Posts Tagged ‘quit lit’
Fall Break Links? In This Economy?
I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...
- A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
- I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
- A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
- Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
- CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
- The CoFutures Prizes.
- Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
- Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
- Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
- How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
- Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
- From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
- Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
- Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
- Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
- Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
- Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
- The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
- Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
- Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
- Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
- The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
- To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
- ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.
- What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
- U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.
- All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
- Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
- Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
- Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
- Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
- The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
- Legally defining Peter Parker.
- Marvel adjective chart.
- Art Is Not Therapy.
- The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
- Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
- A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
- Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
- Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.
- Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
- At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
- This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
- Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
- Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
- If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
- Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
- Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
- Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
- The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
- The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
- Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
- Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…
- “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
- Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
- Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
- Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
- What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
- Equal population mapper.
- The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
- Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
- Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”
- A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
- The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
- War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
- When Chess Gets Weird.
- Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
- America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
- From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
- The United States of Abandoned Places.
- A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
- An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
- An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
- The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
- Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
- Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
- New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
- The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
- In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
- How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
- Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
- We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
- By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
- Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
- Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
- Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
- The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
- Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
- An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
- As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
- As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
- Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
- Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
- Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
- Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
- The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
- The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
- More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
- Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
- Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
- Anthropocene Gothic.
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
- Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
- Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
- It can always get worse.
- They say time is the fire in which we burn.
- How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
- And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.
Happy Valentine’s Day Links!
* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.
* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.
* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”
* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?
* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.
* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.
KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’
The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.
* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.
* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.
* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.
* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.
* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’
* The Olympic hero for our time.
* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.
* Know your police rape loopholes.
* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.
* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.
* In the richest country in human history.
* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.
* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?
* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!
* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.
* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.
* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.
* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.
* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.
* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.
* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.
* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.
* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?
* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.
* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.
* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.
* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.
* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.
* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.
* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.
* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.
* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.
* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.
* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.
* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.
* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.
* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.
Gerry Canavan 