Posts Tagged ‘pregnancy’
Lost in January Links
* Out now: Extrapolation Volume 62.3 explores the representation of cyborgs in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, care in Gen Urobuchi’s science-fiction, and the critique of Western technoscience in Welcome to Night Vale.
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: Neurodiversity and Disability. CFP: Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture.
* Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? Notes on Squeecore. Portrait of the Author As a Component of a “Punk-Or-Core” Formulation. Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed. The sci-fi genre offering radical hope for living better.
* Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature.
* Notes on the Forum of the Simulacra.
* How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.
* How climate catastrophe has consumed popular culture. Ride or Die? Mark Bould and the Fast-and-Furiocene.
* Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock.” Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us. Coming back from a time of illness: how finance can learn from climate change fiction. Melancholy Utopianism: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We Can’t Just Grow Our Way Out of This Climate Mess.
* Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise.
* Pop culture can no longer ignore our climate reality.
* Marvel Movies Made 30% Of The Total Box Office.
* Nnedi Okorafor on SF through an African Lens.
* The Matrix Resurrections and trans life (and death). Unpacking the Hidden Meanings in The Matrix Resurrections. A Muddle instead of a Movie.
* Games Studies Studies Buddies is such a good podcast and this is an exemplary episode. Like and subscribe!
* Joss Whedon fully burns down what’s left of his career. The Joss Whedon Era: A Look Back.
* Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.
* Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
* From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry.
* California’s Forever Fire.
* California, Arizona and Nevada agree to take less water from ailing Colorado River.
* The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record. The Oceans Are Now Hotter Than At Any Point in Human History, Scientists Warn. Here’s how hot Earth has been since you were born. The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment. US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, Noaa report says.
* As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave. How Did We Go From Stimulus Checks to “Go to Work With COVID”?
* The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism. Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens.
* Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection: The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
* Ultras.
* Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump. The January Sixers Have Their Own Unit at the DC Jail. Here’s What Life Is Like Inside. The January 6th Republicans (from Jonah Goldberg no less). Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes charged with seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The Rise and Fall of Latinx.
* Don’t Look Up Is a Terrible Movie. Really bad. I ranted.
* The Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’. Why ‘Star Trek’ made San Francisco the center of the universe.
* A Grieving Family Wonders: What if They Had Known the Medical History of Sperm Donor 1558?
* Percentage that would visit the Moon as a tourist, if money were not a factor.
* On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism.
* The end of the pandemic? Study: Omicron associated with 91% reduction in risk of death compared to Delta. Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble. America’s COVID Rules Are a Dumpster Fire. We are the 3.2%.
* School Closures Led to More Sleep and Better Quality of Life for Adolescents. After last year’s learning loss, we need a plan for students with disabilities. Ideology and school closings. Who is this gentleman, Dude?
* The Mangle of Federalism.
* Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students.
* Becoming Martian.
* Last Year’s Longest Strike Just Ended in Victory.
* Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges.
* Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others.
* This Is the Way the Humanities End.
* A professor welcomed students to class by calling them ‘vectors of disease to me.’ He has been suspended.
* These Tenured Professors Were Laid Off. Here’s How They Got Their Jobs Back.
* So you want to work in academic publishing.
* As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth.
* US inflation reached 7% in December as prices rise at rates unseen in decades.
* Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: ‘The party has turned its back on the working class.’
* A simple plan to solve all of America’s problem.
* Sea Power, ‘Disco Elysium’, and the importance of being miserable.
* HBO’s Station Eleven Surpasses the Novel.
* Oh boy, they’re finally rebooting Quantum Leap.
* I’d never known this: Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile.
* Wes Anderson’s next sounds like another mistake.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly.
* ‘Invincible’ Animated Series Sparks Profits Suit Against Robert Kirkman.
* What Elmo’s Viral Moment Tells Us About How Parents Watch Kids’ TV.
* A people’s history of the Beatles logo.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Is a Terrible Masterpiece.
* The Wire as copraganda.
* BEHOLD! MEGA-MANHATTAN!
* The Strange Literary Puzzle Only Four People Have Ever Solved. And welcome to the Wordle century.
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.
Not CoronavirME — CoronavirUS
* The new SFFTV is out, a special issue on Blade Runner and its legacies. It’s a really good one — check it out! Elsewhere on the SFFTV beat: Congratulations to Joseph Jenner, whose ‘Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect’ (from #12.1) has just been shortlisted for the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies’ Award for best Doctoral Student Article/Chapter!
* This week’s must-read: The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.
* Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction.
* “Oh My God, It’s Milton Friedman for Kids”: A historian of capitalism exposes how Choose Your Own Adventure books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”
* UC Santa Cruz Fires 54 Graduate Student Workers. UCSC cancels classes, shutters services as demonstrators block roadways. I Believe in the Strike. UCSC, The Fate of Graduate Education, and the Future of the University. After Announcing Firing of Grad Assistants, UC-Santa Cruz Is in Turmoil. “So far UCSC has spent $5.1 million dollars on police rather than meet with striking graduate students; this is nearly 25% of the cost of an annual COLA for all graduate students.” MLA Statement. Donate to the strike fund.
* The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s. The New School of Labor Rights.
* Critical theory represents the power, not the corruption, of the humanities.
* Debtors of the World, Unite!
* First Covid-19 outbreak in a U.S. nursing home raises concerns. The ominous days leading up to the coronavirus outbreak at Life Care Center in Kirkland. ‘We’re gearing up for something extremely significant’: Top hospitals across the US told us how they’re preparing for the coronavirus outbreak. Cronyism and Conflicts of Interest in Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. ‘To hell and back’: my three weeks suffering from coronavirus. The new normal. To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China. Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life. WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought. Another senior politician has died of coronavirus in Iran, where 8% of the parliament is infected. State by state, we’ve still barely tested anyone. When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain Coronavirus? New CDC guidance says older adults should ‘stay at home as much as possible’ due to coronavirus. AIPAC. CPAC. Get ready for live-streamed funerals. Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus. Port of Los Angeles Sees Coronavirus Impact Sharply Reducing Imports. As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP. CoronaCoin: A coronavirus speculative deathwatch cryptocurrency. ‘If We Don’t Work, We Don’t Get Paid.’ How the Coronavirus Is Exposing Inequality Among America’s Workers. America Is About to Get a Godawful Lesson in Why Health Care Should Never Be a For-Profit Business. The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead. We’re in trouble.
* SXSW Cancelled, Unbelievably. The effect on Austin will be massive. Event Admits It Has No Insurance for Coronavirus Cancellation.
* First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow. UW, Seattle University classes moving online starting Monday. Stanford too. As Coronavirus Spreads, the Decision to Move Classes Online Is the First Step. What Comes Next? Coronavirus Looms Over March Madness.
* Graphic Novels Your Kid (Probably) Hasn’t Read Yet.
* What to Say to Your Daughter About Campus Sexual Assault.
To bring the spirit of these lessons into a child’s home, parents can focus on building a relationship with their daughter that teaches her that she is equal to men and has the right to set her own boundaries and see them respected. For dads, a simple thing to try is letting your daughter brush you off sometimes. Let her question your authority, talk back, and leave the room in the middle of an argument. These changes could be especially important if the greatest risk to your daughter comes from an authority figure, but they will apply to her peers too.
* Is Miscarriage Is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It? The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go.
* The race to save Polesia, Europe’s secret Amazon.
* We Re-Ordered The Entire Democratic Primary Calendar To Better Represent The Party’s Voters. Twilight of Chris Matthews. Daily Caller gets one I can’t help but pass along. Bring in the boss? ‘This Was a Grift’: Bloomberg Staffers Explain Campaign’s Demise. America’s black billionaires have no place in a Bernie Sanders world! The Liberal-Conservative-Socialist Case for Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren: A Populist for the Professional Class. Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race. ‘Bailey’ vs. ‘blood and teeth’: The inside story of Elizabeth Warren’s collapse. How Elizabeth Warren Lost. It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren. Capitalism Is Rallying Behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans What They Want. Democrats Rallying Around Joe Biden Could Alienate Generations of the Party’s Youth Support. Biden can finish Bernie off in Michigan. Who Said It: Trump or Biden? Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s 2020 Campaign Makes Me Sick with Fear for Our Future. I just remembered Joe Biden is fine. Electability in the time of coronavirus. What if there’s no hope? Sanders campaign hatches comeback plan.
* Lots of my political thoughts have been going viral on Twitter lately, from the proper level of identification with a candidate to the ego protection of despising Bernie Sanders to just straight up rants to a pretty solid sitcom pilot. But nothing approaches a random repost of a meme I saw on Facebook.
* This seems fine: Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups.
* The head of CIS was illegally appointed and it barely even registers.
* The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread gets to The Dispossessed. And from the archives: Sexual Violence in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Towards an Interpretation.
* I don’t want to shock you: Why algorithms can be racist and sexist.
* Larry Nassar victims want accountability. Olympic officials offered cash and veiled threats.
* Woody Allen Memoir Dropped by Hachette After Staff Walkout.
* Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?
* In a lot of office environments, “bad energy” might be code for “old” or “overweight” or “knows too much about labor law,” but one veteran WeWork employee said Rebekah’s firings were seemingly random and without obvious prejudice. “She was just a spoiled baby,” the employee said.
* Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds.
* Susana Polo writes for Polygon about her Twitter account, which, year-round, tweets out events in Lord of the Rings on the day that they happened. (via MeFi)
* Now I know you’re just making these up: “the snow firehose.”
* And Shell is now She’ll. Namaste.
Friday Links! SpoOooOOOOOoOOOOooOOooky
* Remarkable reversal: James Tiptree’s name will be removed from the Tiptree Award after all.
* Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.
* Aggression sensors. Classroom barricades. How architects are transforming schools for the era of mass shootings. The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools.
* Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* Green and white nationalism.
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – fond of using an arboreal emoji on Twitter, until journalists smelled them out – demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ Quoting both Mosley and Heidegger, the alt-right publisher Greg Johnson asserts that saving the ecosystem requires saving the white race. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, a religious homestead movement named after a series of novels, combine racial myths with environmental mysticism.
Most of these are tiny, fringe movements. But there are signs that green and white nationalism is scaling up. In the recent European elections, France’s National Rally claimed that ‘borders are the environment’s greatest ally.’ Marine Le Pen declared that someone ‘who is rooted in their home is an ecologist’, whereas those who are ‘nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland’. Across the Atlantic, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed to be against illegal immigration because it ‘produces a huge amount of litter’, while the far-right pundit Ann Coulter has suggested that Americans must ‘choose between a green America and a brown America’. In India, public tree planting and reverence for sacred groves reinforce the government’s majoritarian claim that only Hindus are the nation’s true stewards.
* Someone who is good at the economy please help me.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: A program on civic virtue at UNC-Chapel Hill is raising concerns about secrecy and funding.
* John Bolton and the Fox News Century.
* Science corner! A bold new perspective suggests space-time isn’t a fundamental entity but emerges from quantum entanglement, says physicist Sean Carroll.
* ‘I Lost Everything’: The Obscene Cost of Being a Woman with a Chronic Health Problem.
* Actually existing media bias: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.
Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.
* The richest man in the world has some news for his workers at Whole Foods.
* Bizarre comet from another star system just spotted. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
* In my home timeline, Tiger Woods was on You Can’t Do That on Television for a season.
* In 1949, LIFE magazine broke it down.
* And your Lord of the Rings after-the-credits stinger.
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.
* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.
* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!
* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.
* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.
* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.
* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.
* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT
* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.
* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.
* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.
* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.
* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.
* Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.
* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.
* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.
* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.
* How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.
* Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.
* Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.
* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?
* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.
* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.
* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.
* In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
* NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…
* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.
* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”
* I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.
* Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.
* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.
* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.
* A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.
* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.
* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?
* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.
* In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.
* California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!
* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.
* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.
* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.
* One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.
* There is no Africa in African studies.
* The dialectic of enlightenment.
* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.
* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?
* The language of Mario Maker.
* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.
* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.
* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.
* And this is some extremely relatable content.
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links
* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…
* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).
* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!
* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)
* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…
* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.
* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.
* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.
* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!
* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.
* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.
* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.
* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.
* Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.
* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.
* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.
* Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.
What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?
The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.
* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.
* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.
* The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.
* How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.
* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.
* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.
* Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.
* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.
* Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.
* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.
Politics corner!
* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.
* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.
* Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.
* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!
* I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’
* The political theology of Trump.
* Florida. Why is it always Florida?
* The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.
* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.
* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.
* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.
* Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.
* Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.
* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.
* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.
* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.
* Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.
* Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.
* Why are we in the Middle East?
* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.
* Trans rights are human rights.
* Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.
* Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.
* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.
* Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.
* What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.
* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.
* Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.
* A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.
* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.
* How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.
* Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.
* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.
* “Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.
* Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?
* The story of a serial SWATter.
* The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”
* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.
* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.
* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.
* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.
* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.
* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.
* The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.
* A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.
* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?
* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.
* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Tuesday Night Links!
* ST: TNG: TNG: Patrick Stewart to Return as Capt. Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series for CBS All Access. Well, that’s something! CBS All Access Is Laying the Groundwork for Non-Stop Star Trek.
* Celebrating Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and black creativity at the first-ever Wakandacon.
* Draft schedule for the Worlding SF conference I’ll be keynoting at this December. Looking forward to it!
* Poem of the day: “A Metaphor.”
* Pedagogy flashback: Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* How to Prepare for Class. Against the Grade. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Another list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English).
* That rare thing, a good Twitter thread: What is the most interesting and revealing and hard-to-believe/understand statistic you know?
* Gasp, shock: Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions.
* What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism.
* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”
* Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature.” How Not to Talk About Climate Change. No, we didn’t almost solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. When Will Capitalism Answer For Its Crimes?
* 2018 Was Probably Already Doomed, But We Might Have Saved 2030.
* ‘Many parts of Earth could become uninhabitable’: Study’s grim warning.
* These 360 Drone Photos of the California Wildfires Are Devastating.
* ‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’ by Alain Badiou.
* Brexit continues to give Trump a run for his money in the deliberate-national-suicide-Olympics.
* Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception. The rise of QAnon Is a Sign That Trumpism Might Not Be Primarily About Trump at All. After mainstream exposure, QAnon is starting to fracture.
* Trump just keeps confessing to crimes and it just keeps not mattering.
* Alejandra ultimately decided to “self-deport” to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her. U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants. Worker Charged With Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. Man Detained by ICE Claims He Went Blind in One Eye After Agent Didn’t Believe He Had Diabetes. How Trump Radicalized ICE. Border family separation isn’t “zero tolerance” – CBP looked for parents to charge so they could kidnap kids. New Jersey Jail is Holding Nearly Triple its Capacity in ICE Detainees. What happens after ICE tears your family apart: ‘The storm descended.’ Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Judge upholds ruling that DACA must be restored. The Power of Abolish ICE.
* “We Need to Fight for Aloha”: Hawaii congressional candidate and democratic socialist Kaniela Ing on taking on Hawaii’s biggest corporations, a bold climate change agenda, and the necessity of opposing US imperialism.
* I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.
* Markets in everything: More Schools Are Buying ‘Active-Shooter’ Insurance Policies.
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is: It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear.
* Meanwhile, in serious environmentalism: Trump Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific.
* Fields medal stolen moments after it was awarded.
* There’s so much corruption in the federal government at this point it’s impossible to keep track of.
* A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world.
* The Trader Who Made a Massive Short Bet Against Nintendo.
* NRA Legal Strategy / Fundraising Appeal Goes Viral.
* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.
* How the NYPD recriminalized marijuana after the state decriminalized it. Internal documents reveal how Bronx prosecutors are taught to slow down cases.
* Democrats do the darnedest things.
* How the Cold War Created Astrobiology.
* A small-town couple left behind a stolen painting worth over $100 million — and a big mystery.
* These The Last Jedi Fans Put on a Mock Court Martial for Poe Dameron.
* Missing the point is the point: Pre-reading Young Aragorn.
* You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead.
* Amazing arbitrage opportunity.
* Sexuality and gender in science fiction games.
* Somebody get me Michel Foucault on the phone: Open Office Plans Increase Employee Stress, Reduce Productivity.
* Ask your doctor if R’lhygrex is right for you.
* Facebook getting pretty brazen even by Facebook standards.
* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage.
* The Great Recession Never Ended.
* Well, if they’re really sorry.
* The end of the writers’ room.
* The next stage of the Tesla scam.
* Chilling Testimony in a Tennessee Trial Exposes Lethal Injection as Court-Sanctioned Torture.
* Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors.
* And now they tell me! Why punishing your children doesn’t work.
Wednesday Links!
* Great episode of I Was There Too today starring Ahmed “Jar Jar Binks” Best, a genuinely fascinating figure in the Star Wars culture industry. I link this great EW profile of Best every few years. They talk about the Aftermath scene I didn’t like, and Best gives a nice explanation of why the treatment of Jar Jar as a character is so regrettable from a storytelling perspective in the context of defending the otherwise execrable Darth Jar Jar Theory.
* There’s an unexpected bonus episode of the Hello from the Magic Tavern spinoff Offices and Bosses out today, too. Truly, nothing can stop me now.
* A nice writeup of Buffy at 20 from the Marquette Tribune.
* Also at Marquette Wire: Marquette’s Live Poets Society breaks the silence with their poems on mental illness and suicide.
* Strange Horizons on “Kirk Drift.”
* Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia.
* I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.
* How to tell if you’re a pervert.
* United’s stock falls 1.1%, wipes out $255 million off the airline’s market cap. Maybe they should have offered people $2000 to give up their ticket? Just a crazy thought. Now they’re sorry. Does The Fine Print In United’s Contract Prevent Kicked-Off Passenger From Suing Airline? The Corporation Does Not Always Have To Win. And from the archives: The black art of overbooking. The Landing: Fascists without Fascism.
* Jeff Sessions Prepares DOJ For Crackdown On Unauthorized Border-Crossers.
Sessions painted the matter in stark terms, saying that gangs and cartels “turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.”
“Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings,” Sessions said in prepared remarks. “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”
When he delivered the speech, Sessions did not use the word “filth,” saying only “where we first take our stand.”
Sounds like the rivers will be running red with the blood of the unclean soon. #MAGA!
* Another Day, Another Charter Scandal.
* The rule is you don’t talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can’t talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system’s inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave. Hiking the Appalachian Trial while Black.
We want a SuperRace because we want to eradicate absolutely everything that terrifies us. We want SuperHumans so we can transcend that thing we are: human. But a SuperHuman would lack that crack in everything through which, as Leonard Cohen sang, the light gets in. There’s something in our suffering that we need. We’ve known this for millennia, and we make it clear in the stories we keep telling. The Buddha gave up his palace and meditated beneath a tree for a week. Jesus of Nazareth said yes to a cross. Our ache is our unfortunate, undeniable doorway. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, says the copper lady with the torch. When we walk into our pain, we sometimes find ourselves on the other side, freed of what we once thought we needed to feel free.
* The ACLU filed a lawsuit Friday against the city of Maplewood, Missouri, over a policy that allegedly evicts domestic violence victims and banishes them from the St. Louis suburb if they call police for help more than twice in six months.
* Laurie Penny says The Expanse is perfect…ly fine. I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm a lot of other people seem to have for the series, though I liked the first season well enough; I haven’t even started the second season yet.
* The DC Cinematic Universe turns to the only hero who could possibly save it: The Rock. The Rock can make anything good, but there are limits. There are limits.
* Let’s scrape together The Shining epilogue that Stanley Kubrick destroyed.
* And Some Math Problems for English Majors.
An English major explains his career options to three mechanical engineers for fifteen minutes. How many beers will the English major drink in explaining that, really, he has it figured out as he’s applying to eighteen grad schools, and after the PhD, maybe become a professor, or go for a post-doc, maybe? What if he’s trying to impress someone? What if that someone’s also a mechanical engineer?
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Weekend Links!
* My upcoming Studies in Genre course has been cancelled because it has been rendered superfluous.
* I realized I’d never gotten around to adding Paradoxa 28 to the sidebar. Check it out, if you haven’t yet!
* Cuban highlighted English, philosophy, and foreign language majors as just some of the majors that will do well in the future job market. “The nature of jobs is changing,” Cuban said.
* Love as Political Resistance: Lessons of Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler. Parable Of The Sower – Not 1984 – Is The Dystopia For Our Age.
* Wikipedia vs. the deletionists.
* Style guide: the look of white supremacy.
* This was beautiful: Coed CYO hoops team defies archdiocese order to kick girls out, forfeits season.
“Is your decision to play the game without the two young ladies on the team, or do you want to stay as a team as you have all year?” asked parent Matthew Dohn. “Show of hands for play as a team?”
Eleven hands shot up in unison. No one raised a hand when asked the alternative.
Assistant coach Keisha Martel, who is also the mom of one of the girls, Kayla Martel, reminded the team of the consequences. They had been told that playing the girls would mean the rest of the season would be forfeited.
“But if the girls play, this will be the end of your season. You won’t play in the playoffs,” she warned.
“It doesn’t matter,” one boy replied and others echoed, before the team began to chant, “Unity!”
In the crowd, supporters cheered along. Several parents began to cry.
* Scenes from the Day without Latinos in Milwaukee.
* What It Feels Like When Your World Ends: Rebecca Evans on Black Wave.
* How many pounds do you need to be able to life to teach a literature class?
* The Trump White House Is Screwed, Big League. Justice Department warned White House that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, officials say. Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence. Warren v. Flynn. Taking a Step Back. The Fog of Trump. What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like. Republicans Won’t Stand Up and Stop President Trump. So you want to brief the president. That’s a hell of an act. Democrats Demand Mar-A-Lago Membership List. As Presidents Live Longer, Doctors Debate Whether To Test For Dementia. Authoritarian government watch: 6/10. The Great Government Breakdown Has Begun. A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon.” Trump Official Obsessed Over Nuclear Apocalypse, Men’s Style, Fine Wines in 40,000 Posts on Fashion Style. The press conference from Hell. Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill? Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve. ‘President Supervillain’ Puts Trump’s Quotes in Red Skull’s Mouth, and It’s Disturbingly Perfect.
* Pitting class against race in the Age of Trump. Shadow of the Plantation.
* Before the Flood: Karel Čapek and the Destructive Drift of History.
* Fantasies of the deep state.
* Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade.
* Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile that American officials say violates a landmark arms control treaty, posing a major test for President Trump as his administration is facing a crisis over its ties to Moscow.
* ICE detains a woman at a courthouse receiving an order of protection, likely after receiving a tip from her alleged abuser. ICE shows up at a women’s shelter. ICE Agents Arrest Men Leaving Alexandria Church Shelter. Why Did ICE Arrest & Imprison a 23-Year-Old DREAMer and DACA Recipient Living Legally in the U.S.? Trump Considering Using National Guard for Immigration Raids. How new is this? Is ICE Out of Control?
* Well this all seems in order: EPA nominee Scott Pruitt won’t say if he would recuse himself from his own lawsuits against the agency. He’s since been confirmed, of course.
* Shocked, shocked to find gambling in the casino: Maybe College Isn’t the Great Equalizer. (More here.)
* Same joke but new study confirms that voter ID laws are very racist.
* Academics, your moment is here: Depression Is an Unlikely Advantage in the Fight Against Fascism.
* The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* I’ll allow it: There’s Going to Be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Comic Book.
* So preoccupied with whether they could, etc: Woolly mammoth on the verge of resurrection, scientists say.
* Though this one is pretty good too.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About a Women’s Strike.
* What if we pretended something that was obviously an effect of wealth were biological? I think it might look a little something like…
* Obamacare Repeal Could Cripple Efforts To Combat The Opioid Epidemic. Paul Ryan wants to bring back lifetime limits. Millions now rely on these plans, and we should defend them until we can win something better. But we also shouldn’t entertain any illusions: the ACA marketplaces rest on a flawed health care ideology that tellingly attracts many adherents on the Right, including Ryan.
* News you can use: The 8 Most Inaccurate Depictions of Mars Ever Put on Film.
* The surgeon who wants to perform a head transplant by 2017.
* Marquette in the news! Marquette Law alum chosen as the first black Bachelorette.
* Lost Essay Reveals Winston Churchill Was Almost Certain Aliens Exist. He met the Daleks! It’s canon.
* Is it really time to teach 1984?
* “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”
* Another apocalypse: The oceans are losing oxygen.
* The New Star Wars: Aftermath Novel Reveals the Pitiful Fate of Jar Jar Binks. This bummed me out a lot, actually.
* Incredible: Suspect in North Korea killing ‘thought she was taking part in TV prank.’
* Of course you had me at “Squid Communicate with a Secret, Skin-Powered Alphabet.”
Thursday Night Links!
* My brilliant colleague Ainehi Edoro was chosen as one of the most 100 influential Africans.
* The Octavia Project. And elsewhere in the VanderMeers’ vast empire…
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler at ALA 2017.
* More fighting over tenure and post-tenure review at Wisconsin.
* Teaching the controversy: Listening While Feminist: In Defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
* We’re gonna need a better gerrymander: If Democrats want to solve the problem of legislative maps that are biased against them they need to pursue a strategy that is more likely to produce maps that compensate for geography.
* “It is striking to see how committed they are to allowing this train wreck to occur,” he said. “And more surprisingly, how little careful attention has been given (at the top at least) to just how vulnerable—given Bush v. Gore—the current (system for counting votes in the) electoral college is.” But wait! There’s more! Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump.
* Trump vs. conflicts of interest: Maybe the Answer Is That He Can’t Divest.
* How Many Generals Is Too Many? I think the number is worrying, but agree with Kevin that the central issue is that he has chosen an extremely popular, recently retired general for DoD. Civilian control of the military is an important value, or it used to be.
* This is bad: Trump Launches Tweet Attack on Carrier Steel Union Boss for Fact-Checking Him. (UPDATE: This is what happens when Donald Trump attacks a private citizen on Twitter.) This is bad: Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr. CEO Tapped as Labor Secretary. This is bad: Trump Considers FDA Chief Who Says People Should Use Medicines “At Their Own Risk.” This is bad: Trump to be part-time president, keep lucrative job with Celebrity Apprentice. This is bad: Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?
* This one though I do approve of: Chris Christie has the lowest approval rating one pollster has ever found for a state governor.
* There are no second acts in American life, they said.
* Point/Counterpoint: How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Can Save the World. What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump? Nothing.
* That’ll solve it! Or, if you prefer, only the super-rich can save us now.
* Worst Game of Thrones spinoff ever.
* …and the portions are too small!
* The Swing-O-Matic: Change the settings to see how shifts in party preference and turnout by different demographic groups would affect the 2016 presidential election.
* We need to admit that right-wing harrassment and conspiracy theories are baked into the business model of social media at this point. And with right-wing political hegemony for the foreseeable future, it will only get worse, because the range of “acceptable opinion” will shift even further to the right. Asking nicely and filling out all the proper paperwork will not change this underlying material reality.
* The tricky part is that many expect the expert agency’s views to change shortly after January 20th, when Trump’s O.C.R. is installed. (Dear Colleagues: Never mind, we take it back.) Come January, advocates of transgender rights, who have enthusiastically supported judicial deference to O.C.R., will have reason for an extreme pivot, given that the new O.C.R. is unlikely to view “sex” as an “internal sense of gender.” It is awkward now for Grimm’s lawyers to argue zealously for the notion that the agency knows best, when only weeks from now, and in coming years, that doctrine is more likely to harm than to help transgender students.
* Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, our photojournalist documented 57 homicide victims over 35 days. And in case you’ve forgotten.
* Located in the city’s Girangaon (Village of the Mills) neighborhood, Trump Tower Mumbai illustrates every pathology of the neoliberal turn away from comprehensive city planning.
* What happens if someone dies on Mars?
* The arc of history is long, but New Jersey Will No Longer Seek to Collect Loans from Families of Dead Students.
* Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you.
* Harvard will not be a sanctuary campus. It’s for your own good, kids!
* Disney ought to pay this former employee for the movie rights to this AMA.
* Today in news from the mysteriiiiiiiious Orient: Japan’s sex problem is so bad that people are quitting dating and marrying their friends.
* Trump propaganda game getting real.
* Chimpanzees See Butts Like We See Faces.
* The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes. From The New Yorker‘s “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”
* If Black Mirror Had a Showroom.
* This might be the worst science journalism piece I’ve seen in years.
* Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They’re Trying to Prove It.
* Paradox Girl Is One of the Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year. I bought these tonight on this recommendation and I can confirm it’s super fun.
* And this makes me feel worse about both extinction-level events and car crashes.
Catching Up on My Open Tabs After an Incredibly Slow News Week in Which Nothing World-Historically Bonkers Happened
* CFP: And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python.
* CFP: The Films of Wes Anderson.
* Three on Dylan, Nobel Laureate. The Guardian reports.
After much consideration my position on this event is that I’m formally opposed, but nonetheless personally delighted.
* Barack Obama for first president of the Federation.
* Le Guin in the Post, the Nation, and the New Yorker.
* PKD and the Problem of 2-3-74.
* An adjuncting career, by the numbers.
* Idiots Who Run Harvard Let Their Low-Wage Workers Go On Strike.
* 4 Professors Involved in Philosophy Brawl Find Feces in Their Mail.
* With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices.
* Why a Controversial Palestinian History Class at Berkeley Was Cancelled, Then Reinstated.
* I make a brief appearance at the end of this CBS58 story on Marquette’s incredible Tolkien collection. I also pop up in this review of the first few episodes of Westworld.
* The Trouble with Thanksgiving.
This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.
* Arrested Development Season Five (not really). Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. All of Donald Trump’s Accusers: A Timeline of Every Alleged Grope and Assault. Gerrymandering helped Republicans take control of Congress, but now it’s tearing them apart over Trump. A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House. Here’s the math. Inside the Bunker. Inside the Meltdown. How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall. Let’s never forget what a terrifying thing we almost did. Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat. I guess I need a new surgeon. If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections. The Evan McMullin Century. A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two. Even the Humane Society. Teach the controversy. Thank you for your idea about a political thriller but unfortunately we find the plot preposterous. Michelle Obama for President. And because we’re all still asking: What Happens If Trump Drops Out?
* Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.
* New Jersey Transit, a Cautionary Tale of Neglect.
* “We’d at least like to have it said of us that we tried”: Marvel and the civil rights movement.
* How Rock and Roll Became White.
* “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”
* Department of Precrime, CIA edition.
* The search for a true blue M&M.
* Whatever this is for, I am so completely in.
* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.
* The four types of board games.
* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.
* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.
* The end of Devin Faraci and the end of The Canon podcast (for now). There’s more at the Mary Sue.
* Huge, if true: Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.
And on the subject of deranged tech madmen: Simpsons did it.
* Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad.
* The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever.
* The coming fight over “nonlethal neuroweapons.”
* What’s the Longest Humans Can Live? 115 Years, New Study Says. Challenge accepted.
* Now, I may have to move first.
* The kids are all right: Only 1 in 5 Millennials Have Ever Tried a Big Mac.
* On Delany’s Dark Reflections.
* App of the week: Really Bad Chess.
* The Perils of Becoming a Meme.
* Finally my condition has a name.
* And I told you, Mom: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.
Gerry Canavan 