Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
It’s Been a Minute: Links!

- There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
- I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
- Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
- Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020
Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY
— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020
The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020
(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.
— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2020 at 3:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Amazon, America, artificial intelligence, austerity, Baltimore, Black Panther, Bolsonaro, books, CFPs, cinema, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, Cookie Monster, COVID-10, cyberpunk, Democrats, demographic cliff, disability, Disney, ecology, elections, fantasy, fascism, futurity, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Georgia, Guilford College, Harlan Ellison, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, intergenerational warfare, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Mars, millennials, Mitch Daniels, moms, MUPD, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Octavia Butler, pandemic, podcasts, police, politics, publishing, Purdue, race, racism, Republicans, roleplaying games, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, SFRA Review, shared governance, socialism, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, stimulus checks, student debt, syllabi, Ted Chiang, tenure, Texas, the Amazon, the Arctic, the economy, The Fifth Season, The Last Dangerous Visions, the Left, The Ministry for the Future, the university in ruins, Tolkien, true crime, UVM, vaccines, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
* No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
* How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
Our first images of Abaco from air. pic.twitter.com/rPmXuKDrSD
— Travis C-Carroll (@TravisCC) September 3, 2019
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
* The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
* South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
* Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
This is literally every cohort of kids for the last forty years or more. Dumb fads sweep through again and again, chewing up valuable time in the ONE CHANCE that these kids have to get a basic education. https://t.co/Hl9jSiv8A0
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 3, 2019
* Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
* She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
* In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
* This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
This is a hell of a thread. If you're concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police. https://t.co/SiwwLEh8jo
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 3, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2019 at 8:34 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, apocalypse, apps, Baby Boomers, Ben and Jerry's, Bernie Sanders, boycotts, Bret Stephens, Britain, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, concentration camps, democracy, democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, drug addiction, ecological humanities, education, educational debt, ethics, fact-checking, fall, Flint, France, free speech, general election 2020, gerrymandering, golf, Goonies, graduate student movements, Grenada, guns, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice cream, immigration, James Tiptree Jr., Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, kids today, lead, Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michigan, millennials, Neal Stephenson, New York Times, North Carolina, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oztmandias, parenting, politics, poverty, Prince, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, publishing, rehab, restaurants, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex offenders, slavery, socialism, South Dakota, Tesla, the Bahamas, the courts, the law, the Senate, The Testaments, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tiptree award, unions, Vietnam, violence, voting machines, Waffle House, war crimes, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, water, wildfires, Yemen
Fall Break Links!
*record scratch*
*freeze frame*
"Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got in this situation…" pic.twitter.com/ATInPq8AGL— Emma Roller (@emmaroller) October 19, 2016
Happy birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." pic.twitter.com/c0Ku5nBu9G
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) October 21, 2016
* CFP: The Fourth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 2017. CFP: The Marxist Reading Group 2017.
* Tolkien news! Beren and Lúthien coming in 2017. Elsewhere in things from my childhood that I’ll almost certainly repurchase: Inside the new D&D Monster Manual.
* “Whoa,” said the gangster/minotaur, awed at how close he’d just come to losing his forearm. He was beginning to understand that this wasn’t the relatively straightforward world of street-level dope dealing anymore; this was Dungeons and Dragons.
* I’m glad somebody finally paged KSR: “Why Elon Musk’s Mars Vision Needs ‘Some Real Imagination.'”
* Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies.
* “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions.
* TFW you cut down a 600-year-old tree.
* On translating Harry Potter. Harry Potter by the Numbers. And did you know Harry Potter was nearly a major cultural phenomenon?
* On The Strange Career of Steve Ditko.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Mistake on a Lake: In Michigan, privatization and free-market governance has left 100,000 people without water.
* One teaching artist sees it differently. “There will always be bad artists with a lot of money who want to go to art school,” she said. On the Future of the MFA.
* The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job.
* The Secret History of Leftist Board Games.
* There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: On Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning. Relatedly: The World’s Happiest Man Wishes You Wouldn’t Call Him That.
* Degree programs in French, geology, German, philosophy and women’s studies are suspended, effectively immediately. Eight additional majors within existing departments, six teaching programs and four graduate programs have been shut down. The university is planning a teach-out program for currently enrolled students. Tenured faculty members in affected programs will be reassigned to different departments. The future of the campus’s nursing, dental education and medical imaging programs is still under discussion. Degree programs in environmental geology and environmental policy were cut previously, in July.
* Advice for how to use Twitter as an academic. Of course, as everyone knows, the only winning move is not to play.
* From David M. Perry: “My non-verbal son communicates through ‘Hamilton.'”
* From Adam Kotsko: From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.
* Dylan, Christ, and Slow Train Coming. Teaching the controversy: Kurt Vonnegut in 1991: “Bob Dylan Is the Worst Poet Alive.” Imperialism-in-Artistry: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Win Is Proof Adichie Is Right about Beyonce. Local Boy Makes Good. But not too good: The Nobel Prize Committee Have Given Up on Trying to Get in Touch with Bob Dylan.
* Game of Thrones is even whiter than you think.
* The self-driving car, Baudrillard, and America.
* On the history of fantasy scholarship.
* David Letterman and his beard.
* The LSAT and class struggle.
* Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks. ‘What Kind of Mother Is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?’ No, There Are No Ninth Month Abortions.
* The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of “imaginative power,” and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.
* Another gerrymandering primer. I’m inclined to make a joke about Obama’s proceduralism even ruining his post-presidency but this really is a major issue worth throwing his weight against.
This note Jimmy Carter left for Ronald Reagan before Reagan took office says everything about how politics have changed. pic.twitter.com/OSNtZ2SIly
— CalmTomb (@CalmTomb) October 21, 2016
* Texas?
trump_firstnuclearwar
trump_secondnuclearwar
trump_ritual_demonbody
trump_clones
trump_mechatrump_mechatrump2.0 https://t.co/AIWspOgRjG— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 16, 2016
A non-tacky but equally scary Trump would have been in the coin-flip range, and maybe the favorite. https://t.co/FYkoiGXaki
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 20, 2016
I honestly think we could get some “the Constitution says the president has to be a he” cryptolegalism stuff. https://t.co/3btrsozsRe
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 20, 2016
* In The Hollow: The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race.
* The Anthropocene and Empire.
* How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers out of Millions in Retirement Savings.
* Atlas Obscura: The Land of Make Believe.
* A People’s History of John Stewart, Green Lantern.
* And then there’s this one: Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.
* Breastfeeding as captivity narrative.
* I’ll allow it, but know that you’re all on very thin ice.
* Thank god the Mac version isn’t ready yet: Civ VI is out.
* A dark, grittier Captain Planet: Leonardo DiCaprio wants to make a Captain Planet movie.
"DiCaprio announced that he will be playing both Ma-Ti and Kwame, while Gi will be played by Benedict Cumberbatch."https://t.co/F7tuLxU3h4
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) October 18, 2016
* Hungerford makes Infinite Jest represent how commercial publishers and their enablers in the mainstream media engineer a novel into a canonizable success. The market is corrupt, she says. But is it any more corrupt or distasteful than the publication and marketing of her university press book? “Post 45” is a scholarly association; Hungerford is one of nine Board members. Two other Board members are the series editors for the “Post 45” imprint. The “Advance Praise” for Making Literature Now includes effusive comments by two people whom Hungerford praises in the book, a blurb by a former colleague at Yale, and other comments so hyperbolic that they appear to have been written under the influence of laughing gas. Hungerford put out a misleading trailer for the book in the Chronicle, excising the misogyny charge that’s essential in her closing chapter, perhaps because she feared anyone who had read Infinite Jest would see through that charge and not order Making Literature Now. Her title is grandiose because her data is extremely limited. Rather than the survey that the title implies, Making Literature Now is literary tourism combined with two takedowns.
* Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference.
* Student writing in the digital age.
* Live long and trick or treat.
* I’m telling you, the simulation is crashing.
* And ours is truly a fallen world.
SOCIALIST: late capitalism has created a moral rot that pervades our entire society
NEOLIBERAL: but imagine if we monetized the rot— The Discourse Lover (@Trillburne) July 6, 2016
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Ya my wife said its irresponsible to spend $160 on baby sized Jordans. Just to clarify my baby is not dead
— the slim reaper (@radvilliany) October 17, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
October 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abortion, academia, administrative blight, alt-right, America, Amitav Ghosh, Amy Hungerford, apocalypse, Appalachia, artificial intelligence, autism, Barack Obama, Baudrillard, beards, Ben Robertson, Beren and Lúthien, bitherism, Bob Dylan, books, breastfeeding, Brittle Paper, Buffy, cancer, Candy Crush, Captain Planet, casinos, CFPs, Civilization VI, class struggle, climate change, comics, conferences, cryptolegalism, cyberterrorism, David Foster Wallace, David Letterman, DC Comics, Derek Black, Don't mention the war, Donald Glover, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dungeons & Dragons, Elon Musk, empire, existentialism, fantasy, fathers and sons, feminism, Flint, for sale baby shoes never worn, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, gerrymandering, gibberish, Green Lantern, Halloween, Hamilton, Han Solo, happiness, Harry Potter, Hemingway, Hillary Clinton, imperialism, Indiana Purdue Fort Worth, Infinite Jest, Islamophobia, Joe Piscopo, John Stewart, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lando Calrissian, late-term abortion, lead, lead poisoning, leftism, Leonardo DiCaprio, literary criticism, literature, London, Lord of the Rings, LSAT, magic, make believe, Man's Search for Meaning, maps, Mars, Marxism, Marxist Reading Group, MFAs, Michigan, military-industrial complex, millennials, misogyny, Monster Manual, music, New Jersey, Nnedi Okorafor, Nobel Prize, parentings, plastics, politics, pollution, prison, publishing, race, racism, reading, record scratch, Rent, rivers, science fiction, self-driving cars, spells, Spider-Man, Spike, Springsteen, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Ditko, Stormfront, students, television, Texas, the Anthropocene, the Devil, the Internet, the oceans, the Singularity, theory, Tolkien, trash, trees, Twitter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Viktor Frankl, Vonnegut, water, West Virginia, Wheaton College, white supremacy, writing, zunguzungu
So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!
* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”
* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”
Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?
The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.
* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.
* Marquette will pilot a J-term.
* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?
* The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.
* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.
* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.
Trump status:
–38%, down 7 pts
–outspent 100%-0 on TV
–$1.3m COH, v. $42m for Clinton
–30 staff membershttps://t.co/UaHpJLICJt— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) June 21, 2016
But this one is still my favorite:
So as it turns out, I was booted from the Trump rally because a woman saw me do the Hunger Games salute to a group getting thrown out.
— Jackson Pearce (@JacksonPearce) June 16, 2016
* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.
In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.
* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.
* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.
@gerrycanavan @Lollardfish lotta people cursing both Senate rejection of watchlist for gun control and Strieff majority's 4A logic today
— Nick Fleisher (@nickfleisher) June 21, 2016
* Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.
* Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.
* The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’
* The hack that could take down New York City.
* Rethinking teaching evaluations.
* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.
* What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?
* How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.
* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.
* On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.
* It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?
* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.
* We’re All Forum Writers Now.
* Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.
* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.
* At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.
* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.
* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.
* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.
* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.
* Homeless in Seattle: five essays.
* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.
* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.
"Our fathers were all evil men." Happy Father's Day from Game of Thrones!
— Sarah Galo (@SarahEvonne) June 20, 2016
* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.
* The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!
* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”
* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.
* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.
* Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.
* The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.
* That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.
* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.
* There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.
* Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.
* Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.
* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.
* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Abraham Lincoln, academia, airplanes, airport security, alligators, Anton Yeltsin, AR-15s, Aurora, Barnes and Noble, Batman v. Superman, Bill Gates, Black Panther, boards of trustees, Bolivia, books, Brexit, Britain, brokered conventions, Cal State, CEOs, charts, chickens, children, China Miéville, class struggle, Colbert, color, comics, computers, Connor, content warnings, DC Comics, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, Earth, EU, extrasolar planets, Flashpoint, food, forums, Fourth Amendment, free speech, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, generation starships, George R. R. Martin, George Saunders, guns, hacking, happiness, He-Man, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hunger Games, interstellar travel, iPhones, J-terms, Jacobin, James Garfield, James Joyce, Jameson, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Jay Edidin, Jesus, Jesus's Wife, Jupiter, Justice League, kids, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kodak, Krypton, labor, language, laptops, LEGO, liberalism, life is short, Liverpool, Lord of the Rings, Mad Men, maps, Marilyn Monroe, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, masculinity, medicine, money in politics, morality, museums, my life backing the wrong horse, my scholarly empire, Nabokov, NASA, Netflix, New York, North America, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oakland, obituary, Olaf Stapledon, Omar Mateen, Orlando, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, Philadelphia, phones, Pixar, poetry, police, police corruption, police state, politics, polls, postmodernism, postmodernity, progress, publishing, Quantum Leap, race, racial profiling, racism, rape, rape culture, Ray Bradbury, Republicans, research, Sansa, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, search firms, Seattle, Sega Genesis, She-Ra, Sherryl Vint, sin tax, social text, soda tax, solar system, Sonia Sotomayor, Star Maker, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Wars, startups, Supergirl, Supreme Court, syllabi, sympathy, taxes, teaching, teaching evaluations, television, terraforming, terrorism, The Bachelor, the bible, The Census-Taker, the courts, the CW, the Emperor, the Flash, the Internet, the law, the nineteenth century, The Young Ones, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, toddlers, Tolkien, totality, trigger warnings, Trump TV, TSA, Tuskegee, two-year-olds, Ulysses, United Kingdom, UnREAL, Venezuela, Wakanda, war on terror, Waukegan, Wisconsin, words, writing
Monday Morning Links
* CFP: SFRA 2015: The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.
* CFP: Paradoxa: The Futures Industry.
* Concerned about the Eaton SF/F archive at UCR.
*Ferguson, Missouri Community Furious After Teen Shot Dead By Police. Family of Michael Brown, Teenager Shot to Death By Ferguson Police, Talks About His Life. Michael Brown remembered as a ‘gentle giant.’ Now, riots.
* Black Life, Annotated. Further reading.
* Life as a victim of stalking.
* The Obligation to Know: From FAQ to Feminism 101.
Abstract: In addition to documenting and sharing information geek culture has a complementary norm obliging others to educate themselves on rudimentary topics. This obligation to know is expressed by way of jargon-laden exhortations such as ‘check the FAQ’ (frequently asked questions) and ‘RTFM’ (read the fucking manual). Additionally, the geek lexicon includes designations of the stature of the knower and the extent of what he or she knows (e.g., alpha geek and newbie). Online feminists, especially geek feminists, are similarly beset by naive or disruptive questions and demonstrate and further their geekiness through the deployment of the obligation to know. However, in this community the obligation reflects the increased likelihood of disruptive, or ‘derailing’, questions and a more complex and gendered relationship with stature, as seen in the notions of impostor syndrome, the Unicorn Law, and mansplaining.
* Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction.
* What Makes Nigel Richards The Best Scrabble Player On Earth.
* What It’s Like to be a Doctor in a Supermax Prison.
* Teaching The Merchant of Venice in Gaza.
* Inside online communities for non-offending pedophiles.
* While emailing with a colleague yesterday, I realized that I had never really written about the so-called “spacecraft cemetery” of the South Pacific, a remote patch of ocean water used as a kind of burial plot for derelict satellites.
* Dispute Between Amazon and Hachette Takes an Orwellian Turn. Amazon Gets Increasingly Nervous. In which Amazon calls you to defend the realm.
* What happens when a female writer asks a question on Twitter about women’s health.
* BREAKING: The NCAA Still Doesn’t Care About Athletes. The lawsuit that could change everything. The NCAA in Turmoil. How the O’Bannon Ruling Could Change College Sports.
* “The alternative to partition,” he said, “is a continued U.S.-led effort at nation-building that has not worked for the last four years and, in my view, has no prospect for success. That, Mr. Chairman, is a formula for war without an end.”
* World War I, as Paul Fussell famously argued, discredited what Wilfred Owen in a classic poem called “the old lie”: that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. But what it has meant to shift allegiances from nation to “humanity” has changed drastically over the 20th century among those flirting with wider and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Namely, the highest goal shifted from the abolition to the humanization of war.
* Nothing Says “Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party” Like $800,000 And Some Guns.
* Scenes From COCAL: A Conference for Contingent Faculty Looks to Seize Its Moment.
* Why Does the United States Have 17 Different Intelligence Agencies?
* Why not a three-day work week?
* What was it like to be on Supermarket Sweep?
* I was told on numerous occasions that I was going to face a general court martial on six or seven charges. Then word came down from Washington to discharge me quietly. An honourable discharge. Maybe the thinking was that the peace movement didn’t need a martyr.
* Yes, the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless.
* Elon Musk Reveals Open Source Design for 14,000 Mile-an-Hour Vacuum Tube Railroad.
* So much dBilown the memory hole: Reconsidering the Legacy of Bill Clinton.
* Philip K. Dick’s only children’s book finally back in print – with many subtle nods to his most famous SF work. But not in the US!
* Where’s the Diversity, Hollywood? Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blockbusters Overwhelmingly White, Male.
* John Oliver’s Search for New Voices in Late Night.
* The New York Public Library’s hilarious archive of librarians’ harsh children’s book reviews.
* Peter Frase talks Vonnegut’s Player Piano on the Old Mole Variety Hour.
* The A.V. Club is celebrating Clone High.
* Party Like It’s 1999: Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger.
* One of the weirdest episodes of Star Trek ever.
* Critical Theory after the Anthropocene.
* Tennessee Drug Tests Welfare Applicants, Discovers Less Than One Percent Use Drugs.
* Drilling Company Owner Gets 28 Months In Prison For Dumping Fracking Waste Into River. Sad that this would be so shocking.
* The Scott Walker Hypothesis. The Scott Walker Paradox.
* Giant urban sprawl could pave over thousands of acres of forest and agriculture, connecting Raleigh to Atlanta by 2060, if growth continues at its current pace, according to a newly released research paper from the U.S. Geological Survey.
* Island In Upstate New York Taken Over By Cats.
* Dream to revolutionize ostrich industry crumbles.
* What could possibly go wrong? Armed Right-Wing Militias Amassing Along Texas Border With State Lawmaker’s Blessing.
* But it’s not all bad news: Yellowstone Is Not Erupting And Killing Us All.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 11, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, amateurism, Amazon, America, Atlanta, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, capitalism, cats, CFPs, child abuse, children's literature, Chrono Trigger, CIA, Clone High, college sports, comedy, diversity, Don't mention the war, drones, drugs, Durham, Elon Musk, FAQs, FBI, feminism, film, forever war, futurity, games, Gaza, Gunsmoke, immigration, Iraq, Israel, J. Lloyd Eaton Collection, Japan, John Oliver, Kindles, literature, male privilege, medicine, megapolis, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, militias, misogyny, Missouri, moral panic, Myers-Briggs, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, NSA, nuclearity, NYPD, ostriches, outer space, Pacific Ocean, Palestine, Paradoxa, peace, peace movement, pedophilia, Peter Frase, Player Piano, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison-industrial complex, prisons, psychology, publishing, race, racism, Raleigh, retrofuturism, riots, satellites, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, Scrabble, Shakespeare, spacecraft cemetery, St. Louis, stalking, Star Trek, Supermarket Sweep, supervolcanoes, surveillance society, surveillance state, tasers, television, Tennessee, Texas, the 1990s, the abolition of work, the Anthropocene, the archives, the courts, the Internet, the law, The Merchant of Venice, The New Inquiry, the obligation to know, the South, theory, tracking, trains, Twitter, UC Riverside, unions, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on the poor, What could possibly go wrong?, what it is I think I'm doing, white privilege, Wisconsin, writing, Yellowstone, Yemen
Friday Links!
* The UK Ministry of Defence Says Life in 2045 Will Be Unequal and Violent. That level of continuity with our present almost counts as utopian these days.
* I keep thinking about yesterday’s shooting down of a plane over Ukrainian airspace, especially the high number of children and AIDS researchers on board. And then there’s the geopolitical implications.
* Australia repeals its carbon tax because there’s just no hope.
* NSA sees your nude pix ‘as fringe benefits of surveillance positions,’ says Snowden.
* How to Answer the Diversity Question at a Campus Interview.
* I Saw a Man Get Arrested For a Sex Crime Because He Made a Scheduling Error.
* Freedom! Studies: Stand Your Ground Laws Lead To More Homicides, Don’t Deter Crime.
* Amy Poehler, then new to “Saturday Night Live,” was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”
* How prosecutors would build a case against the Batman.
* The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts.
* Danish DNA could be key to happiness. Well, I’m certainly glad we solved that!
* Israel and Gaza: A Plague on One House.
* A People’s History of Tattooine.
* The ‘World Cup Is Over, Now What?’ Guide to Soccer.
* Adam soldiers on in his sustained reading of the Temporal Cold War. My inclination is always to read the threat of the future as ecological rather than financial, but otherwise I’m on board.
* Amazon announces the death of the author.
* Grad school as scummy subscription service. Disruptilicious!
* Big Bang Theory Stars Could Make $1 Million An Episode, Because There’s No Hope.
* Which early Christian heresy are you?
* A Brief History of Houses Built Out of Spite.
* Okay, okay, but just this once.
* And Slate has an urgent report on my favorite subject in the world, the only thing that really matters, Roko’s Basilisk.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 18, 2014 at 8:27 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2045, academia, academic jobs, AIDS, airplanes, Amazon, America, Amy Poehler, apocalypse, Australia, Batman, Big Bang Theory, campus interviews, carbon tax, Christianity, class struggle, Colbert, death of the author, Denmark, disruptilicious, disruptive innovation, diversity, DNA, dystopia, ecology, Edward Snowden, feminism, futurity, Gaza, graduate school, guns, heresies, housing, How the University Works, Israel, Jon Stewart, military-industrial complex, NSA, Palestine, politics, publishing, Putin, race, racism, Roko's Basilisk, Russia, science, segregation, sex offenders, soccer, spite, stand your ground, Star Trek, Star Wars, surveillance society, surveillance state, Tattooine, terrorism, the courts, the law, time travel, true crime, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Utopia, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, World Cup, writing
Wednesday Night Links: 8,000 Barrels, 0.000025%, 3,387 Men, $100 Bills, and More
* Over a longer time span, say a decade, we would expect about 19 spill incidents with an aggregate spill volume of about 8,000 barrels, enough to fill about half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We would expect about 1.3 of these spills to be “large,” which means that on average we would expect a “large” spill to occur about once every 8 years or so. Clearly, based upon reported historical industry performance, spills in general and large spills in particular would not be a rare occurrence for the proposed pipeline.
* Elsevier’s behavior is so egregious that it has provoked a boycott from academics who refuse to write or review papers for its journals. But to focus on one malefactor elides a larger question: Why should academic knowledge — largely produced by academics at public and nonprofit universities and often with government grants — be turned into private property and kept from public dissemination?
* Dartmouth College Cancels Classes After Sexual Assault Protesters Receive Rape Threats. More at Student Activism.
* Piranhas are a very tricky species: On Gift Horses and Trojan Horses: The Proposed Aquatics Center.
* Tumblr of the day: Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You.
* Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the “American Novelists” page and into the “American Women Novelists” category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly–except of course–when you google “American Novelists” the list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men).
* Mad Men’s Misery Problem And How TV Can Handle Characters Who Never Change.
* Right Wing Media Exploit Boston Bombings To Attack Government Assistance Programs. West Virginia Republican: Make Kids Work As Janitors For School Lunches.
* Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts. That’s a crushing 0.000025% of the federal budget going to WASTE.
* Holding Corporations Responsible for Workplace Deaths. And then there’s Matt “Proud Neoliberal” Yglesias.
* Rhode Island Becomes 10th State To Approve Marriage Equality.
* A Slavoj Žižek Text Adventure.
* Monster.com bans unpaid internships.
* And the new $100 is awful. Good thing I’ll never actually have one.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 24, 2013 at 7:15 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with $100 bills, academia, aquatics center, Bush, college, comics, corporations, Dartmouth, Elsevier, feminism, gay rights, How the University Works, Information wants to be free, internships, Keystone XL, Mad Men, marriage equality, misogyny, money, neoliberalism, Occupy Cal, oil, oil spills, Open Access, painting, parasites, publishing, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Rhode Island, school lunches, sexism, STEM, student movements, superheroes, sweatshops, television, text adventures, the budget, the debt, the deficit, Tumblr, war crimes, welfare, welfare state, West Virginia, Wikipedia, workplace safety, writing, Žižek
Late Night Monday
* In a post-employment economy, many are working simply to earn the prospect of making money.
So when a publisher comes to you and says “We like your book, can we buy it?” do not treat them like they are magnanimously offering you a lifetime boon, which if you refuse will never pass your way again. Treat them like what they are: A company who wants to do business with you regarding one specific project. Their job is to try to get that project on the best terms that they can. Your job is to sell it on terms that are most advantageous to you.
* When People Write for Free, Who Pays?
Oakland Police kept a man on its Most Wanted list for six months though he was not wanted for anything, the man claims in court.
And the most amazing part:
After “nearly a week of hiding in fear,” Van turned himself in on Feb. 13, “to resolve this devastating mistake,” the complaint states.
He was held for 72 hours, never charged with anything, then released, according to the complaint.
Yet on Feb. 14, the Oakland Police Department released a statement, “Most Wanted Turns Himself In,” which began: “One of Oakland’s four most wanted suspects has been taken off the streets. Last week, Oakland’s Police Chief Howard Jordan named Van Chau as one of the City’s four most wanted criminals. Today, the Oakland Police Department reports that Van Chau is off the streets of Oakland and is safely behind bars after turning himself in due to media pressure. Chief Howard Jordan said, ‘A week ago I stood with community members and asked the community to stand with me to fight crime and today we have one less criminal on our streets. Today a victim is one step closer to justice.'”
Via @zunguzungu.
* The State Department’s latest environmental assessment of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline makes no recommendation about whether President Obama should approve it. Here is ours. He should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem. Good conscience! Good conscience! Hilarious.
* The Inevitable 2014 Headline: ‘Global CO2 Level Reaches 400 PPM For First Time In Human Existence.’ The melting of Canada’s glaciers is irreversible.
* Arizona’s Law Banning Mexican-American Studies Curriculum Is Constitutional, Judge Rules.
* “It’s not for everyone”: working as a slavery re-enactor at Colonial Williamsburg.
* Where banks really make money on IPOs. Via MeFi, which has more.
* Nation’s Millionaires Agree: We Must All Do More With Less.
* The world’s most useless governmental agency, the FEC, is still trying to figure out fines for crimes committed three elections ago.
* Anarchism: illegal in Oklahoma since 1919!
* Also from the Teens: Dateline 1912: The Salt Lake Tribune speculates about “vast thinking vegetable” on Mars.
* Marvel declares war on the local comic shop, offers unlimited access to their comics for $10.
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman was right: New Experiment Suggests Mammals Could Reproduce Entirely By Cloning.
* Does the loneliest whale really exist?
* The Senate is the worst, and the New York Times is ON IT. Meanwhile, really, the Senate is the absolute worst.
* Neil Gaiman remembers Douglas Adams.
* 11 More Weird & Wonderful Wikipedia Lists. Don’t miss the list of fictional ducks and the list of films considered the worst.
* CLEAR Project Issues Report on Impact of NYPD Surveillance on American Muslims.
* And let freedom ring: Judge strikes down NYC ban on supersized sodas.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 11, 2013 at 10:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with acting, anarchism, Arizona, at least now they know, banking, banks, Barack Obama, carbon, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, class struggle, climate change, cloning, Colonial Williamsburg, comics, delicious Coca-Cola, do more with less, Douglas Adams, ecology, education, elections, elites, ethnic studies, ethnicity, FEC, freedom, freelancing, good conscience, Herland, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, internships, Islamophobia, John Scalzi, justice, Kafka, kafkaesque, Keystone XL, lists, mammals, Mars, Marvel, Mayor Bloomberg, most wanted lists, Muslims, Neil Gaiman, New York, NYPD, Oakland, Oklahoma, parthenogenesis, pedagogy, police corruption, police state, politics, post-employment economy, publishing, race, slavery, stop-and-frisk, tar sands, the Constitution, the law, the Senate, trust funds, Utah, voting, whales, Wikipedia, writing
Tuesday Morning!
* The kids aren’t all right: on being 29 in 2013.
* Remaking the University: What’s bad for students has been good for Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that “Student-Loan Securities Stay Hot” even as student default rates climb. “Demand for the riskiest bunch” of student-loan backed securities sold last week by SLM Corp, formerly known as Sallie Mae, “was 15 times greater than the supply.” The riskiest securities have the highest yields, but investors don’t have to care, given the special impossibility of defaulting or erasing student loan debt. Meanwhile, the New York Fed reports that 90-day delinquency rates have risen from 24 to 31 percent since 2008, and that student debt nearly tripled in the last eight years. When the Fed breaks out the numbers for Intern Nation–graduates of the past eight years–they found that “the delinquency rate jumped to 35% last quarter from 26% in 2008.” Student Debt Is Perfectly Following the Financial Meltdown Script. Whose fault is the big student loan bubble?
* But I am fascinated by the contrasting rhetoric between the rapid-boil fervor over MOOCs and the barely simmering apathy for open-access policies, especially at the institutional level.
* Spider Robinson, rape culture apologist. Well.
* TNR rockets back to the top of the worst-things-ever-published sweepstakes.
But there’s a group that should be equally irate about “We Saw Your Boobs”: admirers of bare breasts. Because MacFarlane’s is exactly the type of frat-boy behavior that leads so many American women to keep their breasts hidden from public view for fear of just such humiliation.
FINALLY, SOMEONE SAID IT.
* Male and female authors reviewed, book reviewers, and bylines at major magazines.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 5, 2013 at 8:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, class struggle, crisis, How the University Works, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, misogyny, MOOCs, Open Access, Oscars, pedagogy, peer review, politics, publishing, rape culture, retrofuturism, science fiction, Seth MacFarlane, sexism, Soviet Union, Spider Robinson, student loans, the humanities, the kids aren't all right, the past is another country, underemployment, unemployment, what it is I think I'm doing, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing
Open Access
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 30, 2011 at 10:31 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Open Access, publishing, rentier capitalism
More Links
More links because if there’s one thing I hate it’s getting done the things I planned to get done.
* Huge gigapixel panorama of the inauguration, with very close zoom.
* The Obameter tracks 500 of Obama’s campaign promises.
(both of those via Cynical-C)
* More inaugural poem talk from the New Republic and Edge of the American West.
* Obama reminds Republicans that he actually won the election and that in fact they have no credibility at all. Also, that Rush Limbaugh is a tool.
* And Time considers the future of the publishing biz.
So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what’s the 21st century giving us? Well, we’ve gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we’ve moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.
Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 24, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with Barack Obama, big pictures, campaign promises, Elizabeth Alexander, inaugurations, Internet, new media, Obameter, Praise Song for the Day, publishing, Republicans, Rush Limbaugh