Posts Tagged ‘posthumanism’
Thursday Night Links!
- The local AAUP’s fundraiser for an independent audit at Marquette funded so quickly I barely even had a chance to promote it.
- Meanwhile, Marquette in the news! Demographic Realism and the Crisis of Higher Education.
- The attack on the humanities, especially at less selective universities, is a violation of some of the basic premises of undergraduate education, argue Mary Beth Norton and James Grossman.
- The Academic Concept Conservative Lawmakers Love to Hate.
- As Colleges Strive for a Return to Normal, Students With Disabilities Say, ‘No Thanks.’
- Why Doomsday Hasn’t Happened. Most colleges averted financial disaster. But the pandemic will still have a lasting impact.
- Alison Clark Efford describes the value of setting aside time in each class with her graduate students to discuss the humanities, careers and the good life.
- Look who’s being deprofessionalized now? Phylicia Rashad named dean at Howard University.
- Faculty Moral Distress about Pandemic Teaching.
- Journal of Posthumanism has launched. CFP for issue two!
- Failed state watch: Target to Halt Pokémon Card Sales ‘Out of an Abundance of Caution.’
Drastic as the decision may seem, particularly given that Pokémon cards aren’t the only things people wait in line for hours to buy, it comes days following a fight in a Brookfield, Wisconsin Target’s parking lot in which four people attacked a man, who then pulled his legally-owned gun on his assailants, prompting them to flee before later being arrested by the police. Target’s decision also comes just weeks after the company implemented new policies to curtail people camping out overnight at their stores. Beyond telling people not to line up like this, an alleged note to employees asked them to consider calling the police in order to force people to disperse.
- Elsewhere in my failed state: Wauwatosa PD’s high value target internal investigation.
- You and me both, kid. Bunny, the dog that can “talk,” starts asking existential questions.
- These days, he argues, most of Israel’s leadership falls into what he terms the “annexation” camp or the “control” camp. Israel’s Violence Shows Why Now Is the Time for BDS. The end of the green line.
- This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy.
- Breaking. NBC News confirms: The CDC will announce that Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID no longer need to wear masks or physically distance, indoors or outdoors in almost all circumstances. Elsewhere on the COVID beat: a hilarious troll.
- A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?
- The Real Reason Behind the Misinformation Epidemic in Online Moms’ Groups.
- A GOP Civil War? Don’t Bet On It.
- Joe Manchin’s surprisingly bold proposal to fix America’s voting rights problem. Reminds me a certain other Joe…
- Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet. Only if it turns out after a few years that it’s made up of ground-up animals and after a few more years of transactions will take up all the biomass of Planet Earth!
- The Intelligent Forest.
- 2050 Is Closer Than 1990.
- How the computer broke the human body.
- Once more for safety, the Problem of Susan.
- Untitled Earth Sim 64.
- Who Should John Mulaney Be Now?
- Dark Souls in the dark night of the soul.
- Cory Doctorow mega-thread on The Ministry for the Future.
- All of man’s dreams turn to ash: The Jenga sublime.
- The only CEO I trust.
- Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…
* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.
* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.
* USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.
* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.
* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.
* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.
* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.
* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.
* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.
* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.
* Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.
* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.
* 9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.
* Are You Overpraising Your Child?
* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.
* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.
* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?
* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”
* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.
* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.
* Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.
* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.
* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.
* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.
* The Evolution of Ransomware.
* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.
* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.
* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.
* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.
* How UFO culture took over America.
* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.
* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!
* (Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.
* What about the bad job offers?
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.
* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’
* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.
* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.
* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.
* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.
Also Happening at Marquette: “Transhumanism: Narratives and Implications”
Another thing I’ve been developing is an informal, zero-credit seminar on transhumanism with Kate Hayles, who was on my dissertation committee once upon a time and who is visiting Marquette this semester. We had our first meeting on Monday and it was a delight; I’m really looking forward to the rest of it. Here’s a tiny writeup and the schedule of readings…
Transhumanism: Narratives and Implications
Every other Monday, Fall 2018, 9-10 AM, beginning September 10
Cudahy 114
Gerry Canavan and Katherine Hayles
This zero-credit seminar is offered to explore one of the most generative and widely influential ideas of our time: transhumanism. Although it has various expressions, transhumanism in general refers to the idea that human evolution is incomplete and will soon take an unprecedented turn at the Singularity, the point at which humans develop a technologically enhanced intelligence that far surpasses their own cognitive powers. This could be a biological being sufficiently enhanced to count as a different species, an artificial intelligence, or some combination of the two. This imagined future poses several urgent questions for humanities scholars. Is further evolution of humans through technology desirable? Is it inevitable? How might it be resisted or controlled? What is likely to be the nature of transhuman beings, and how will they relate to present-day humans? What will be the human(as distinct from the posthuman or the transhuman) future? What ethical concerns should guide future research into transhumanism? These and other issues will form the focus for our readings, film viewings, and discussion. Because the course is non-credit, we will meet every other week to keep the workload at a reasonable level.
This course is sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities and the Association of Marquette University Women in Humanistic Studies; it is open to students, staff, faculty, and community members. Please contact Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@marquette.edu) for registration and access to the readings.
September 10
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, “Paths to Superintelligence,” pp. 26-61;Steve Shaviro, No Speed Limit, “Introduction to Accelerationism,” pp. 1-24; Andrew Pilsch, Transhumanism, “Introduction,” pp. 1-24.
September 24
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan (print novel).
October 8
Ex Machina(film, to be viewed in advance of our meeting)
October 22
Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street(comic)
November 5
Ted Chiang, “Understand” (short story)
Nalo Hopkinson, “A Habit of Waste” (short story)
November 19
Transcendental Man(documentary, to be viewed in advance of our meeting)
December 3
Final meeting and general discussion
Wednesday Links!
* Some current calls for papers: Science Fiction and Communism. Beyond Humanism. Sesame Street at 50.
* Coming soon to Marquette! The Center for the Advancement of the Humanities will host Adam Kotsko on Feb. 15th at 3:30 p.m. in Marquette Hall 105, as he discusses “Animated Nihilism: RickandMorty, BoJackHorseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* My favorite weird found-poetry I’ve discovered on this trip: in Switzerland and Germany first-person shooters are called “ego shooters.”
* My favorite thing on the Internet in a long, long time: Rey and Kylo set to just about every song you’ve ever heard of.
* Star Trek: Discovery is exciting, but not much else.
To put it another way, if this was just called Discovery, if the serial numbers were filled off and this was just another science fiction show with aliens and parallel universes and FTL drives, I doubt we’d be talking about it. It would be significantly less annoying in some ways (my brain would appreciate not having to fit any of this into continuity, that’s for damn sure), but it would be far more forgettable—a pretty, messy piece of nonsense with some decent performances and occasionally unexpected story twists. Hell, maybe we’d like it more, if only because our standards would be lower and it would still be possible to convince ourselves that someday, this would all make sense.
io9 was even harsher, if anything. I’m still a fan of the series but the extremely poor plotting of the second half of season one has made complete hash of their very promising initial setup. It’s much harder for me to argue the series is genuinely good, as opposed to liking it because it is Star Trek and I like pretty much everything Star Trek.
* Advice from a Contingent Faculty Member on Career Directions for PhDs in English.
* Sam and Max Hit the Road: The Design Document. What a great game that was.
* “A fascinating new kind of job that only a human can do: robot babysitter.”
* The myth of America’s immigration problem.
* Beautiful Coal and Disastrous Droughts.
* Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it. Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse: The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State.
* If your highest value is the preservation of American institutions, the avoidance of “dysfunction,” the discourse of norm erosion makes sense. If it’s democracy, not so much. Sometimes democracy requires the shattering of norms and institutions. Democracy, we might even say, is a permanent project of norm erosion, forever shattering the norms of hierarchy and domination and the political forms that aid and abet them.
* What does living in a dictatorship feel like?
* Cixin Liu and Chinese science fiction, in the London Review of Books.
* The Voynich Manuscript has been cracked again. Everybody take a drink!
* Sic semper: Twilight of Chief Wahoo.
* Huge, if true: some millennials think James Bond could be sexist.
* Emma, the fifteen-second horror movie.
* Here’s What One Day In The Dysfunction Of Restoring Puerto Rico’s Electricity Looks Like. FEMA To End Food And Water Aid For Puerto Rico.
* ICE Deports Palestinian Man Living In The U.S. For Almost 40 Years Despite Outcry. Father detained by ICE after dropping 4-year-old off at daycare. 2 dads nabbed by ICE as they drop off kids at NJ school; 3rd takes shelter in church. Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is a recipe for national decline.
* Even By Our Awful Standards, Americans Have Basically Stopped Saving Money.
* CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work.
* An ER visit, a $12,000 bill — and a health insurer that wouldn’t pay.
* Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person.
* The future just ain’t no good.
* “In honor of the new Mr. Rogers biopic, here’s his Marquette Commencement address from 2001.”
* A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.
* Why Reddit’s face-swapping celebrity porn craze is a harbinger of dystopia.
* The life of the mind. Working at university in 2016. Statement of teaching philosophy.
* Of course you had me at a Civilisation V mod about the risk of superintelligent AI.
* And happy birthday, old friend.
Weekend Links!
* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”
* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!
* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.
* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…
* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.
* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.
* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.
* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.
* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.
* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.
* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.
* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”
* The female price of male pleasure.
* The gig economy and sexual harassment.
* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.
* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.
* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.
* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.
* Oh no.
* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.
* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.
* A world without Holocaust survivors.
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.
* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.
* On the greatness of Swastika Night.
* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.
* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.
Thursday Night Links!
* New Photo Seems To Prove Amelia Earhart Survived Plane Crash, Was Captured By Japanese.
* If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45 a.m. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Impossibly Hungry Judges.
* Free download: Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America.
* On My High School Obsession with UFOs.
* It’s in the National Review — and it describes a phenomenon at work in many departments along many political axes — but this piece describes a problem academics should take more seriously than they do. This is probably the most crimethink intellectual position I hold.
* Head of Office of Government Ethics resigns, sending President Trump a serious message. The message is “you can do whatever you want and nobody will stop you.”
* 4 dumb ideas that centrist Democrats simply adore.
* Mark Penn has been giving shitty advice for literally forever. But don’t worry, we’ve got this.
* Meet the populist Wisconsin Democrat looking to dethrone Paul Ryan.
* But in truth the Declaration wasn’t quite the singular achievement we remember it to be. As it turns out, nearly 100 other “declarations of independence” had already been issued in the months leading up to July 4th, 1776, by states, towns, counties, and assorted other bodies. The Declaration of Independence endorsed at the Continental Congress that July wasn’t a bolt out of the blue: It was more like a final draft in a loose, many-centered, wide-ranging process, authored not by one man but by a chorus of voices in a fledgling nation whose people had caught independence fever and were suddenly proclaiming it with contagious enthusiasm.
* Hobby Lobby Agrees to Forfeit 5,500 Artifacts Smuggled Out of Iraq.
* No SWAT Zone: Resisting police militarization under Trump.
* Mom Feared Beating by United Employees — So She Gave Up Toddler Son’s $1000 Seat to Standby Passenger. It’s clear the time has come for United to be abolished.
* Rick Perry left his smart-guy glasses at home today. Check out 2nd Term SS 1970.
* Arizona Court Overturns In-State Tuition for Some Immigrants.
* Facebook and Google gobble ’99 per cent of new digital ad cash.’ Media buyers warn Facebook viewability ‘diabolical and horrible.’ Taxonomy of Humans According to Twitter.
* Easily the most boundary-pushing, offensive path they should have chosen: South Park to Lay Off Trump Jokes, Focus on Childhood Antics.
* The poverty of expanded universes: Man, Rey and BB-8 Went Through a Lot During Their One Night on Jakku.
* This is how climate change will shift the world’s cities.
* When your book only sells sixty copies. Don’t tell me what to do. Or, the utopian impulse. And they hated Jesus because he told them the truth.
Monday Morning Links!
* In Milwaukee, I lived two lives. On the East Side was the liberal Catholic school I attended for nine years; on the North Side was everything else. Dateline Milwaukee: Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation. Some Lesser Known Justice Facts about Milwaukee and Wisconsin. And a more positive Milwaukee profile: How Milwaukee Shook Off the Rust: The Midwestern hub reclaimed some of its industrial glory by doing a surprising thing. It cleaned up.
* Google’s response to inquiries was chilling: “Google News Archive no longer has permission to display this content.” Entire Google archive of more than a century of stories is gone. Why?
* A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
* Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse. Special congratulations to N.K. Jemisin, whose The Fifth Season I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and to Nnedi Okorafar, whose “Binti” I have read already and is fantastic. Relatedly, Abigail Nussbaum asks: Do the Hugos actually need saving?
* In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.
* This seems like a pretty big deal: Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail.
* U.S. Army only fudged its accounts by mere trillions of dollars, auditor finds.
* An Indiana City Is Poised To Become The Next Flint.
* Another late-summer syllabus: Problems in Posthumanism. #WelfareReformSyllabus. And a study guide for a world without police.
* “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world. I may have half my squad there for hours.”
* Ranking the Most (and Least) Diverse Colleges in America. Marquette sneaks in at #86, while my alma mater Case Western is a surprisingly high #40 and Duke gets #32.
* The strangeness of deep time.
* “The jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. In other words, only the best-educated humans will compete with machines,” Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist, told Pew. “And education systems in the US and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what is told to them, preparing them for life in a 20th century factory.” Nothing can stop Judgment Day, but with the liberal arts you just might have a chance of surviving it…
* 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you.
* Hot.
* Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’saislados, as isolated people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of his tribe.
* The poet and activist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
* Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore.
* Pittsburgh and the birth of the self-driving car.
While people around the world will no doubt continue to project various fantasies onto the tiny island republic, the fact remains that Iceland has yet to see any surge in left mobilization comparable to that in Portugal and Greece — or even the more modest adjustments being made inside the two trans-Atlantic establishment left-liberal parties in the form of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns.
* This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP.
* 88 College Taglines, Arranged as a Poem.
Lang will reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch, Avatar’s villain who appeared definitively dead at the end of the film after taking several huge Na’vi arrows through his chest. Despite that setback, Quaritch is expected to be resurrected in some way and will appear in all the remaining sequels.
Eywa* save us all.
* Reader, I googled it.
* Lovecraft and suburbia and Stranger Things.
* Anyway, the point I’d like you to take away from this is that while it’s really hard to say “sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible”, the smart money says that it’s extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We’d need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances … and that’s for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.
* I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
* My new favorite Twitter bot: @dungeon_junk.
* Viacom is hemorrhaging money, in part on the basis of the struggling Star Trek (and Ninja Turtles, and Ben Hur) reboot franchises.
* Friend acquires a lot of cheese. What to do with it?
* And of course you had me at Historic Midcentury Modernist Motels of the New Jersey Coast.
Wednesday Wega-Links!
* Ken Burns presents: The Humanities.
* My Pop Culture Series might have to be all Harry-Potter-themed this fall: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child comes out in July, then the Fantastic Beasts screenplay in November…
* I was hoping the other magic schools wouldn’t have four houses. But just tell me which one is Ravenclaw and get it over with.
* Something happens to you out there: Astronauts and the Overview Effect.
…administrators have effectively developed a hidden curriculum that they exclusively control to further sideline the faculty. Never mind that the courses offered in this hidden curriculum focus on life skills and various types of political indoctrination related to race, gender, and ethnicity, subjects that the deanlets and deanlings are hardly qualified to teach. Add to this, speech, civility and anti-harassment codes, which administrators use with great effectiveness to silence faculty and student critics who interfere with administrative designs. These same administrators often rely upon outside agencies and licensure groups to discipline the faculty with outside assessment measures, threatening the faculty with the school’s possible loss of accreditation. Administrators often interfere with well-running programs, attempting to change their structure to the point of ensuring their failure.
* Banned instructor sues Inver Hills Community College, saying he was defamed. Just incredible.
* Political science department chair Eric Schickler said in an email that there was no longer a bond of mutual trust between faculty and the administration. He added that there were concerns among faculty that major donors were being steered toward supporting the Berkeley Global Campus project in Richmond rather than core campus research and teaching missions. “Shared governance requires a shared vision and shared trust between faculty and those at the top,” Schickler said. “Many of us believe that the chancellor’s poor decisions have eroded that trust to the breaking point.”
* Call for Provocations: Stealing from the University – extended deadline.
This is our first call for provocations that demand we go beyond familiar complaints and challenge ourselves to organize. Recent student-led uprisings at Missouri, Ohio State, Duke, Appalachian State, and UC Davis, among many others, open up possibilities of re-purposing university-based resources for radical movements. How can we take the relay from these uprisings to expand insurgent practices of studying-in-movement?
* And it looks like it’s that time of the semester again: “Should I go to grad school in the humanities?”
* Dark Posthumanism: The Weird Template.
* When Teller directed The Tempest.
* Today in exciting political developments: Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader as a Delegate in California. At least nothing else incredibly dangerous and destabilizing is happening!
* West Virginia is neither a secret socialist stronghold nor a racist fever-dream. It is one of several bleeding edges of a sharply unequal country, where people who never had much are feeling as pressed as they can remember ever being. Some are bigots. Many are not. Some, no doubt, find that Trump’s cocktail of arrogance and disgust, grievance and triumphalism, reassuringly resembles their own psychic survival strategies, blown up into world-historical dimensions. Others are voting for the socialist for the same reason they voted for the Chicago community organizer: a desire for a more equal society, born out of the lived experience of inequality. Maybe future organizing and leadership, like the decades-long fight that first built the unions and the Democratic party in the coalfields, will show that they are not alone in that. What West Virginia Is Saying.
* Data visualization in the Anthropocene.
* One in five of world’s plant species at risk of extinction. Sea Level Rise Is Here, And Is Gobbling Up Islands.
* Sold in the room: Philip K. Dick Is Getting an Anthology Show, Courtesy of Bryan Cranston and Ronald D. Moore. Elsewhere in TV news: Locke & Key! Uh, Wheel of Time, I guess? Krypton, really?
* And elsewhere in PKD news: One of the TAs in an Artificial Intelligence Class Was Actually an A.I.
* How Do You Put Out A Subterranean Fire Beneath A Mountain Of Trash? Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Oof.
* And oof.
* Our Awful Prisons: How They Can Be Changed.
* The one thing rich parents do for their kids that makes all the difference. The answer may shock you!
* This GIF of pre-CGI superhero jumps proves actors are just okay at jumping. The best thing on the Internet this year.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Poor People Don’t Stand A Chance In Court.
* Huge, if true: School principal: ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ cause brain damage.
* Someone’s been watching too much Game of Thrones: “Ultimately, There Is No Narrative without Death.”
* Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy.
* If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. A reply.
If those text reproduce ideology, and therefore reproduce empire’s projects of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism, then we can’t just say “nothing is intrinsically wrong.” We in fact have to be open to the notion that these texts are entangled in the most violent, destructive ideas in world history. That they are rooted in whiteness and what whiteness meant in those moments: the right to murder and steal and subjugate.
* Civilization 6 Has Been Announced And It’s Out This Year.
* The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Have Had Marvel Comics’ Most Fucked-Up Superhero Romance.
Wednesday Links!
* Call for Papers, UWM/Marquette Graduate Student Humanities Conference: “Conflict and Liberation.”
* Call for Papers: Posthuman Futures.
* Your SF short film of the week: “Stealing Time.”
Fail safe systems in the weapons mostly worked
Uh, mostly?
and none of the four bombs experienced a nuclear reaction upon impact, sparing the region and its hundreds of inhabitants from multiple nuclear blasts that would’ve dwarfed the explosion over Hiroshima. “Only a fortunate stroke of luck saved the Spanish population of the area from catastrophe,” a Soviet official said at the time.
well that’s good
But the conventional high explosives on two of the bombs did detonate, essentially turning those weapons into dirty bombs that blasted plutonium radiation across the countryside.
oh
* Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis.
Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”
* Detroit’s Teachers Want You to See These Disturbing Photos of Their Toxic Schools.
* The Color of Surveillance: What an infamous abuse of power teaches us about the modern spy era.
* This is the exam from a class that MLK taught at Morehouse in the early 1960s.
* So you want to read Infinite Jest.
* These 11 laws are what keep space from becoming the wild west.
* America’s Other Original Sin.
* The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.
* Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds. ‘I Am Drowning.’ The Voices of People With Medical Debt.
* The Nation: Bernie Sanders for President.
* And in anti-endorsements: Sanders and Reparations. Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism.
* Jay Edidin on his recent top surgery.
* HBO to air the rarely seen Godfather Epic cutting Parts I and II together.
* Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed.
* “Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.
“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’”
* “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Weird! Kooky! Zany!
* “In Oklahoma, now the country’s earthquake capital…”
* Steven Moffat reveals the BBC almost canceled Doctor Who in 2009.
* Young People Used These Absurd Little Cards to Get Laid in the 19th Century.
* A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam.
* Former Nazi Medical Orderly to Stand Trial for Deaths of 3,681 People at Auschwitz.
* Writing is hard: “Shut up, Wesley!” did irreparable damage to Wesley Crusher’s role in TNG.
* Unbreakable! They alive, damnit!
* Why Is Sperm So Damn Expensive?
* A 120,000-Piece Lego Model of the Titanic Breaking in Half.
* The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne.
Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.
* I don’t know why I’ll watch basically anything involving Pee Wee Herman, but.
* ‘Man flu’ is real. I’m taking the month off.
* Synergy killed the Fantastic Four.
* The Weird Way That Standing (Not Walking) on Escalators Helps Move People More Quickly.
* Race and gifted and talented programs.
* News you can use from the Financial Post: Here’s how to crush student activists once they become your employee.
* The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained.
* Is it still possible to get away with a heist?
* And for real though this is aliens.
Gerry Canavan 