episode. The AC Club: D-.

* Something I’d somehow missed when it was new, but came across in research for a new piece on zombies I’m working on: Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.

* Science fiction after Ferguson: An interview with Walidah Imarisha.

* SF as R&D for the very powerful: U.S. spy agency predicts a very transhuman future by 2030.

* Imagining an open source Star Wars.

* On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Oregon: Admin threatens to deport striking international grad students, just straight-up make-up grades. U Oregon and the Academic Labor System. Megapost at MetaFilter.

* Meanwhile, at Columbia.

* The Democrats’ Education Plan: Class War. Resegregation.

* Cal Refuses to Pay Berkeley Minimum Wage.

* Colleges that pledged to help poor families have been doing the opposite, new figures show.

* An update on the Salaita case from Corey Robin.

* “If students have time to get drunk, colleges aren’t doing their job.” MetaFilter links to the full series at CHE.

* The Equipment 117 Colleges Have Acquired From the Dept. of Defense.

* What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings.

* The latest New Inquiry on illness is another stellar issue from a publication that always delivers. This piece on love and schizophrenia is the one making the rounds currently.

* Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report. John Kerry’s sad legacy.

* It Takes Nearly $100,000 a Year in Earnings Just to Buy a Crappy House in L.A.

* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”

* Why Poor People Stay Poor.

* Milwaukee after the recession: the jobs are going to the suburbs.

* Social justice as a means to social capital.

* 12 Female Characters Who Keep Shaving Despite Constant Peril.

* The music industry is a horror show, like everything else.

* Remembering Bhopal, the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.

* We nearly saved the world, but we couldn’t give up our precious academic annual meetings.

* California drought the worst in 1,200 years, new study says. Won’t someone cancel the MLA before it kills again!

* This doesn’t look so bad.

* First ever British sci-fi feature film released. Congratulations, England! Looking forward to your next one.

* 40 Years Ago, Earth Beamed Its First Postcard to the Stars.

* Court Hears Second Case for a Chimpanzee’s Legal Rights.

* Sony has apparently gone to war with North Korea. The future is weird, y’all.

* Someone Made A Map Of Every Rude Place Name In The UK.

* Shimer College: The Best Worst College in America.

* I mock the idea of “the law” around here a lot, but I never for the life of me imagined a scenario where the emergence of a video that shows a man accused of murdering his stepdaughter defiling her corpse could be bad news for the prosecution.

* Breaking news: the rich are different.

* So, for some reason, are the left-handed.

* But it’s not all bad news: The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like.

* “It is no longer true that the divorce rate is rising, or that half of all marriages end in divorce. It has not been for some time.”

* The British Government Wants To Build A Tunnel Under Stonehenge.

* If I’m being perfectly honest I got bored watching the three-minute “What if The Hobbit was one movie?” trailer.

* Scholars, start your syllabi: New novel from Toni Morrison coming in April.

* Wes Anderson’s The Force Awakens. If only!

* And about 100 brains are missing from University of Texas. I’m late posting this, alas; all the easy jokes have already been taken…

Sunday Afternoon

* ICYMI: Dr. Seuss Explains Assessment, Metrics, Administrative Blight, and Pretty Much Every Aspect of the Contemporary Education System.

* This is, I think, literally the first time I have ever heard of university budget cuts impacting administration. Meanwhile.

* Meanwhile meanwhile, Congress talks adjuncts and adjunctification. I’m sure they’ll come up with a good solution soon.

* Tressie McMillan Cottom on race and adjunctification.

* Yo novel so staid and conventional, it’s taught at over 50 MFA programs.

* Submitted for your approval: An OCR of the MLA JIL list, 1965-2012.

* For some reason I’m seeing a ton of links to Bousquet’s “Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers” this weekend.

*  Bérubé’s last post on MLA 2014.

* Harvard, MIT Online Courses Dropped by 95% of Registrants.

* Inside a for-profit college nightmare.

* Inside the “longform backlash.”

* How Student Activists at Duke Transformed a $6 Billion Endowment.

* “Income inequality” has proved a very successful framing for Democrats discussing a massive social problem, so of course the Obama White House is rolling out a much worse one.

* Pope Francis Is Drafting An Encyclical On The Environment.

* xkcd explains climate.

* Demographics is destiny: Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.

* How nonviolent was the civil rights movement?

* It’s 1968, and Esquire is interviewing James Baldwin.

* Chris Christie says no to dashboard cameras.

* The coming Common Core meltdown.

* The headline reads, “Chinese restaurant owner told to pull down two gigantic 50ft naked Buddhas from establishment’s roof.”

* Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts.

* America’s nuclear corps are a mess. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary.

* A journey to the end of the world (of Minecraft).

* Science has finally proved that sex reverses cognitive decline in rats.

* This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem.

* The New York Times has the tragic story of a man with a million dollars in his retirement account struggling to scrape by on just $31,500 a month. Truly, there but for the grace of God go we.

* Bucking trend, Wisconsin union membership grows.

* Fox to strand reality show contestants on an island for an entire year.

* Woody Guthrie’s daughter wants to preserve Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

* The “okay, fine, let’s abolish all marriages” response to marriage equality is so strange to me. I know things like this happened during the civil rights movement — and one might argue that precisely the same thing has been happening in slow-motion to public education over the last few decades — but it still seems like such a strange, uniquely twenty-first-century temper tantrum.

* Behold, the 90s! The Most Impressive Costumes from Star Trek: TNG’s First 3 Seasons.

* Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath.

* We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.

* And Stephen Hawking wants to destroy all your silly, silly dreams.