Posts Tagged ‘privilege’
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
* And Lord, make me outgrow Quentin Tarantino, but not yet.
Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!
* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.
* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?
* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.
* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.
* The market can’t solve a massacre.
And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”
* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.
* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.
* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.
* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.
* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.
* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.
* The rise of the prison state.
* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.
* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.
* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.
* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.
* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.
* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.
* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.
* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.
* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.
* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.
* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.
* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.
* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.
* Hate spree killings in Austin.
* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.
* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.
* Happy International Women’s Day.
* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.
* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.
* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.
* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.
* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Monday Morning Links!
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here’s a Storify of the weekend’s #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* ‘Seat 14C’ short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington’s Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump’s CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it’s much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a “bipartisan” patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There’s no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the “Xennial” label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It’s a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Iran’s temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson’s widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* McConnell’s nearing a deal. Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes.
* ‘Terrorism’ misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I’m like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane’s backstory.
Monday Night Links!
* I had two short pieces come out this weekend: a review essay on Star Trek: Beyond at LARB and a flash review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child right here at WordPress.
* CFP: Vector Special Issue: Science Fiction and Music. The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
* Point: Earwolf has a new Hamilton podcast, seemingly along the lines of The Incomparable’s but with higher profile guests. Counterpoint: You Should Be Terrified That People Who Enjoy “Hamilton” Run Our Country.
* To Learn About ‘Hamilton’ Ticket Bots, We Wrote Our Own Bot.
* “So Below”: A Comic about Understanding Land.
* Peak Thinkpiece? “Centuries ago, explorers like Columbus and Vasco da Gama played a real-life version of Pokémon Go.” When colonialism is a game. Pokémon Go: Who owns the virtual space around your home? Werner Herzog: Would You Die for the Pokémons? Would You Kill?
* A new genre of leftist literature arose between the wars, urging the young to build a brave new world. In the first of two articles, a forgotten dream is remembered. Here’s part two.
* The Huntington has put up some of Butler’s notes on writing Kindred.
* Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction.
* The Cosby Next Time: Former Fox News Booker Says She Was Sexually Harassed and ‘Psychologically Tortured’ by Roger Ailes for More Than 20 Years.
* Teasing Arrested Development season five, and the long-rumored recut of season four, at TCA.
* The good news is, we’re all going to live. Here’s the bad news.
* 6 Human Activities That Pose The Biggest Threat To The World’s Drinking Water. America Has Never Seen a Hot Weather Outlook Like This. And an upcoming conference at Marquette: Public Policy and American Drinking Water.
* Early Animals Could’ve Caused Earth’s First Mass Extinction Simply By Existing.
* How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure.
* What Are Young Non-Working Men Doing?
* Is Rolling Stone about to get throttled in court over UVA rape report?
* Ableism, Mass Murder, and Silence.
* Race and dermatology. Space and cardiology.
* The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood.
* Zombie bacteria that awaken from old corpses might sound like the stuff of an “X-Files” episode. The premise is far from a complete fiction, however.
* Metaphors too on the nose: rise of the corpse flowers.
* Elsewhere on the zombie beat: The Walking Dead Comic Nearly Ended a Lot Sooner Than Anyone Expected. That’s sort of amazing, honestly.
* Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children.
* J.K. Rowling Says Harry Potter is Done After Cursed Child.
* The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices.
* Trans* identity will be reclassified by the WHO.
* Black Art Matters: A Roundtable on the Black Radical Imagination.
* News you can use: How to land a passenger jet without any flight controls.
* Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. How Prisons Overtook Schools as the Foremost American Institutions. Why Preschool Teachers Struggle To Make Ends Meet.
* This Rick and Morty clip reading from an actual trial transcript shows what how weirdly perfect the two voices work as a comedic duo, independently of any narrative context.
* I say the teach the controversy.
* The Syllabus as a Contract: How do you deal with clever students who find loopholes you didn’t intend?
* College learning takes 2.76 hours/day.
* I grew up thinking journalism was just for rich white people. I was mostly right.
* Ghostbusters and liberal feminism. The Spiritualist Origins of Ghostbusters.
* This time the nostalgia industry is trained on my heart like a laser.
* Self-identified Jedi and political atheism, yes really.
* Automation and the end of liberal democracy.
* They told me capital was a vampire, and man, they nailed it.
* As an artist, what can I consider if I want to de-objectify and add power to female characters?
* Politics roundup! State roll calls: What RNC and DNC delegates want you to know. Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go. Trump’s Likeliest Path to Victory May Be an Electoral College Tie. Bounce! Disability Rights at the DNC. Seven Minutes. The GOP’s Dilemma: How Low Can He Go? Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty? All the same, a pretty incredible chart. From the archives: Norman Mailer Goes to the RNC. How And Why Trump Will Try to Ditch the Debates. Donald Trump as a One Man Constitutional Crisis. An Anti-Trump Electoral Strategy That Isn’t Pro-Clinton. Revenge of the Ghostwriters. A Historic Dud. Obscene Media Spectacle. American Horror Story. Is Donald Trump OK? “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We are the 5%. And we’re still allowed to vote.
* And the kids are all right: Trump, Clinton more disliked by millennials than Voldemort.
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Get June Started Right with June Links
* CFP for the first issue of Fantastika Journal.
* David Higgins reviews Paradoxa 27: The Futures Industry.
* This Is What Extinction Sounds Like.
* “Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian.”
* So here’s my question: if this is all so “common sense” and “modest” then why do you have to lie so much about process and intentions? Why are people who drone on about “accountability” for others allowed to act without any accountability to the institutions they are supposed to represent?
Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgments made by particular historical observers. For instance, adjectives of size (“huge,” “gigantic,” but also “tiny”) are among the most reliable textual clues that a book will be called science fiction. Few people would define science fiction as a meditation on size, but it turns out that works categorized as science fiction (by certain sources) do spend a lot of time talking about the topic.
[whispers] Well, my dissertation and book-when-I-finally-get-around-to-massively-revising-it does define science fiction as a meditation on size…
* Bonus Ted Underwood content! The Real Problem with Distant Reading.
* In response to McGurl’s call we intend to create a digital database along with a visualization tool that can be used to map the professional itineraries and social networks of everyone who ever studied or taught creative writing at Iowa since the Workshop’s inception to the present date.
* Duke University enters hotel business with $62 million project. You know, nonprofit for educational purposes.
* University Of Akron President Resigns After Financial Controversies.
* Is It Time for Universities to Get Out of the Hospital Business?
* …if you take up these old positions about what a higher education in the humanities should involve, you end up dancing with some very conservative people. I found myself in very strange company when I began to hold out for education, not as a credentialising process, but what I think of as encouragement for the revolutionary force of individual curiosity–pursued without limit.
* On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.
* Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape.
* Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel.
* Which City Has the Most Unpredictable Weather? Of course Milwaukee makes the top-ten for major metropolitan areas.
* It’s 2016. Why is anyone still keeping elephants in circuses?
* How rich does a black criminal have to be to get treated like a white one?
* Vindicated! A new meta analysis in Perspectives in Psychological Science looked at 33 studies on the relationship between deliberate practice and athletic achievement, and found that practice just doesn’t matter that much.
* 11 History Books You Should Read Before Writing Your Military SF Novel.
* On Early Science Fiction and the Medieval.
* Careerism and totalitarianism.
Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Progressive racism is how racism is enacted by being denied: how racism is heard as a blow to the reputation of an organisation as being progressive. We can detect the same mechanism happening in political movements: when anti-racism becomes part of an identity for progressive whites, racism is either re-located in a body over there (the racist) or understood as a blow to self-reputation of individuals for being progressive. This term “progressive whites” comes from Ruth Frankenberg important work on whiteness studies. She argues that focusing on whiteness purely in negative terms can “leaves progressive whites apparently without any genealogy” (1993, 232). Kincheloe and Steinberg in their work on whiteness studies write of “the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive antiracist white identity” (1998, 34). Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this list of adjectives (positive, proud, attractive, antiracist) is that antiracism then becomes just another white attribute in a chain: indeed, anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.
* When we peel back its progressive pedagogical covering, the teaching-tool defense is embodied in unequal reasoning. It is embodied in racist logic: our national inability to value the same, to reason the same, to think the same for different racial groups.
* What effects has “ban the box” had so far? Two new working papers suggest that, as economic theory predicts, “ban the box” policies increase racial disparities in employment outcomes. So disheartening.
* Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth. No! I won’t believe it!
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* Well, the establishment’s also pretty bored by literary work that deals with our treatment of the rest of being — you know, other animals, the rest of life on Earth, the creatures beyond the man-apes. Like the tragedy of how our men treat our women, the tragic way humans treat nonhumans is still, to many U.S. fiction arbiters, also irrelevant as a conversation, often dismissed as a boutique topic that’s the fodder of cranks and tree huggers. Women and the rest of species in existence: two flaming badges of uncool.
* Harambe launches a thousand thinkpieces.
* The Black Film Canon: The 50 greatest movies by black directors.
* Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object.’
* How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges.
* Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school. All told, over that same 14-year stretch, Chicago’s black population decreased by an estimated 200,000 residents, or nearly 19 percent. Illinois now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.
* AP FACT CHECK: Clinton misstates key facts in email episode. Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States.
* After Being Called Out, Trump Hastily Donates the Veterans’ Aid Money He Said He’d Already Donated. Meet David French: the random dude off the street Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump.
* This is good fun but pretty seriously slanders Magneto and the Joker.
* The Republicans’ Military Budget Could Make Every Homeless Person In America A Millionaire.
* The Male Gaze in a Math Book.
* Coming from Pixar, 2022: Swarm of bees follows woman’s car for two days to rescue their queen.
* The paralogisms of pure dismissal.
* Fandom Is Broken. A Retort. I’m mostly just impressed with how hard I nailed it.
* Baby abandoned at SF State now one of its grads.
* Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit.
* Hyperattention and hyperdistraction.
* Not a Review of Neoreaction a Basilisk. I for one welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted writer and educator, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground zinc caves.
* Make Bayesianism Work for You.
* A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf.
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
* A Fascinating Video Essay Explores the Key Reason Why Calvin and Hobbes Remains So Beloved Today.
* This is a little old, but DC has basically gone ahead and made it real, so…
* David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.
* Algorithms: The Future That Already Happened.
* Judith Butler on the Value of the Humanities and Why We Read.
* Time to panic about Rogue One.
* I still can’t believe The Cursed Child is a real thing. Even photographs can’t convince me.
* [somberly drags FerrisBueller.privilege.Salon.docx to the trash can]
* Business Of Disaster: Insurance Firms Profited $400 Million After Sandy.
* Over a third of coral is dead in parts of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.
* And to imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever.
Tuesday Night Links!
* Climate Fiction Short Story Contest judged by Kim Stanley Robinson. Fall fiction contest judged by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer.
* Whoa: Ta-Nehisi Coates to Write Black Panther Comic for Marvel.
* Whiteness, Political Economy, and the MFA.
The majority of these reasons have to do with student desire. It is obvious that people have to want the degree for universities to feel motivated to create programs. But there are many economic pressures that induce colleges and universities to expand and aggressively advertise and recruit for programs in creative writing. We do not think it is an overstatement that, prior to the 1990s and the intensifying financial pressures that brought about the corporatization of the university, English departments tended to have a studious lack of interest that bordered on disdain about the teaching of creative writing. And top-tier schools still tend to not offer graduate degrees in creative writing. Of the top 10 universities according to USNWR rankings, only Columbia has an MFA program.
The story of how these financial pressures show up in the college where we work — a small liberal arts college that admits self-identified women and people assigned female at birth who do not fit into the gender binary — might provide a useful illustration here. In 1990, the board of the college voted to go co-ed. In response, students went on a strike that they won after two weeks; the board backed down and the school did not go co-ed. Despite the outpouring of support, the college still had significant enrollment issues. Administration responded to this in the 90s by focusing on co-ed graduate programs. Between 1990 and 2013, graduate students went from 25 percent of the total enrollment at the college to 40 percent. The MFA in creative writing was targeted for growth. During the same period, the number of MFA graduates in the creative writing program more than doubled, from an average of 13 to 34 annually. This growth was not under department control. In 2005, after a long discussion, the department decided that they wanted to admit a smaller, more selective class. It was clear that “targeted for growth” meant adding more students, not more resources. But the president of the college held the acceptance letters until the department agreed to admit everyone on the fairly large wait list. This resulted in the largest class ever admitted.
* An excerpt from Claire Vaye Watkins’ upcoming novel, Gold Fame Citrus, “a sweeping, apocalyptic vision of the Southland after the water wars turn California into a roaming sand dune sea.”
* Interdepartmental research shows that during that 12-month period when body cameras were in use, instances of some types of force by San Diego police officers actually rose by 10%.
* If You Live In These States You’ll Soon Need A Passport For Domestic Flights. I can’t imagine that this will actually come to pass, but I just got my driver’s license renewal and Wisconsin is treating its default ID as not-airplane-ready.
* In honor of the ten years since speculative fiction author Octavia Butler’s untimely transition, the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Octavia E. Butler Society are joining forces to create simultaneous West and East coast events February 25-28, 2016 in L.A. and at Spelman College in Atlanta respectively. The two organizations will also be collaborating on a special edition of the academic journal Palimpsest that highlights her written work and impact on humanity.
* The majority of white people who take the implicit association test (IAT) for racial bias do demonstrate biases against dark-skinned people.
* Higher education as Veblen good.
* Dispatches From the Future’s Past: How a collection of sci-fi fanzines helps us understand the prehistory of the Internet.
* Why Is College So Expensive if Professors Are Paid So Little?
* “Canada’s oldest independent arts university has struggled financially in recent years, and currently faces a $13-million debt.” So of course the solution is to build a new campus for $25 million.
* Cornell’s Pitch to Humanities and Social-Sciences Ph.D.s: All of You, Apply Here.
* If 2008 taught us anything, it’s that the whole culture has followed the economic quants far enough down the complexity rabbit hole. I would argue that it might be the scholarship that neoclassical economists dismiss most forcefully that we should look to for help in questioning the self-interested models that the financial sector asserts are real. As these books help us realize, it is humanists who are best trained to pull back the curtain on what we are talking about when we talk about finance.
* Criminal charges for Volkswagen? A CEO just got 28 years in prison after nine people died from his salmonella-tainted peanuts, and VW probably killed more people than that in California alone.
* Men haven’t gotten a raise in forty years.
* Sheboyganfreude: Scott Walker suspends presidential campaign.
* Eleanor Rigby, greenlit for six seasons and a movie.
* One dad’s sad, expensive, and brief encounter with Ron Weasley.
* I Confronted Donald Trump in Dubai.
* Why does light have a top speed?
* No, I’m Not Piercing My Daughter’s Ears.
* A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion.
* Gymnastics and the abusers. Incredible, incredibly disturbing read.
* “Preventing Ethnic Fraud.” Should Universities Be Policing Professors’ Ethnicity Claims?
* Games connect you with the sublime infinity of the mathematical universe, but they intersect with the real world only in secret and for pretend. Only in your head.
* A new scandal, though, is putting Johnson’s rise at serious risk. It involves the mayor replacing civil servants with private citizens funded by the Wal-Mart empire and tasked with the twin purposes of working to abolish public education and bring in piles of cash for Kevin Johnson. The rising star, it seems, set up a fake government—and some people are starting to notice.
* The Road to a 100% Clean-Powered Planet.
* The rise, and rise, of literary annotation.
* Selfies Killed More People Than Sharks This Year.
* And it was certainly nice of them to name the whole generation after my kid.
Thursday Night Links!
* Did you know Jaimee Hills’s incredible How to Avoid Speaking has started to ship? Buy it today! Hear her on Lake Effect!
* Presenting the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence. Will “decoherence” be the doom of American democracy?
* The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Race Is Always the Issue.
* The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us about freezing brains and reanimating human minds. A Dying Young Woman’s Hope.
* The Caine Prize after “emergence.”
* The Nine Dumbest Things in the Rutgers Report on Kyle Flood.
* The Internet after Ad Blocking. Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web.
* Inside the Brains of Happily Married Couples.
* Friends don’t let friends write clickbait confessionals.
* The feminist think piece industrial complex.
* Twilight of the Elites and the rise of a global left. Even Yglesias is on board!
* We enter into something of a contract as a faculty member: we trade income for autonomy and security. If we do not use the latter, we enter a fool’s bargain. This is why I stay, and why being ready to quit is an important part of staying.
* Inside the Battle for Cooper Union.
* Doing the Lord’s work at GOG.com.
* Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.
* 30 Questions to Ask Your Kid Instead of “How Was Your Day?”
* These 25 schools are responsible for the greatest advances in science. Go Spartans! #11.
* If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism.
* Tased at the Harris Teeter. After an often torturous tenure at the helm of the Durham Police Department—including, most recently, last week’s controversial Tasering of an unarmed black man at a Durham Harris Teeter—Chief Jose Lopez Sr. is out.
* Fraternities are pretty bad.
* “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
* The NFL and the military: a love affair as strange and cynical as ever.
* God save Title IX from its champions.
* Memo to Clinton-world: It might be time to start panicking.
* Ahmed Mohamed and the “Freedom to Tinker.”
* How to screw up the Muppets in one easy step.
A spoiler-free example: The Miss Piggy-Kermit relationship has always worked because of how unfathomable it is, both in terms of species and temperament. These people don’t belong together, but somehow they’ve formed a decadeslong pairing, one that always felt buoyed by Miss Piggy’s stronger affections and a submissive aspect to Kermit. But discovering that Kermit is dating another pig now, perhaps a slightly more docile pig, inverts the whole dynamic of the relationship. Now Kermit just has a fetish, so has he always been playing hard-to-get with Piggy as part of some role-playing that we haven’t previously established? Once you open the window a crack, you’re gonna have to throw open the doors eventually. And within the same dynamic, Miss Piggy’s affections for Kermit, even affections tempered by occasional abuse, have always been a key softening factor for Miss Piggy. We tolerate her awfulness because of her love for Kermit and the love we believe Kermit has for her. Without that core, the risk of Miss Piggy spiraling into an untenable sty of callus words and consistent mistreatment of subordinates is all too real.
* What’s it like to take Jim Henson’s place?
* Don’t Have Sex With Robots, Say Ethicists.
* Nemo iudex in causa sua, but, you know, the opposite.
* Utilitarianism, y’all. Also: the Singularity.
* What Happens When A Parent’s Grief Goes Viral?
* At WeWork, an Idealistic Start-Up Clashes With Its Cleaners.
* Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art.
* “The Long Emancipation” offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists.
* Students’ Requests for Trigger Warnings Grow More Varied. Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine. How Salaita Was Fired: One Year Later. Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data. Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down. Colleges Flush With Cash Saddle Poorest Students With Debt. No Child Left Behind Goes to College. Is College Tuition Really Too High? The Uberification of the University. The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University. Tacit knowledge and graduate education. Can’t afford to eat at a college sitting on over $9 billion? There’s an app for that. The Whistleblower Effect. The entire Japanese public university system attempts a massive queen sacrifice. There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts. Are College Lectures Unfair? Microaggressions and good manners. The coming human capital contract nightmare.
* In 1997, the ETS announced that the SAT could not properly be labeled a scholastic assessment test, either; the initials now stand for nothing.
* Maybe the best description of what it is I think I’m doing I’ve ever seen: He said that his best professors “took texts that seemed complicated, made them look simple, and then made them complex again.”
* “We couldn’t imagine Oregonians’ turning their backs on higher education, but they did.”
* Some have called Harvard a Hedge Fund with a school attached, because it has over $36 billion in its endowment, but the UC holds over $100 billion in its retirement funds, endowments, and working capital funds. This large amount of money can be used for good, or it can be used for darker purposes, but one thing for sure, it makes the university an important global finance player. Of course, we should all ask what it means when a public university enters global finance.
* Jerry Brown’s University of California Perma-Temp Problem.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 22: Collaboration (part 2 of 2).
* The rise of the woman comic book buyer.
* Studies in Cruel Optimism, Bernie Sanders campaign edition.
* Yes. Yes. Embrace your hate.
* This week, the site enabled hosts of events to determine who has actually seen the Facebook invites they’ve sent out but not replied, making the simple act of viewing of your notifications a horrifying social contract you can’t escape.
* Nice work if you can get it: How I Felt After 70 Days of Lying in Bed for Science.
* If We Burn All the World’s Fossil Fuels, We’ll Melt Antarctica & Flood the Earth. Right, that’s the plan. Climate Apocalypse and/or Democracy. PS: Almost Half of the World’s Ocean Life Has Died Off Since 1970.
* Markets in everything! Refugees bring in big business in Europe.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* And some news you can use: The IRS Will Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
The Prophecy Was True: More Tuesday Links
* Eight short science fiction stories.
* On running an arcade in 2015.
* Dear Dad, Send Money – Letters from Students in the Middle Ages.
* The University of Iowa’s new president has no experience, no ideas, and flubbed his own résumé.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 22: Collaboration (1 of 2).
* NCTE Statement Affirming #BlackLivesMatter.
* The past is another country: the town where Emmett Till was lynched is disappearing.
* “I’m a public defender. It’s impossible for me to do a good job representing my clients.”
* Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water.
* Refugees are the price we pay for a globalised economy in which commodities – but not people – are permitted to circulate freely. The idea of porous borders, of being inundated by foreigners, is immanent to global capitalism. The migrations in Europe are not unique. In South Africa, more than a million refugees from neighbouring states came under attack in April from the local poor for stealing their jobs. There will be more of these stories, caused not only by armed conflict but also by economic crises, natural disasters, climate change and so on. There was a moment, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when the Japanese authorities were preparing to evacuate the entire Tokyo area – more than twenty million people. If that had happened, where would they have gone? Should they have been given a piece of land to develop in Japan, or been dispersed around the world? What if climate change makes northern Siberia more habitable and appropriate for agriculture, while large parts of sub-Saharan Africa become too dry to support a large population? How will the redistribution of people be organised? When events of this kind happened in the past, the social transformations were wild and spontaneous, accompanied by violence and destruction. Slavoj Žižek on the refugee crisis.
* “On Queer Privilege.” Postcolonial theory has faced versions of this dilemma from time to time.
* A Comprehensive List of Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
* Why Maria Left Sesame Street.
* Netflix to continue the best SF show of the decade? Yes please.
* 10 of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s best Muppet Labs experiments, rated for scientific accuracy.
* Superhero Comics for Little Superheroes: Caped crusaders are not just not just for kids anymore.
* Ashes to ashes, mall to mall.
* And for your consideration: the greatest gif in world history.
Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost
* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.
* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.
* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.
* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.
* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.
* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.
* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.
* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.
* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.
* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.
* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.
* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.
* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.
* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.
* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.
* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!
* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.
* Coca-Cola and the denialists.
* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.
* What If Stalin Had Computers?
* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.
* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.
* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.
* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.
* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”
* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.
* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”
* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”
* Understanding Neal Stephenson.
* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.
* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.
* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.
* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.
* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?
* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?
* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.
* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.
* An oral history of Six Feet Under.
* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.
* The new Cold War is a Corn War.
* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.
* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.
* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.
* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.
* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?
* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.
* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.
* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.
* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.
* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!
* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.
* Hell, with same-day delivery.
* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.
* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.
* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.
* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.
In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”
* Science proves the universe is slowly dying
* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.
* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.
* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.
* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”
* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.
* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.
* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.
* Don’t bring your dogs to work.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.
* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.
* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.
* Don’t say it unless you mean it.
* And we shall Truffle Shuffle no more forever.
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”
* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.
* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.
* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.
* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.
* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.
* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.
* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?
* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.
* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.
* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.
* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”
* The paradox of the underperforming professor.
* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.
* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.
“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”
And this used to be a free country.
* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.
* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.
* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.
* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.
* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”
* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.
* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.
* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.
* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.
* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”
* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.
* Point: “The green case for fracking.”
* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.
* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.
* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.
* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.
* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.
* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?
* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.
* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.
* Punishment Park is on YouTube.
* How privilege became a provocation.
* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.
* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.
* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.
* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.
* And they all lived happily ever after.
Ten Thousand Tuesday Links
* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.
* Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?
* Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.
* Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.
* How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.
* Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.
* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.
* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.
* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.
* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.
* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.
* America is still incredibly segregated.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.
* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!
* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.
* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.
* NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.
* Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation, which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.
* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.
* What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.
* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.
* Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!
* Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.
* The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.
* 100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.
* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.
* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.
* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.
* Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.
* Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.
* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.
* Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.
* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”
* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.
* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.
* Language is like gymnastics.
* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Gerry Canavan 