Posts Tagged ‘nuclearity’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.
* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!
* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.
* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.
* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.
* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.
* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.
* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.
* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?
* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.
* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.
* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.
* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.
* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.
* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.
* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.
* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.
- Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?
* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.
* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.
* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.
* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.
* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?
* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.
* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.
* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.
* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.
* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.
* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?
* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.
* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.
* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.
* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.
* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.
* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.
* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.
* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.
* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!
* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.
* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.
* The world’s riskiest project.
* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…
* The Oral History of A Different World.
* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.
Monday Morning Links!
* The era of high fertility is ending. Every child on their own trampoline. Police-Free Childhoods. The Seismic Generational Shift in Worldview: Millennials Seek a Nation Without God, Bible and Churches.
* Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic.
* The empty brain. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
* My theory, Philip K. Dick style, is that we didn’t survive the Cold War. All the evidence points that way.
* We still know basically knowing about COVID policy.
* Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.
* An interview with Emily Wilder, recent Stanford grad fired from AP job over criticisms of Israel.
* Science Fiction and Fantasy by Palestinian Authors.
* They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy. 27 possible voter fraud cases in 3 million Wisconsin ballots. What if the Renegade Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won? Republicans Want You To Forget January 6 Ever Happened.
* Some Republicans may talk the talk, but this one walks the walk.
* How UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington. How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers.
* California climate refugees. Indigenous Land Management Is The Solution to the Wildfire Crisis. World’s largest iceberg, nearly four times size of New York City, forms in Antarctica. If these trends continue…
* Indigenous Cinema and the Limits of Auteurism.
* How could anyone doubt it? “Generous” Billionaires Are Part of the Problem.
* Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge. For Colleges, Vaccine Mandates Often Depend on Which Party Is in Power. Why Did a University Suspend Its Mandatory Diversity Course? Conservatives Control Public Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill Edition. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure. The Real Reason UNC–Chapel Hill Is Withholding Tenure From Nikole Hannah-Jones. A Statement from the UNC AAUP. Guess Who’s Coming to the Lecture?
* ‘I am seeking justice’: Tulsa massacre survivor, 107, testifies to US Congress.
* Decolonizing Education: A Conversation with Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
* #ReleaseTheSteinbeckWerewolfThing.
* Has science fiction become too serious? Apocalypse movies need to imagine climate solutions, too.
* Bring on the Forgotten Realms!
* Bring on the Summer Slowdown!
* And I think I linked this one before, but we’re in the endgame now.
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
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…
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21
- My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
- Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
- Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’ - Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
- And the obvious Plan B.
- CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
- Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
- ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
- Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
- In praise of The Life Aquatic.
- Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
- “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
- Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
- What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
- LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
- War by Other Means.
- Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
- Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
- Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
- 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
- Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
- ‘The Agile College.’
- How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
- The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
- We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
- Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
- The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
- Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
- How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
- The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
- An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
- The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
- Frozen and Queer Coding.
- California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
- Who really created the Marvel Universe?
- Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
- Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
- How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
- Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
- Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
- The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
- Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
- The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
- From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
- A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
- Behold: the megacycle!
- Okay this just seems mean.
- And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.
Tuesday Links!
* Something I wrote a few years back about Black Panther has finally popped up at Mayday: “Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda.”
* And Grad School Vonnegut #10 is up, on “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and Watchmen with Adam Kotsko. I’m proud of the tweet hyping it.
* SFRA is seeking a web director. The Huntington has a new Octavia E. Butler research fellowship. World Science Fiction Studies is still seeking proposals for the 2021 book prize.
* CFP: Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF. Call for Papers: Serious Play. CFP: “Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future?”
* This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!
* For the second year in a row, George R.R. Martin has managed to make the Hugos all about him.
* The Coronavirus Pandemic, Science Fiction, and the Contingent Nature of Roads. Last and First Men review – eerie sounds and unearthly images from a posthuman world. Apocalypse Then, Now—and Future? “Nostalgia for the Future”: Projecting a Post-Disability Image through Retro-Futuristic Aesthetics in Viktoria Modesta’s “Prototype.” The Name of This Feeling Is Revolution: On David Mitchell’s “Utopia Avenue.”
* CDC predicts up to 11,000 people will die every week this month from coronavirus. CDC Predicts Grim Future. Young people are infecting older family members with coronavirus in multigenerational homes. Survivors of Covid-19 show increased rate of psychiatric disorders, study finds. One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren’t hospitalized have long-term illness. Lasting heart damage could be COVID-19’s legacy for some non-hospitalized survivors. How the Pandemic Defeated America. Vermont, History, and the Coronavirus. After Plummeting, the Virus Soars Back in the Midwest. We Just Have to Assume the Monster Is Everywhere. Every Decision Is A Risk. Every Risk Is A Decision. We Need to Talk about Ventilation. Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine.
* In late July academia changed its mind about the fall term. Covid Tests and Quarantines: Colleges Brace for an Uncertain Fall. The Risk That Students Could Arrive at School With the Coronavirus. ‘The virus beat us’: Colleges are increasingly going online for fall 2020 semester as COVID-19 cases rise. Email From Columbia Admin Requests That Graduate Students And Faculty Reconsider Teaching Solely Online, Gives Three Days To Decide. UO is reopening dorms at full capacity *and* keeping their on-campus housing requirement. North Carolina colleges and universities reported COVID-19 cases on campus. More Than 6,600 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges. The largest school district in Georgia reported Sunday that 260 employees have tested positive for the coronavirus or are in quarantine because of possible exposure as they prepare for the new school year. Staff in a district in Arizona is already 11% positive. Officials say the student attended part of the first day of school Thursday. Outbreak at Fraternity Row. UNC Tenured Faculty Tell Students to Stay Home Amid COVID Concerns: ‘It Is Not Safe for You to Come to Campus.’ Colleges Seek Waivers From Risk-Taking Students. “This is the worst, biggest crisis we have ever gone through UWM.” Let’s Look at the Numbers. Teachers Are Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction Too. Will Kids Follow the New Pandemic Rules at School? ‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail.’ 9 ways America is having the wrong conversation about ‘reopening’ schools. How to Stop Magical Thinking in School Reopening Plans. Think school kids won’t be hurt by COVID-19? Experiences from the 1918–19 flu say otherwise. Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic.
* And on the homefront: Whitefish Bay school board approves plan to start school year with in-person and virtual learning. Marquette Wire: MU must offer remote learning, teaching options for fall semester.
* Essential or Expendable? Working in Higher Education during COVID-19.
* ‘We are being gaslit’: College football and Covid-19 are imperiling athletes. On a call with SEC leaders, worried football players pushed back: ‘Not good enough.’ Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX. Colorado universities are increasingly losing money on sports as coaches’ pay, recruitment costs rise.
* Wild @Sciencing_Bi hoax ends in absolutely wild fashion.
* U.S. Economy Drops 32.9% In Worst GDP Report Ever. At least someone’s getting rich. NYC small businesses now closing for good. The Virus Turns Midtown Into a Ghost Town, Causing an Economic Crisis. These Businesses Lasted Decades. The Virus Closed Them for Good. Beach towns fear they won’t survive a summer of COVID-19. No football in Green Bay would be economic, emotional blow. America needs a bar and restaurant bailout. Self-employed Wisconsinites wait for word on unemployment payments. ‘Coronavirus has stolen our future’: young people’s despair as jobs evaporate. America.jpg. United States May Lose One-third of All Museums, New Survey Shows. Dunkin’s as Bellweather. Activism against evictions in New Orleans. As Pandemic Rages, the United States Slashes an Economic Lifeline. The incompetent criminals ruling the U.S. are about to push millions of Americans off a terrifying financial cliff. How the eviction crisis across the U.S. will look. The Pandemic Makes the Case for Sweeping Reform.
* Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All.
* Americans Aren’t Making Babies, and That’s Bad for the Economy. I guess the “baby boom or divorce boom” folks have their answer…
* How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air.” Kushner’s COVID-19 Team Ended Plan For Nationwide Testing Because They Didn’t Want To Help Blue States.
* Study: Men More Likely Than Women to Back COVID Conspiracies.
* Disgusting effort from the Manhattan DA office to drag the Trump name through the mud. Know Your Enemy. Nearly everyone believes that Trump can be reelected in November but almost no one believes he’ll do so with the support of a majority of the voting public. DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents. Census Door Knocking Cut A Month Short Amid Pressure To Finish Count. Destroying the Postal Service for Fun and Profit. As Trump leans into attacks on mail voting, GOP officials confront signs of Republican turnout crisis. Pregaming the Coming November Trainwreck. How Trump Could Steal the Election. Warning Statement on the Potential for Mass Atrocities in the United States.
* Because it never stops being relevant: Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism.
* This TikTok thing is just nuts.
* Counterfactual Criticism: Watchmen, Witch Armies, and Asking TV for More.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* Neo-Nazis Infilitrate the Police in Germany.
* The gender-neutral b’nai mitzvah.
* U.S. Missionary With No Medical Training Settles Suit Over Child Deaths At Her Center.
* Pewaukee priest once accused of sexual assault of a minor free to return to church.
* Miracles and wonders: uniQure Begins First-in-Human Gene Therapy Trials for Huntington’s Disease.
* Zelda recipe appears in serious novel by serious author after rushed Google search. This really hits home — my dissertation had an entire chapter on Zelda Fitzgerald I had to take out at the very last minute.
* On the local beat: What happened at Comet Cafe?
* What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Is on Fire. It’s at least double.
* What sort of weird late-period William Gibson bullshit is this?
* Is This the End of Writing in Cafés?
* Did a Goblin King write this?
* Remember when Google was useful?
* Former Deadspin staffers launch Defector, a new worker-owned media company.
* The DA’s Office Is Reviewing Hundreds of Cases Linked to (Just) 3 LAPD Officers.
* Michigan Today profiles Saladin Ahmed and his Dearborn-based superhero Starling.
* The headline reads, “Human sperm roll like ‘playful otters’ as they swim, study finds, contradicting centuries-old beliefs.”
* The X2 Cast Allegedly Almost Quit the Marvel Film Over Bryan Singer.
* The ‘Star Trek’ Saga: How the Starship Enterprise Almost Landed in Las Vegas.
* When Black People Appear on Seinfeld.
* And Forrest MacNeil reviews living through a pandemic.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
* And imagine going back in time.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
* No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
* How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
* The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
* South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
* Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
* Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
* She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
* In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
* This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
* And there’s no idea so bad you can’t make it worse.
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!
* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.
* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.
* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.
* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.
* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.
* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.
* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.
* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.
* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.
* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.
* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.
* Let’s talk about peeing in space.
* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.
* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!
* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.
* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.
* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.
* Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.
Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.
* ‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.
* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.
* But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.
* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.
* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.
* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”
* To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.
* Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.
* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.
* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.
https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985
* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.
* Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.
* Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.
* It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.
* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.
* What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.
* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.
* How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.
* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.
* For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.
* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.
* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.
* Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!
* The end of the Supreme Court.
* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.
* The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?
* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.
* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.
* In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.
* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.
* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.
* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.
Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.
* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”
* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.
* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.
* MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.
* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.
* Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.
* Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.
* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.
* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.
* Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.
* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”
* The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.
* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.
* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.
* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.
* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.
* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!
* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!
* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.
* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.
* How the retweet ruined the Internet.
* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.
* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.
* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.
* A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”
* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.
* How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.
* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.
* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.
* Sexism and the car crash dummy.
* Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.
* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!
* It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.
* Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.
* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”
* I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.
* The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.
* He did.
* And the good news is: We can’t lose!
Gerry Canavan 