Posts Tagged ‘Prince’
Friday Links!
- Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
- CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
- If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
- I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
- Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
- “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
- Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
- $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
- Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
- History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.
- Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
- The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
- Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
- How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
- I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
- A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
- We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
- Curation is not cancellation.
- This is why we can’t have nice things.
- The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
- Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
- Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
- “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
- Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
- Unions Are Cool Now.
- The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
- ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
- Life after vaccination.
- “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
- The Invention of murder.
- Inside the incel.
- ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
- The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
- We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
- Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
- The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
- Against WandaVision.
- Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
- What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.
* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”
* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.
* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
* No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
* How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
* The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
* South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
* Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
* Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
* She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
* In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
* This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
* And there’s no idea so bad you can’t make it worse.
Christmas Eve Eve Links Links
* There’s a lovely review of my Butler book by Nisi Shawl in the new Women’s Review of Books. It’s not available online so you’ll have to take my word for it, unless your library subscribes…
* And I’m so happy to report that Extrapolation 58.2-3 is finally out, the special issue on “Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre” I edited with Benjamin Robertson. Check out the intro to see what it’s all about, and then check out articles on Dragonlance, the Star Wars and Star Trek expanded universes, Sweet Valley High, Blondie, The Hunger Games, and Game of Thrones and fantasy roleplaying games…
* CFP: Academic Track at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention, San José, California. CFP: Punking Speculative Fiction. CFP: Histories of the Future: Proto-Science Fiction from the Victorian Era to the Radium Age. CFP: Chapter Proposals for “Ecofeminist Science Fiction.” CFP: Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.
* An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried.
* Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Ted Chiang.
* Science fiction when the future is now. With appearances from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, and Lauren Beukes.
* The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen is Alyssa Rosenberg’s at the Washington Post. And the best pro-Last-Jedi piece from Dan Hassler-Forest at LARB. Somewhere in the middle is Abigail Nussbuam’s excellent piece at Asking the Wrong Questions.
* Lightsabers, by the numbers. Secret history of the porgs. Star Wars from below. Thank goodness somebody realized how terrible this would be. The Last Jedi and the necessary disappointment of epilogues. The films that inspired The Last Jedi. Behind the scenes. In defense of Canto Blight. Anti-nostalgia and anti-salvation. Star Wars without the Empire. How to Read Star Wars.
* Winter Is Coming: Climate Change in Westeros.
* How the Sesame Street Puppeteers Play Their Characters. It was only a year or three ago that I realized that on a basic level I’d still believed Big Bird was real; I had never thought or processed the fact that his lips were being moved by a puppeteer’s hands.
* So old I can remember when Sweet Briar was an inspiring story about a college being saved.
* On faculty and mental illness.
* Podcast alert: how does Samuel R. Delany work?
* Comedy writers name their most influential episodes: 1, 2.
* SHOCK REPORT: The tax bill is bad.
* This Congress’s clear priorities: corporations, not children.
* It’ll also tax large endowments. Meanwhile in the academy: We Will Not Be Your Disposable Labor: Graduate Student Workers’ Fight Goes Beyond the GOP Assault. ‘A Complete Culture of Sexualization’: 1,600 Stories of Harassment in Higher Ed.
* Defund every agency that had any part in this. Murder Convictions Overturned, Two Men Are Immediately Seized By ICE. What happens to children whose parents are deported? 92 Somali immigrants deported in “slave-ship” conditions. ICE is abusing immigrant detainees with strip searches and threats. Shock of shocks, it turns out legal immigration is bad too.
* Why Doug Jones’s narrow win is not enough to make me confident about American democracy.
* First #J20 defendants found not guilty.
* The media wealth of African Americans in Boston is $8.
* People are using Uber instead of ambulances.
* The Adult Bodies Playing Teens on TV.
* Monopolies are bad, no matter how much you like the brands involved. Avengers vs. monopoly.
* “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.
* The madness of prison gerrymanders.
* Desegregation never happened.
* Climate refugees in Louisiana. Disability and disaster response in the age of climate change. Losing the wilderness.
* The FoxConn boondoggle gets worse and worse.
* The Next Crisis for Puerto Rico: Foreclosures.
* Revising agricultural revisionism.
* Your Favorite Superhero Is Probably Killing the Planet.
* The Daily Stormer’s style guide.
* Opoids and homelessness. 3,000,000 pills to 3,000 patients in two years. The Opioid Crisis Is Getting Worse, Particularly for Black Americans. What happens after an American city gives a homeless person a one-way ticket out of town.
* The US gymnastics scandal somehow gets worse and worse.
* ‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread.’
* The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife.
* WHAT YEAR IS IT: How to prepare for a nuclear attack.
* Lumberjanes’ Noelle Stevenson is Rebooting She-Ra for Netflix. Sir Ian McKellen Would Totally Play Gandalf In Amazon’s TV Tolkien Adaptations. The Next Bechdel Test.
* “Paradox,” by Naomi Kritzer.
* The Journal of Prince Studies.
* 80% of workers think managers are unnecessary. The other 20% mistakingly think they are managers.
* It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one our Founders built: The Donald Trump droid is live at Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.
* ‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer. 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017. Fascism has already come to America. Life expectancy declines for the second straight year. On brand.
* Heartbreaking interview with Heather Heyer’s mother.
* Still, it does make you ponder all the ways this industry works in service of power, and by extension those who abuse it. So many of comedy’s institutions are, at their core, PR machines. Branded content is Funny Or Die’s bread and butter. Every week SNL promotes someone’s new movie or TV show or album. Late night talk shows, with few exceptions, use jokes to bookend celebrity press tours. Comedians host awards shows because otherwise we might see them for the rituals they are—the wealthy and famous celebrating their own wealth and fame. Comedy normalizes power; it’s so successful at normalizing power that it feels weird to even write that as a criticism. Well, what’s wrong with normalizing power? Lots of things, but to start it lets monsters play the straight man in comedy sketches. It makes them relatable, which makes them less threatening. But power is always a threat, even more so when it seems innocuous, even more so when it seems… funny.
* 2018 is already terrible: there’ll be no more Zelda DLC.
* And remembering the reason for the season: Behold the official policy for destroying the head of Chuck E Cheese.
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
Impeach Trump Now (and Other Links)
* I haven’t done a post like this in a while, so of course you have to catch up with the horrors of America collapsing around our ears. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Russia. Russia. Russia. The NSC memo was only last week! Republicans, Remove This Madman From Power.
* As White Supremacists Wreak Havoc, a University Becomes a Crisis Center.
* The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All.
* Slouching towards death squads.
* Defense fund for the protestors in Durham who pulled down the Old Soldier last night. A history. Gov. Roy Cooper calls for Confederate statues to come down in North Carolina. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery. These monuments should come down.”
* After Obama’s 2008 Win, Indiana GOP Added Early Voting in White Suburb, Cut It in Indianapolis.
* Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
* Stop Calling Millennials the Facebook Generation. They’re The Student Loan Generation.
* 8 Times The World Narrowly Avoided A Potential Nuclear Disaster. This is how easy it would be for Trump to start a nuclear war. Averting Annihilation. Notes on Late Exterminism, the Trump Stage of Civilization. The Annihilator. Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War. Analysts are trying to work out what happens to the markets they cover in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence. The national security establishment versus the “madmen.” And from the archives.
The underlying logic is quite uncomplicated: unless America is the best and the most powerful, the entire world is forfeit. This is of course the brutish proposition that sustains American hegemony—that has sustained since it since the get-go. It’s the same threat whether it’s mouthed colorfully by Trump, or stated matter-of-factly by a career military officer like Defense Secretary James Mattis, who warned that “the DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” But as with so much else, hearing it laid out so baldly, in yet another unplanned and unvetted Trump ad-lib, has an arresting effect. As out of the mouths of babes, so out of the mouth of our President: the truth brings us up short. We move from an initial, disavowing reaction of “This. Is. Not. Normal” to a nauseous, self-implicating “Oh God, this is what normal always was.”
* Timely! Ava DuVernay is developing Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel, ‘Dawn’ as a television series.
* Now More than Ever, We Wish We Had These Lost Octavia Butler Novels.
* The “Weird Thoreau” on ecological fiction and the cult of climate-change denial.
* Half the GOP Base Say They Would Support Cancelling the 2020 Elections. The Other Half Won’t Admit It.
* Right-leaning media outlets have moral culpability for what is happening, if not legal culpability. They created this. The coming Civil War.
* Mom Deported Because She Didn’t Change Lanes.
* On Tuesday, they will reluctantly split up their family, flying to Mexico with their 12-year-old son to start a new life, while leaving their three older daughters — who are 16, 21 and 23 — behind in the U.S.
* Healthcare workers rally to halt Oakland nurse’s deportation.
* How ICE Is Using Big Data to Carry Out Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crusade. Private prison companies are saying Trump’s immigration crackdown is looking good for business.
* Thank you, Wisconsin, for the beautiful gift. Editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times.
* How to Tell If Your Eclipse Glasses or Handheld Solar Viewers Are Safe.
* Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence.
* Better Business through Sci-Fi.
* People in rich countries are dying of loneliness.
* The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music. Is it possible to swim through coins, Scrooge McDuck style?
* Forever Yesterday: Peering Inside My Mom’s Fading Mind.
* Biohackers encode malware within a strand of DNA.
* Side effects kill thousands but our data on them is flawed.
* Why do some people get so upset when we talk about how diverse the ancient Greek and Roman societies were? Because if Classical antiquity is the foundation of western civilization and they were multiracial/multiethnic societies, then the idea that western civilization is a white accomplishment based on a history of white superiority is called into question.
* Congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Measuring the slow death of the Rabid Puppies.
* On Game of Thrones, the Cracks Are Beginning to Show. It’s bad y’all.
* The Soul of the Gamer under Communism.
* What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology? To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.
* When Bill Murray Saw the Groundhog Day musical. UPDATE: Nothing gold can stay.
* A map for extraterrestrials to find Earth.
* “I came home because I believed what they said about the new system and that it was supposed to be the best in the world,” said Williams, 67. “But now it seems if we get hit by another Katrina, the city will be gone.”
* Learjet Liberalism: Advocates for climate action should stop defending the rich.
* And in a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Monday Links!
* Academic freedom in Wisconsin.
* This is silly, but I confess I found it an interesting wrinkle: Wonder Woman Actor Says Chief Is Actually a Demi-God.
* People shouldn’t live in Arizona.
* Democrats Don’t Need Trump’s Voters To Retake The House. The overall message of 2017 special elections is that Republicans are in trouble. Why Paul Ryan’s race for Congress next year bears watching, even if he’ll be hard to beat. An Associated Press study of U.S. House races found that Republicans may have gained up to 22 additional seats in the 2016 election due to redistricting. The AP’s analysis also found four times as many states with GOP-skewed state legislative maps as Democratic-skewed ones. Voter suppression is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than Russian election tampering, if you can imagine it.
* Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers.
* Senate GOP expected to add new penalties for the uninsured into their health bill. Privately, health plan worries Senate bill would “cause most small employers’ premiums to go up.” Coverage Losses Under the Senate Health Care Bill Could Result in 18,100 to 27,700 Additional Deaths in 2026. Crazy waivers: the Senate bill invites states to gut important health insurance rules. Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes. You’re Probably Going to Need Medicaid. Pure Class Warfare, With Extra Contempt. Can the moderates save us? Even Ron “Horrible” Johnson: ‘We should not be voting’ on healthcare this week. (But, you know, partial credit at best.) The principled support for the bill is apparently pass it no matter what’s in it just cause Team Red. Trump and Social Darwinism. Keep calling.
* What we have just witnessed can, I think, be legitimately referred to as the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble. That is, the ending of the assumption that a tepid, compromised, market-friendly, bureaucratic centrism that nobody actually liked was the only form left-of-centre politics could take, because everyone was convinced that everyone else thought so.
* What It Was Like to Star in the Trump-Themed Julius Caesar.
* Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please.
* Trump’s Deflections and Denials on Russia Frustrate Even His Allies.
* Remember when we had laws and dumb stuff like that? God, we were such dorks.
* NJ Assembly Passes Bill Requiring Kids Be Taught to Interact With Police. Maybe give some of the same training to off-duty cops next?
* Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed.
* I wasn’t one, but congratulations to all the Locus Award winners!
* The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man.
* Pale Blue Dot. The Weinersmith Test for Artificial Intelligence. Everything happens for a reason. Hot lava. Markov dating.
* Alarmingly, one source speaking to THR claims that upon the announcement to the crew that Ron Howard would step in to take over the film a day after Miller and Lord’s firing, applause broke out. Report: Lucasfilm Was So Concerned About Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo Performance It Brought in an Acting Coach. What a mess.
* The race to save Florida’s devastated coral reef from global warming.
* Crimebook noplane freedomhate.
* High Court Mostly Revives Trump Travel Ban, Will Hear Appeal.
* High-stakes scenarios and market failure.
* The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it.
* Everyone, get your guesses in! Last call for Kennedy bets.
* This is no time for optimism.
* Prince Was a Secret Patron of Solar Power.
* Flashback: David Bowie’s Failed Attempt to Adapt George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
* 150 times actors were forced to say the title of the movie they’re in.
* Riot at Disney tonight, details TK.
* Superhero Rescues Put Everyone in Danger, Urge Scientists.
* This is why we can’t have nice things. Do not panic; the authorities are in complete control. Bitch I might be. Happy last week of summer school.
* And I’ve said it all along: don’t blame me, blame the world.
No Bad News Today Links
* The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.
* Where Black History and Floods Intertwine.
* I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords.
* CFP: The David Foster Wallace Conference has extended its deadline to January 15.
* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.
* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.
* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.
* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.
* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.
* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.
* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.
* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.
* The birthering of the Democrats.
* Japanese American Historical Plaza.
* The smoke break and solidarity.
* Robots and literary criticism.
* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.
* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.
* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.
* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.
* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.
* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.
* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.
* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.
* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.
* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.
* This is some Black Mirror shit.
* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.
* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.
* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’
Monday Morning Links!
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Friday Links Are Just a Party and Parties Aren’t Meant to Last
* Out today, a project very close to my heart: my edited 2016 rerelease of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Here’s the Amazon order page, for you or your favorite academic library!
* The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s. The Mobile Academic.
* The strange story of Hugo Gernsback, who brought science fiction magazines to America.
* Just in time for finals! MLA Eighth Edition: What’s New and Different.
* At LARoB Rebecca Evans reviews the reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Green Earth. David Perry reviews The Secret Life of Stories. Against Star Wars. Inside the Coetzee Collection.
* My desire to see The Twilight Zone has boomeranged on me in the most ironic possible way.
* An independent researcher claims to have discovered a lost civilization in China.
* Existential Depression in Gifted Children.
* Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man. Buzzfeed’s The Most Powerful Writing about Prince. Nation Too Sad To F*ck Even Though It’s What Prince Would Have Wanted.
* The Secret Life of Novelizations.
* The Hidden Economics of Porn.
* Five Hundred Years of Utopia.
* Harriet Tubman once staged a sit-in to get $20. The Treasury just gave her all of them. You have no idea how hardcore Harriet Tubman really was.
* The smug style in American liberalism.
* How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.
* How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated.
* How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months.
* Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.
* Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem. Related: 25 Best Wisconsin High Schools: U.S. News Rankings 2016.
* For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress.” Bernie Sanders offers a different way forward. How Sanders fell short. The real scandal.
* 12 Reasons Not to Write Lord of the Rings.
* I Talked to the Kid Whose Mom Used Craigslist to Find Him a Feminism Tutor, and It Got Weird.
* Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea. Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric.
* Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors. But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
* Details arise about U.S. Bank robbery in the Alumni Memorial Union.
* Behold, the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
* The Tragic History of RC Cola.
* U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.
* Hamilton just won the Pulitzer for drama. Here’s why it matters for American musicals. And congrats to Emily Nussbaum!
* This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress.
* Milwaukee’s Appeals, Vibrant and Cheap.
* First Criminal Charges Handed Down After Flint Water Crisis.
* A man once described as a “perfect donor” at an August, Georgia sperm bank and who fathered at least 36 children around the world is actually a mentally ill felon whose lies on his donor forms went undiscovered for more than a decade.
* We owe Rey and Finn’s friendship to Harrison Ford’s broken leg.
* Love It Or List It sued over shoddy renovations, ridiculous falsehoods.
* As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters.
* Hello, from the Magic Tavern watch! There’s two noncanonical podcasts from Foon-16 over at One Shot. There’s also a band new, slightly less… rigorous improv podcast from some of the principals involved called Siblings Peculiar.
* The U.S.’s Best High School Starts at 9:15 a.m.
* Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science.
* New Evidence Suggests That Limbs and Fins Evolved From Fish Gills.
* And rejoice, comrades! Twilight Struggle has come to Steam.
Happy Monday
* Secret origins of gonzo journalism: “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” by Hunter S. Thompson.
* What’s so frustrating about really upper class kids who go on to become elite pundits and write stupid stuff about this topic is that, had they any self-awareness whatsoever, they should know all about intergenerational class entrenchment. In most cases, their parents have done everything they can to make sure social mobility remains a myth.
* When a campus building is named for a famous white supremacist. Oh, hi, Duke!
* The Melancholy, Crumbling Remains Of Great Socialist Murals.
* The failures of Title IX. How a Title IX Complaint Is Processed.
* Which states have the highest levels of student debt?
* How Athletic Departments (And The Media) Fudge The Cost Of Scholarships.
* Partisan politics, segregation, and Milwaukee.
* I worry a bit that giving the 1% the option to become literal vampires might not work out great.
* Samuel R. Delany reviews Star Wars.
* A collision of greed, neglect, and mismanagement is endangering young people in America’s college capital while enriching some absentee investors — landlords who maximize profits by packing students into properties — and universities that admit many more students than they can house.
Where the show has faltered — and where it comes up against its contradictions — is when it attempts to look at those who are no longer living in the Before. So effective in detailing the quiet terrors of the old order, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way.
* Today in the rule of law: The Harris prohibition has resulted in law enforcement agencies using the stingrays without obtaining a court warrant, because the agencies have interpreted the contract to mean they cannot even tell a judge about their intent to use the devices.
* Milwaukee officer shoots man after struggle at Red Arrow Park. Drunk NYPD Officer Allegedly Shot a Stranger 6 Times.
* Meanwhile people are just straight-up setting up murder traps now in Stand Your Ground states.
* The Incidental State: Coercion in the Age of Big Data.
* But it turns out that if you consider the facts reported; he wasn’t a genius. His violations of anti-trust law were obvious crimes. Instead, his key characteristic was the one we always emphasize is critical about the most fraudulent CEOs – audacity. Jobs had gotten away with committing so many crimes that he came to believe he was immune from prosecution.
* On crafting a nonwhite Spider-Man. Spider-Man execs kill our dreams of seeing Miles Morales on the big screen. They must really hate money.
* To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand.
* Want to Go to Mars? It’s Not That Expensive.
* Vulture: Is television art yet?
* Path to student loan debt relief for adjuncts just got a little easier–but still a long way to go.
* Ross Douthat hates your loose libertine morals so much he’ll even become a communist to oppose them.
* Gun That Can Only Be Fired By Owner Exists but No One Will Sell It Because of New Jersey.
* How Much Source Material Does HBO’s Game of Thrones Have Left to Work With? The worst news is: it seems like it’s all Jon Snow stuff…
* For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role.
* The secret history of White Coke.
* Louis C.K. versus the Common Core.
* The Ocean Floor Is Littered with Humanity’s Garbage.
* “Let It Go” was inspired by Prince, who also contributed its most memorable line.
* Should we be teaching him civics at such a young age?
* The oldest man on earth lives on the Upper West Side. Take that, Okinawa!
* Fanwanking a reason why there doesn’t seem to be many women in the Star Wars universe.
* Presenting the Wes Anderson cruise.
* And Slate celebrates the world’s best statues.
Saturday!
* Features, not bugs: America Is Raising A Generation Of Kids Who Can’t Think Or Write Clearly.
* Former NFL Tight End Wins Concussion Grievance Case Against Cincinnati Bengals.
* Onondaga Public Library in Syracuse, New York, has an enormous collection of roughly 1,100 vintage books in science fiction, mystery and “other genres.” But apparently, there isn’t enough interest to keep them in circulation. So they’re asking people to propose what should be done with them.
* None of this means that the GOP couldn’t win Florida in 2016. But there should be serious doubts about whether there’s room for another round of big, additional gains among Florida whites. And once those doubts are raised, the GOP route to victory in Florida looks tough. They’d need a lot to break right in order to squeak out a victory in 2016, let alone afterward. There’s the scary possibility that Florida goes the way of Nevada: the next Democrat would win Florida by 9 points if they merely did as well as Kerry among Florida’s white voters.
* Remaking the University v. Napolitano: Meritocracies define “being qualified” for the biggest job in a field as requiring prior experience in other jobs in the field.
* A Synopsis of Tim Burton’s Batman Based Only on the Prince Soundtrack.
* Just for the Comedy Bing Bong fans: When Reddit asked Scott Aukerman anything.
* xkcd’s “Time” has now been running for over one hundred days, and is now more than 2500 panels long.
* And Gawker presents some hard-hitting reporting on The Pizza Belt. I’m a native. This is all 100% accurate.
There’s Such a Thing as Being Too Sexy
There’s such a thing as being too sexy: Prince reportedly going under the knife for hip replacement surgery at the age of only 49.
Gerry Canavan 