refrigerators | Gerry Canavan

Monday Mega-Links

* Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Be President. Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken. Clinton Releases a Brutal Anti-Trump Ad. 5 not-totally-crazy electoral maps that show Donald Trump winning. Could Trump Put Georgia in Play for Democrats? Only a Democrat can stop Trump now. Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism. The six days of Carly Fiorina’s vice presidential campaign, ranked.

* So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.

Even in the age of Trump, US party politics = the hystericalization of petty, marginal differences within a largely uniform elite consensus.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 4, 2016

* Report: FBI Preparing to Interview Hillary Clinton About Email Thing.

* Wave of no-confidence votes sweeps Wisconsin campuses.

* [Aristotle], On Trolling.

* Why graduate students should be allowed to see the letters we write on their behalf. I was in strong disagreement with the headline but was won over by the text.

* Recommendation for a quick, great read: Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti, an Afrofuturist space-age riff on Harry Potter with more than a little bit of Octavia Butler in there…

* Another thing I’ve been enjoying, which you might too: “Hardcore Game of Thrones” on howl.fm. (First three episodes available for free here.) It’s completely sold me on the viability of a prequel spinoff, and I may actually like it more than the actual series.

* Two Great Tastes: On Civil War and Hamilton. Meanwhile, a great review from Abigail Nussbaum asks whether Civil War (which I liked a lot) has ruined the MCU.

Some quickie CIVIL WAR thoughts: better job balancing the sides than the comic. Much better than BvS. Still should have never come to blows.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016

And the choreography on the last bit of the last fight of CIVIL WAR is such a great, subtle character moment. Really stellar work there.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016

Overall, deantastic, would dean CIVIL WAR deangain.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016

socialistdefenseofsuperherofantasy.notreally.docx

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016

* The Norton Writer’s Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay written by an undergraduate. Literacy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.

* “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

* Unable to analyze meaning, narrative, or argument, computer scoring instead relies on length, grammar, and arcane vocabulary to do assess prose. Should you trust a computer to grade your child’s writing on Common Core tests?

* A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism.

* Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

* Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?

* Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight. This situation is absolutely untenable and I cannot believe the airlines are willingly participating.

* Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills.

* Maps of the end of the world. The post keeps going after the image!

* Why Refrigerators Were So Slow to Catch On in China.

* In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.

* U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.

* Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.’

One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.

* Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet.

* Happy Mother’s Day: Kids’ Screen Time Is A Feminist Issue. Keep scrolling!

A moment of silence for all of the fictional mothers that had to die in the name of tragic back story and character development.

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) May 8, 2016

* Nonhuman Rights Project Chimpanzee Clients Hercules and Leo to Be Sent to Sanctuary.

* Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff.

* The modern banking system and zero-factor security.

* University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien. There’s still more after the image!

* Here’s the Table Of Contents For Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Amazing Big Book of Science Fiction.

* The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies.

* Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.

* Fullest House, A Never-Ending Stream of Daily ‘Full House’ Scripts Generated by a Neural Network.

* Before Hamilton, there was… An Oral History of Rent.

* Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship.

* #GiveElsaAGirlfriend.

* Grimdark realism isn’t realistic: where is kindness on Game of Thrones?

* The end of SF Signal.

* Twilight of The Antioch Review.

* Being Lauren Lapkus.

* Why we sued the American Studies Association.

* Against postdocs.

* When Robinson Met Bacigalupi.

* Daredevils Jump Out of Plane, Play Quick Game of Quidditch Before Landing. Keep going.

* The Flight of the Navigator sequel/reboot just wrote itself.

* Chris Matthews, my god.

* New J.M. Coetzee novel announced.

* Daredevil and the Problem of the Not Bad.

Ultimately, there’s not much you can say about Daredevil because its not-goodness derives from the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. This makes it hard to say anything about the way it’s not saying anything. Based on the first season, I would have argued that the show uses the superhero genre tode-familiarize gentrification and the way crime plays into struggles over urban land use. Similarly, I would contend that Jessica Jones uses the superhero-detective genre to de-familiarize trauma and addiction. Coming out — dare I say, being flushed out — of Daredevil season two, I would say that it uses the Batman-genre to re-familiarize the Ninja-genre. And for all the violence it does to its characters and setting, the real problem is this reinvestment in the fetish of ninja violence. The show uses the spectacle ofliteral violence to render unnecessary the organic narrative flow of people just being people in the world. Instead of the hidden injuries and traumas of class, as they play themselves out across our lives, we get a story of a ninja fighting ninjas because, well, ninjas.

* CEI et al. argue that TSA’s final rule fails to consider one important factor related to the deployment body scanners: a potential increase in highway injuries and deaths. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. Past research suggests that post-9/11 airport security policies were so invasive that a number of would-be air travelers decided to drive instead. Given the fact that auto travel is far more dangerous than air travel,three Cornell University economists found that TSA’s invasive, time-consuming airport screening policies resulted in about 500 additional highway fatalities annually in the years following 9/11—more than a fully loaded 747 per year.

* Google is working on a computer that is literally injected into your eye. Hard pass.

* Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War.

* What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage.

* On women’s bodies in academia.

* Educated people are usually critical of absolute truths, no matter if they come from statistics or religious revelation. Facts need to be understood within a larger cultural context in order to be deemed plausible or implausible. Today, however, we see an increasing tendency to describe the world not in terms of cultural values, but in terms of fundamental truths. In the cases of fundamentalism and neoliberal education of excellence, as I’ve shown here, this “deculturation” takes the form of a dangerous combination of religion and pseudoscientific thought peddled as excellence.

* There’s a Sci-Fi Novel Secretly Unfolding in Reddit’s Comments.

* 78% of Reddit Threads With 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis.

* Sure, let’s clone Leonardo da Vinci. Things could hardly get worse.

* I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

* Historical memory is not about the past — it is about the future.

* And some scenes from the Anthropocene: Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There. Fort McMurray Wildfire: 80,000 Evacuated Over Out-of-Control Blaze. Fleeing Fire in Oil Country. Alberta Wildfires Expected to Double In Size and Burn for Months. The First Coral Reefs Are Starting to Permanently Dissolve. Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard. Have a great week, everybody!