Posts Tagged ‘nuclear war’
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
I Had To Do Some Laundry, So You Know What That Means: Wednesday Links!
* What our science fiction says about us.
* From the Earth to the Moon. And hell why not it’s Wednesday just a few more.
* Following a Board of Trustees meeting this afternoon, Temple University President Richard Englert released a statement on behalf of the board, announcing that professor Marc Lamont Hill will not be punished or investigated for his Nov. 28 speech during an event organized with the United Nations. Now investigate the feckless administrators who made these baseless threats.
* Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges 2018.
* Following scientists in three fields, the paper’s authors found that it took about five years for a half of a science cohort to leave academic work in 2010 — compared to 35 years in the 1960s.
* Tired: China is building a social points system that will rank people from birth to death. Wired: Trump Is Trying to Use Credit Scores to Keep Immigrants Out of the U.S.
* Wow, here and I thought Scott Walker was a man of principle and integrity.
* Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off. I tweeted a tweet about the president and the modest virality of that tweet smells bad.
* Grant Morrison Opens Up About Feuding With Alan Moore and Why He Still Doesn’t Like Watchmen.
* Upright Citizen’s Brigade on the brink.
* The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what’s to come. Unparalleled warmth is changing the Arctic and affecting weather in US, Europe. In what is being called the first of its kind, Mayor Francis Suarez quietly signed a resolution last month to address climate gentrification in Miami. Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed. EPA announces plan to poison all the water.
* Children of Ted: Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.
* ICE arrested 170 potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children.
* They say bipartisanship is dead, but U.S. House unanimously approves sweeping self-driving car measure.
* The law, in its infinite equality watch: Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has dropped charges against 23-year-old Jazmine Headley related to her arrest at a social services office on Friday, he announced Tuesday. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, and trespassing after security guards called police over a dispute that apparently began because she was sitting on the floor while she waited with her 1-year-old son to renew a child-care benefit. Charge the cops who did this next.
* “Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See?” What terrible luck that the camera mysterious turned off during the relevant portion of the search! What are the chances!
* What Everyone Having Diarrhea On The Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity.
* A ProPublica investigation has found that the IRS has been so gutted that audits of the top 1% are rapidly converging on audits of the bottom 36%. This is of course totally irrational, but completely in line with the contempt the ruling class has for the poor.
* What It Means to Be a Marxist.
* The CRISPR babies and scientific ethics.
* The final stage of any sufficiently mammoth crime is abusing bankruptcy law to avoid responsibility.
* I remember having my mind blown by reading this observation in Daniel Dennett book twenty years ago: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have.
* Throw these Chromebooks in the snow. Leave childhood alone, let kids have a little bit of joy.
Father’s Day Links!
* Statement of teaching philosophy.
* CFP: Empirical Ecocriticism.
* But anyone with a modicum of utopian imagination should be asking, what are the opportunities secreted within this emerging network of control? When older forms of democratic possibility are being foreclosed or rendered obsolete, what new (and perhaps better) possibilities can be found? How can the emerging order, which has thus far depended so much on deliberately produced ignorance, and on keeping its political allegiances occulted, be politicised? Utopian thinking beyond Brexit.
* In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” It Can Happen Here It Happened Here 18 Months Ago.
* The Trump administration’s policy of separating families is designed to erase hope—with devastating consequences for thousands of children. Extinguishing the Beacon of America. Conservative Religious Leaders Are Denouncing Trump Immigration Policies. A Legal Resident, an Arrest by ICE and Father’s Day in Jail. In Father’s Day plea, wife of man held by ICE after delivering pizza asks for his release.
* Yeah, that’ll do it: The National Institutes of Health on Friday canceled a mammoth study of moderate drinking after determining that officials had irrevocably compromised the research by soliciting over $60 million from beer and liquor companies to underwrite the effort.
* I should have seen this coming, but it still shocked me: NASA’s Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities.
* If You’re A Facebook User, You’re Also a Research Subject.
* James Bridle’s essay on disturbing YouTube content aimed at children went viral last year. Has the problem gone away – or is it getting worse?
* How does a Google-averse generation figure out how to deal with acne, fake friends, and boy trouble? On Instagram, of course.
* Well, sure: Americans Are Unprepared for a Nuclear Attack.
* Trump’s EPA Greenlighted a Pesticide That Harms Kids’ Brains. Hawaii Just Said, “Hell No.”
* High tech lock is “invincible to people who do not have a screwdriver.”
* Adventure House: the sequel to the Haunted Mansion that never was.
* And Wired Has Your Secret History of the Racy Module That Almost Ruined D&D.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* CFP: Darkness.
* Never Tell Them Your True Name: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin.
* The Demanding, Essential Work of Samuel Delany: The Atheist in the Attic.
* Games for a Fallen World: On the Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene.
* Why we march: a then and now look at Marquette student’s involvement in protests.
* Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability. The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.
* A grim new angle on the intergenerational struggle: Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors.
* Harvard study estimates thousands died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria.
* Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger.
* The Criminalization of Knowledge.
* A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student. Niall Ferguson, amazingly. Niall Ferguson quits Stanford free speech role over leaked emails.
* It’s Not Liberal Arts And Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed.
* Inside the NCAA’s years-long, twisting investigation into Mississippi football.
* Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty.
* Here’s every Star Wars movie, ranked by female screen time. Should Donald Glover Have Played Han Solo? Disney and Star Wars: An Empire in Peril? The growing emptiness of the Star Wars universe. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves.
* Isaac Cates on Infinity War‘s False Conclusions.
* How Tolkien created Middle-earth.
* Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls. White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them. TMZ Goes MAGA. Can the Rule of Law Survive Trump?
* Three tweets on impeachment from Corey Robin.
* thread re: how NYT has now basically locked out Congressional Dems from commenting on Trump news.
* Trump’s ‘Forced Separation’ of Migrant Families Is Both Illegal and Immoral. Separated at the border: A mother’s story.
* After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back. Customs stole a US citizen’s life savings when he boarded a domestic flight, now he’s suing to get it back. Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood. This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk.
* Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google.
American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?
* In the richest country in the history of the world: Nine year old raises thousands of dollars at lemonade stand to help pay brother’s medical bills.
* Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself agreeing with David Brooks.
* Bear’s Dairy Queen ice cream treat earns zoo $500 fine.
* Archaeologists uncover remains of man crushed as he fled Pompeii.
* Why Isn’t Asbestos Banned in the US?
* Choose-Your-Own-Security-Disclosure-Adventure.
* Meet the Rising New Housing Movement That Wants to Create Homes for All. Tenant and Squatters’ Rights in Oakland.
* We compared Milwaukee police reports on Sterling Brown’s arrest with the video. They don’t match.
* Jury Leaves $4 to Family of Man Killed by Sheriff’s Deputy, Along With Many Questions.
* LARB reviews Dirty Computer.
* How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language From a Terrible One. How to Build a World.
* Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a “residential” zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I assume the rivers of meat blood come later.
* A weather report from an alternate universe, in which science is real and people aren’t idiots.
* Climate grief in the classroom.
* Banning straws won’t save the oceans.
* Bet this won’t either: Trump Prepares Lifeline for Money-Losing Coal Plants.
* Summah. Don’t kill your wife with work. If these trends continue. Teach the controversy. Dads & grads. When you’re almost forty.
* “Says he had to stage his own murder in order to capture someone, apologises to his wife.”
* How #MeToo Impacts Viewers’ Decisions on What to Watch.
* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.
* How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking.
* The art of the grift in 21st century Manhattan.
* Shockingly, ‘impossible’ EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all.
* New podcast watch: Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes. The Good Place: The Podcast.
* An oral history of the Muppets.
* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.
* We’re not prepared for the genetic revolution that’s coming.
* And you can’t argue with the facts: Wearing glasses may really mean you’re smarter, major study finds.
people and nature
All Your Sunday Reading™
* Call for applications: Postdoctoral Scholar for Futures of Literary and Cultural Knowledge, UCSB.
* Call for Papers: “Binge-Watching and the Future of Television Research: A Workshop” Sept 13-14, 2018, at Anglia Ruskin University.
* Studying Tolkien fanzines at Marquette University.
* I make a by-the-way appearance on this massive roundup of Infinity War links.
* What is an English professor?
* The Enduring Anger of Joanna Russ.
* Bonkers Wisconsin tax policy error in my favor.
* Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services. UC Workers on Strike. After 3-Day Strike, University Of California’s Service Workers Vow To Keep Fighting.
* A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired. The icing on the cake. Well, actually, this is.
* If you’re worried about free speech on campus, don’t fear students — fear the Koch brothers.
* Why universities became big-time real estate developers.
* Stephen Kuusisto on ableism in the university.
* White student calls police on black student napping in Yale dorm. When Calling the Police Is a Privilege.
* Academia’s #MeToo moment: Women accuse professors of sexual misconduct. 45 Stories of Consent on Campus. The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time.
* (Another) progressive case against the progressive case for the SAT.
* Never-ending nightmare: why feminist dystopias must stop torturing women.
* In 2011, Minnesota got a liberal governor and Wisconsin got a conservative one. Who was better off?
* What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.
* Your workplace is killing you.
* Intrigue and Drama on the Han Solo Set. Catch the fever!
* One of the most purely destructive things Trump has yet done. Early days though, early days. Evergreen.
* Taking parents from their children is a form of state terror. Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance. An upcoming Supreme Court ruling could force all workers into forced arbitration, deprived of the right to class lawsuits. Trump Administration Wants to Train Teens in ‘Hazardous’ Jobs. Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab. A taxonomy of Michael Cohen and potential Trump corruption. How Michael Cohen Cashed In. It’s harder to pay off foreign governments than the US one. Breaking Down Gina Haspel’s Tense Confirmation Hearing. Trumpism Is Having Its Best Week Ever. We know a lot about Trump’s misdeeds. But most of all we know there’s more to come.
* How bananas is this Schneiderman story going to get? Man.
* And isn’t it pretty to think so?
* ’We Can Make Him Disappear’: The Power of County Sheriffs.
* In One Year, 57,375 Years of Life Were Lost to Police Violence. Plainclothes NYPD Cops Are Involved in a Staggering Number of Killings.
* How to Survive the First Hour of a Nuclear Attack. Wow, a whole hour!
* The Story Behind FanCon’s Controversial Collapse.
* Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings.’
* Democrats against the gig economy. The Politics of Full Employment.
* It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.
* The Brooklyn Comedian Whose Joke About ICE Got Him a Visit From Homeland Security. ICE Breaking into Home: “We’ll Show You the Warrant When We’re Done.”
* The “Maddening Labyrinth” Aging NFL Players Face for Dementia Compensation.
* England revving up for a Corbyn prime ministership.
* There’s No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal. Almost as if… there’s no excuse at all…
* From blood diamonds to blood healing crystals.
* It sounds like my dream of a Bill & Ted parody of the trend towards grimdark 80s revivals is gonna come true.
* What CBS found when it bought four random used photocopiers.
* How political and media elites legitimized torture.
* #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable.
* You Won’t Like The Consequences Of Making Pluto A Planet Again.
* New York Court Says Chimps Aren’t People—But a Judge Is Not Happy About It.
* The dream of communism is the elimination of wage labor. If AI is bound to serve society instead of private capitalists, it promises to do so by freeing an overwhelming majority from such drudgery while creating wealth to sustain all.
* Imagine that it’s 2044, and everyone is still listening to Duran Duran.
* Sometimes you just need two men.
* And in the advanced Turing test, the machine convinces you that it is conscious and you aren’t.
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
Monday Afternoon Links!
* A prediction: China will produce some of the world’s most interesting scholarship on American literature within a generation. A secondary effect of this production will be a boost for the humanities, if from a most unexpected quarter.
* The Meta-Anthropocene: Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? A look at the available evidence.
* The Anthropocene and the Theater of Disappearance.
* Dialectics of Jacobin: The Socialist Case against the SAT.
* Language in a time of climate change.
* The cruel optimism of college football.
* 5 Takeaways From Turning Point’s Plan to ‘Commandeer’ Campus Elections.
* Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers.
* Making the rounds again, but worth rereading: The Invisible Labor Of Minority Professors.
* How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space.
* Mark Carney warns robots taking jobs could lead to rise of Marxism.
* James Comey is not a hero. (UPDATE: Seriously.)
* First, socialism – the belief that the earth belongs to labor – is my moral being. In fact it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life. Second, ‘old school’ implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picketline, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit.
* Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind.
* The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations. Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency.
* The history of the left in the United States is in large part a history of betrayal: of the repeated embrace of imperial ventures for the sake of shortsighted aims, always coming back to haunt the left and the empire’s victims. It is a history blighted by the self-serving conceit that the domestic and the foreign, or what was once the interior and the frontier, can be understood apart from each other. And until very recently, it was a history forged by white elites too sheltered from the racial consequences of their choices to anticipate the havoc they would unleash.
* Avoid Gulf stream disruption at all costs, scientists warn. Probably will work itself out.
* And this is arguably what went wrong with humans too: The Lebowski theorem: No superintelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function.
