Tuesday Links!

* A new Modern Masters of Science Fiction volume is out: Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones. Check it out!

* The Tiptree Award Motherboard has issued a lengthy statement on why they won’t be renaming the prize.

* Podcast alert! Keywords of Capitalism with John Patrick Leary.

* Natalia Cecire on “cursed” as an aesthetic category.

* It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness — its energy, innovation, and abundance — except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity: the monumental folly of our age.

* Expert predicts 25% of colleges will “fail” in the next 20 years.

* More honest Latin mottoes for your overrated university.

* Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age.

Adjunct instructors at my university don't get paid until October 31. School started on August 26. Happy Labor Day.

— Mark Doyle (@DrMarkDoyle) September 2, 2019

* Why don’t doctors trust women? Because so much of the research was done only on men.

* Another US visa holder was denied entry over someone else’s messages.

* Trump trails Democrats by a historically large margin. That’s why they call him the Comeback Kid!

* The Senate suddenly looks like it’s up for grabs in 2020.

* The world promised to double its green energy R&D from 2015-2020. Sadly, no sign of this happening (2015 at $16bn, 2018 at $17bn). Still got a few months!

Simply put: Grand Bahama Island is currently enduring one of the most catastrophic 24-hour periods of weather in recorded world history.

The people there are going to need years, if not decades to recover. https://t.co/lCieDg7S4W

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) September 2, 2019

* I realize I have barely stopped complaining for four months, but I honestly think that if anything we should be talking even more about how Marvel’s first two phases gave us one female superhero each, the token woman on each of their two teams (nothing so much as a solo movie, don’t be silly, we had to wait ten years for that), and in the culmination of the Infinity Saga, both of those women were thrown off a cliff.

* “Common Mistakes Guys Make When Approaching Women Who Are Wearing Headphones.”

* “After pressure, PayPal takes down Ku Klux Klan donation account.”

* “Harvard Freshman, Ismail Ajjawi, Admitted Into U.S. After Being Denied Entry.” Imagine how hard this would be if you didn’t have Harvard in your corner!

* America can’t talk about labor, part 89: There are 91,000 professional home aides in New York City. There are 50,000 coal miners in the United States of America.

* Hand surgeons agree: hand surgeons should be paid 4.5 billion dollars per surgery.

* Ron Fellows played cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Raiders from 1981–1988. He intercepted 19 passes and scored three touchdowns, including two on interception returns. Now 61 years old and living in Sacramento, Calif., Fellows suffers from Alzheimer’s, and his cognition is gradually declining. What follows is a description of life from the perspective of Debra Fellows, Ron’s wife since 2002, as told to Dom Cosentino. My Husband Is Dying Every Day.

* ROMs and Mappers: Why NES Games Can Be So Different On The Same Hardware.

* Abolish Uber.

* Side hustles of the music industry.

* Follow an exorcist’s advice and you’ll never see a demon in your life.

* With a trusted information source like the Pentagon on the case, fake news doesn’t stand a chance!

* Another new Twitter account to love: reporting the absolute risk increase alongside the relative risk increase of various mundane activities.

RELATIVE RISK INCREASE: 200%

ABSOLUTE RISK INCREASE: 0.6%https://t.co/dv8EVedPit

— RelativelyRisky (@justsaysrisks) July 2, 2019

* “I’m going to die,” Stevens cried later. “Yeah, I know,” Reneau said.

* And I don’t know much, but I do know Wisconsin will break your heart.

Post *All* the Links

A big post, catching up from most of last week:

* With the success of 2009’s “District 9” still fresh in their minds, producers are cherry-picking South African sci-fi properties, making it one of hottest genres this side of Swedish crime fiction.

* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.

* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.

* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.

* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.

* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”

* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.

* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.

* Colbert vs. Colbert.

* Matt Taibbi vs. Iowa.

And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.

* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.

* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.

* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.

* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.

* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.

* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”

* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.

* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.

* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.

* “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” Kant wrote, “no straight thing was ever made.” Not even an iPad.

* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.

* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.

* What if Obama loses?

* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.

People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.

But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”

So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.

* A Q&A with Louis C.K.

* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.

* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.

* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.

* How to Get a Nuclear Bomb.

* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.

* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”

* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!

* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.

* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.