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.

That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2021

Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY

— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022

another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI

— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022

• 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.

I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022

• 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’.

I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 30, 2022

look I don’t think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022

• 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.

Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler’s old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel

— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022

• 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.

this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022

The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of “fantasy,” “adventure,” “frontier,” and “tomorrow,” with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you’ll find anywhere.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022

science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 20, 2022

• 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.

🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.

For one: more sequels & comic book movies.

In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu

— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022

• 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…

good morning
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F

— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022

oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 27, 2022

• “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.”

This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022

The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2022

the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD

— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022

• 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.

I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.

It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022

pic.twitter.com/V0tmZsNfrA

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022

We're a modest company with modest goals:
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god

— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014

• 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.

if you don’t oppose nuclear war when you’re 25, you have no heart. if you’re not in favor of nuclear war by the time you’re 35, you have no head

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2022

This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022

The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels

— ᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟ (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022

from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022

Friday Links!

my fall plans / delta variant pic.twitter.com/55UwaOEsx1

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2021

• I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence at The Rosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…
• Transfer Orbit dives into the latest on The Last Dangerous Visions.
• In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction.
• Alien again, again.
• Music to my ears: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the MyPillow Guy Are in Huge Trouble. Not as great: A rogue DOJ lawyer almost kept Trump in office.
• When they fantasize about killing you, believe them.
• Breakthrough cases may be a bigger problem than you thought. Children’s hospitals are swamped with Covid patients — and it may only get worse. How the Pandemic Ends Now.
• Census minute: Census Bureau releases population data, starting scramble to redraw congressional lines. We’re Going The Wrong Way. Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show. Milwaukee city workers moved out in droves after the residency rule ended. It was a boon for the suburbs. Wisconsin as democracy desert.
• And in local news: Milwaukee’s comedy market is surging with new Improv club, more shows as people seek escape from COVID-19.
• Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.” Your favorite senator and mine, Ron Johnson, features prominently.
• A people’s history of the Karen.
• The fall of Snopes.com.
• A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Now it’s official!
• Put a man on the moon by whenever you get around to it.
• UFOs and the Boundaries of Science.
• Why Are Young People So Obsessed With Cults?
• A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse.
• What’s the matter with book reviews?
• Climate Denial, Covid Denial and the Right’s Descent.
• A New Idea That Could Help Us Understand Autism.
• And what happens when the bugs all die?

we are confronted with a planetary ecological crisis whose scale and severity is absolutely without precedent in human history and the primary political and aesthetic response is calling out people for being “doomers”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2021

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you. pic.twitter.com/ciP9JaLtZY

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2021

Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy

this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021

Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...

First, just a few things I’ve been doing:

• I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
• I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
• I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
• We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
• I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
• I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
• My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
• I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
• I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
• And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…

“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973

“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:

Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021

• SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
• Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
• Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
• Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
• CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
• The war on critical race theory.
• The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
• The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
• Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
• Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
• Ground operations.
• Reflections on the Market.

I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.

— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021

• Dark academia.
• How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
• The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
• The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
• Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
• Firsting in Research.
• A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
• “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
• Reagan broke everything.
• The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
• Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
• Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
• All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
• A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
• University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
• The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
• ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
• Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
• Every day a new sadness.
• Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
• How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
• Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
• Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.

Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021

this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ

— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021

if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021

• How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
• Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
• We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
• Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
• The Airline Safety Revolution.
• Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
• Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
• Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
• It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
• No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
• A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
• Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
• Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
• The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
• The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
• Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
• The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
• How much money does a writer need?
• Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
• The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
• Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
• The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
• It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.

My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."

— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021

• Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
• So you want to acknowledge the land?
• Decolonize Oregon Trail.
• Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
• Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
• Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
• How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
• There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
• Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.

https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC

— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021

• We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
• How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
• Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
• America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
• A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
• What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
• Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
• 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
• The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
• The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
• I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
• How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
• Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
• “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
• ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• Two from Ted Chiang:  “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
• Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
• Sertãopunk.
• The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
• Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
• Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
• The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
• The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
• The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
• Top 20 Irishisms.
• Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
• 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.

it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities

— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?

This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:

• ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
• American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
• A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
• I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
• You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
• Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
• I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
• The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
• Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
• CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
• Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.

nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020

• A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
• Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
• Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
• Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
• 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.

Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020

have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t

— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020

Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020

• Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
• Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
• Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
• Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
• “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
• How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
• How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
• Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
• Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
• We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
• Glücky!
• RIP, Duke TIP.

The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020

• Miracles and wonders.
• The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
• Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
• Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
• Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
• He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
• DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
• Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
• idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
• AOC, streamer.
• Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
• Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
• Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
• Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
• Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
• Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
• What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
• “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
• The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
• The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
• The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
• Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
• How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
• Revisiting Nabokov.
• Always look on the bright side of life.
• How will 2020 end?
• And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
• Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!

the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020

pic.twitter.com/VcyJtdFq17

— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020

Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else

* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.

* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”

* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.

* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!

* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.

* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.

— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020

Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.

— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020

Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020

* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.

* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.

* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.

* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.

* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.

* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.

* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?

* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.

* Quarantine fatigue is real.

* The COVID-19 Conjuncture.

* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.

* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.

* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.

People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020

Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK

— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020

This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm

— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020

* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.

* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.

* Four months as a private prison guard.

* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.

* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.

* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.

* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.

* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.

* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.

* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.

* Why Zoom Is Terrible.

* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.

* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?

* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.

* Flood and evacuations, including a looming environmental disaster at the Dow Chemical plant in Michigan.

* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.

* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.

* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.

* Charlie Brooker taps out.

* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.

* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.

* Take that, STEM!

* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.

* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.

* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

* How we got to Sesame Street.

* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.

* CBS All-Access gonna try again.

* Coronavirus shutdowns exposed the fragility of the comic book industry. How will those in the Pacific Northwest comics scene survive?

* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.

* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.

* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.

* 36,000 Feet Under the Sea.

* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.

[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America

— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017

* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.

* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?

* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.

* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.

* No one knows what a g looks like.

* This one cuts deep.

* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.

* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread

* society if dads went to therapy

* made a Rube Goldberg machine

* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.

* Well this is just silly.

* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.

suNDaY ReAdiNG

 

* College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months. The Big ‘If.’ What If Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021? College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. Public Colleges Lose State Funding, Effective Immediately. I Teach at Rutgers and I Don’t Know If I’ll Have a Job This Fall. Rising expenses, falling revenues, budget cuts: Universities face looming financial crisis. ‘Pressure Is Turning Way Up’: College Presidents Plan Layoffs, Budget Cuts Due to Coronavirus, Says Survey. College Closures in the Wake of COVID-19: A Need for Forward-Looking Accountability. Pandemic Hits College Sports. Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online. The New Tenured Radicals. For the recovery, we need to spend like our lives depend on it.

* And at home: Faculty express concerns over university furloughs, financial decisions.

* NYU is not kidding around. Stanford Health Care to cut workers’ wages by 20%.

realizing on reflection that this is intended as an advertisement for high-cost private colleges, the only places that could possibly provide this level of test, trace, and quarantine https://t.co/ziT7PYRbrl

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020

anyway, I’m definitely sure our universities are definitely well-resourced and infrastructurally prepared enough to take on primary roles as stewards of public health this fall, no problems there!

— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) April 26, 2020

* Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor.

* Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. Life After Ventilators Can Be Hell for Coronavirus Survivors. Even Palliative Care Doctors Have Never Experienced Anything Like This Before.

* A Stanford Professor’s Wife Recruited People For His Coronavirus Study By Claiming It Would Reveal If They Could “Return To Work Without Fear.”

* Zoom as “The Gift of the Magi.”

* Here are the unambiguous rules for what to do in this pandemic.

* ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege. These epidemiologists say let’s think about reopening daycares and elementary schools. After Coronavirus, Nearly Half Of The Day Care Centers In The U.S. Could Be Gone. You’re Not Homeschooling — You’re ‘Crisis Schooling.’ To Access Online Services, New Jersey Students With Disabilities Must Promise Not To Sue.

* Liberals just seem incapable of accepting that New York is a coronavirus disaster because Cuomo and de Blasio did a bad job.

* America gets back to work: My Family Was Denied a Stimulus Check Because My Husband Is an Immigrant. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? The end of bars and restaurants. Trump Donor Hired Trump-Tied Lobbyists, Then Raked in Coronavirus Relief Cash. GOP Governors Will Push Workers off Unemployment by Reopening Early. A Step-by-Step Plan to Reopen California. Can We Really Make a Safe Vaccine in 18 Months? ‘No Evidence’ Yet That Recovered COVID-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says. Just 14% of Americans support ending social distancing in order to reopen the economy, according to a new poll. The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests. Coronavirus is spreading fast in states that may reopen soon, study finds. We Cannot “Reopen” America. What Reopening Georgia Might Really Be About. Reopening Has Begun. No One Is Sure What Happens Next.

“If the state narrowly defines suitable work and doesn’t include the implications of the virus and what that means for a workplace, then that might put those workers who are drawing unemployment insurance in a precarious position, where they would have to either lose their unemployment insurance or go back to work in an unsafe environment,” Camardelle says.

Everytime I see this I realize anew that the plan is for every small restaurant in the country to fail, with the space eventually taken by a new dent-financed restaurant venture, a national chain, or just nothing. https://t.co/DOJTeDaway

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020

The longer the lockdown goes on, the more burden will be placed on the government to make it livable. "Opening the economy" is about forcing working people to put their health at risk to avoid that terrifying problem: https://t.co/yWanaHbNCD

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020

* The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. Understanding media bias.

Bret Stephens doesn't write "opinion columns"; he uses the leeway provided him by "opinion" to pass along the alternative facts that his ideological fixations would require to be to true to be valid.

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020

* American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Small Business Rescue Earned Banks $10 Billion In Fees. With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. Wheeeeeeeeee!

* Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November. Most people dying from Covid-19 are old. Don’t treat them just as statistics.

* Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan. Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections. Say It Loud, Say It Clear: Donald Trump Needs to Resign Over His Handling of the Coronavirus. And for the people in the back: The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It.

* All the Reasons This Will Be a Bleak Summer for N.Y.C. All Children.

* How I Knew It Was Over.

* Tread *very* carefully, Joe — there are a lot of perverts in swing states.

* Pelosi’s Playing Hardball, Charlie Brown.

* Well done everyone.

Three problems:
1) Biden doesn't support doing those things.
2) Biden isn't getting an LBJ-sized mandate.
3) Even when Dems got the biggest mandate realistically possible in 2008, they fucked it up absolutely thoroughly with Joe Biden leading the damn way.

We're fucked. https://t.co/BuOevwn2gt

— Chris Wachal (@notChrisWachal) April 24, 2020

* A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. They didn’t even let him get interviewed for this!

It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.

* How the Supreme Court’s Progressive Minority Could Prevent a Stolen Election. Or the conservative majority could steal it! Who knows, really.

* We will not stand for the erasure of Wisconsin’s proud Confederate history. Or Michigan’s!

* 40 Coronavirus Cases In Milwaukee County (So Far) Linked To Wisconsin Election, Health Official Says.

* Planet of the Humans pulled from Netflix.

* Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products. This would be an open and shut case if we actually had a government.

* The world is a vast hellscape right now, but remember, the Mandarin word for “penguin” literally translates to “business goose.”

* Parks and Rec is back, baby!

* This fall on Netflix: Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer.  Stay till the twist!

* Dolly Parton secretly producing Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the 90s version of Lucille Ball throwing her weight behind Star Trek: TOS.

* Great, one more thing to worry about.

* Kim Yo Jong leans in.

* And for your consideration: another Bible as D&D thread.

Wednesday Night Links!

* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.

* Shoot this post into my veins.

Shoot this post into my veins. pic.twitter.com/YNsOgnRAM3

— Detective Pikajew (@clapifyoulikeme) January 22, 2020

* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.

* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.

* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.

* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!

* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.

* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.

* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.

* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!

* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.

* When rich people can’t get along.

* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.

* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.

* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.

* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.

* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.

* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).

* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.

* The Status Game.

* The Internet of Beefs.

* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.

* The Fight for Mom’s House.

* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.

* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!

* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’

* The things you learn on Twitter.

Makes sense. Google used Enron emails to train its autocomplete. The dead ghosts of corporate malfeasance speak through us all now: https://t.co/fSzqQ5HCYO

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 21, 2020

* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.

* RIP, the rule of law.

* Wendy’s and Child Labor.

* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.

* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’

* Today in the LEGO sublime.

* The truth is somewhen.

* Today in memes.

* And somehow I always knew it would end this way.

Monday Links!

* Just came across this card game as part of an editing project I’m working on: The Quiet Year.

The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a community living after the collapse of civilization, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.

* The fact is that there is no excess in teaching critical analysis – in an era of increasing political propaganda and weakening democratic bonds it’s estimably necessary. We teach how to critically read culture – including movies, comics, and television – not because we don’t acknowledge the technical greatness of a Shakespeare, but in addition to it. Contrary to Douthat’s stereotypes, there’s not an English professor alive who doesn’t understand Shakespeare’s technical achievements when compared to lesser texts, but we understand that anything made by people is worthy of being studied because it tells us something about people. That is the creed of Terrence when he wrote that “I am human and I let nothing which is human be alien to me” – no doubt Douthat knows the line. Did I mention that he went to Harvard?

* How College Became a Commodity.

* Price of admission to Johns Hopkins just went up.

* William Gibson: We Are All Science Fiction Writers Now.

* The View from Milwaukee.

* Danger.

* Most people think capitalism does more harm than good, survey shows.

* Tech Companies Want to Run Our Cities. A Georgia town welcomed America’s largest coal plant. Now, residents worry it’s contaminating their water. Rich people live longer and have 9 more healthy years than poor people, according to new research. The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration. Climate change won’t result in a new normal but in constant, horrifying new disasters.

* The Vanishing Executive Assistant: The erosion of jobs that gave women without college degrees a career path happened in dribs and drabs but is as dramatic as the manufacturing decline.

* Virginia Braces for Arrival of Pro-Gun Militias Amid State of Emergency.

That Nazis will simply take over Richmond on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, and all anyone can do is damage control just shows how far things have already sunk.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2020

* Hunger Striker Nearing Death in ICE Custody: “I Just Want Freedom.”

* A giant kettle of vultures has encrusted a CBP radio tower at the US-Mexico border in feces and vomit.

* The trouble with crime statistics.

* Fractal white nationalism.

* There’s a reason why the royals are demonised. But you won’t read all about it.

* Yet the politically engaged have also taken to believing that electability is a stable and perhaps even measurable quality innate to the candidates themselves. This belief persists despite the victory, in that election, of a man who was widely considered one of the most unelectable candidates ever to seek the presidency. Now many of the sages who rendered that judgment have reconvened to tell us Donald Trump can only be beaten by someone matching a profile—white, male, moderate—that has not won Democrats the presidency in 24 years.

* If you’re going to listen to the endorsement of a neoliberal with terrible opinions, at least make it Matt Yglesias!

The only ways to make it through primary season are to log off or go insane, and I have chosen to go insane

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) January 19, 2020

Whenever I try to get people to understand where they *actually* are in the class war, the reminder that "you are *always* three very bad months away from being homeless, but *never* three very good months away from being a millionaire", can be clarifying. https://t.co/G3UEzHsWEZ

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) January 4, 2020

idk who needs to hear this but you are significantly closer to being homeless than you will ever be to being a billionaire, have some class solidarity and stop glorifying your oppressors

— Alexis Isabel (@lexi4prez) January 16, 2020

* I’m continually amazed that Hollywood as been so slow to adapt Vaughn’s comics, but Ex Machina is a good one and Oscar Isaacs will give it some real juice. Time to reread!

* Any sufficiently long-running fantasy system (Tolkien, Buffy, most recently Star Wars) eventually considers whether it’s actually ok for the heroes to just exterminate enemy soldiers without feeling bad about it, and then has to find some way to cram that worry back into the box.

* All fan theories about TNG must begin from the proposition that Troi does not have either psionic powers or therapeutic training, everyone on the ship is aware of it, and plays along with her delusions for reasons not yet explored in canon.

A useful dualism:

1) The Rorschach effect, in which a character intended to be criticized is instead widely embraced by fans as the hero.

2) The Dark Knight Returns effect, in which a character held up as an uncritical ideal is widely read as ironic or critical.

— Best El of the Decade (@ElSandifer) January 18, 2020

* News you can use: the forever war between “come” and “cum.”

* Real life horror stories: Symphysiotomy – Ireland’s brutal alternative to caesareans.

* Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t.

* I was way ahead of the game on this: Lego sets its sights on a growing market: Stressed-out adults.

* And a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.

End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links

* Holiday plans.

* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”

* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.

* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.

* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

the full corporate takeover of fan culture has turned fans from a subculture whose creativity stems from overidentification with commodities into guardians of IP, enabling the transition of ‘their’ franchises into a series of expensive but low-risk technical updates

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019

& to shift the political horizon of fan ‘resistance’ away from from IP theft & toward minor gains in representation

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019

repeating to my self in the mirror "Star wars is for adults" before seeing the final one & having a violent reaction like ingesting a poison

— wint (@dril) December 22, 2019

still the best star wars story produced in any medium cc @mattthomas pic.twitter.com/cfllpuBDzT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2019

* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”

* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).

The greatest work of science fiction I’ve ever been involved with – my Men in Black profit statement – arrived for the holidays. Sadly it lost 6x what it lost last period. Impressive for a movie that hasn’t been out in 22 years. Unless it’s been *sneaking* out. Yeah, that’s it. https://t.co/fE3bFMRJvb

— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) December 27, 2019

* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.

* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:

After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.

…

“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.

* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).

Not to be all Everything Is Connected, but an inability/unwillingness to think hard and carefully about Society–and an insistence on individuals as the only thing that's real–is why Star Wars, Watchmen, and Bret Stephens are obsessed with genetics

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) December 28, 2019

* Kill Your TV.

* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”

* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.

* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?

* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.

* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?

* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.

* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.

* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.

* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.

* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!

terms like 'financial crisis' and 'bad economy' are propaganda obfuscating the fact that the point of capitalism is to bleed working people

for the vast majority of humanity there's no such thing as a good economy, and there's no such thing as a crisis for the ultra rich

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 27, 2019

You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years

— Raging Dull (@InternetHippo) December 27, 2019

* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.

* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.

* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.

* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.

* More than simple racism or discrimination, the destructive premise at the core of the American settler narrative is that freedom is built upon violent elimination.

* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.

In a somewhat healthy polity the fact that the president is pardoning, championing, and hanging out with this monstrous war criminal would be treated as a massive scandal and have serious consequences. But America is not healthy, and its political and civic elites are failing. https://t.co/vJdnrU69bT

— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 23, 2019

* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.

* On pretty privilege.

* Trade war with Wakanda lol

* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.

* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.

* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”

* Yer cancelled, Harry.

more seriously tho it's striking what these two franchises, which are immense cultural productions and supposed testimonies to the limitlessness of imagination and possibility, implicitly posit as immutable – war, class stratification, various ideologies of gender and sex, etc

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 19, 2019

* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.

* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?

* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.

* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.

SANDERS: I was the only senator in 1999 who opposed Fat Bastard wanting to eat a baby, whereas my colleague Joe Biden was in favor of it
BIDEN: Look I’ve been friends with Fat Bastard for a long time, and I told him Fat, you gotta stop this talk about eating a baby, its not right

— cj (@currentvictim) December 20, 2019

* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.

* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.

* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.

* The truth about PAW Patrol.

* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.

* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.

* Home Alone 14.

* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.

* Oracle, how can I live forever?

* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.

* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).

* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.

Monday Monday Links!

* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!

* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”

* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.

* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.

* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.

* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.

* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.

The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019

younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin

older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019

* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.

* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.

* U.S. Army Worries Humanity is Biased Against Deadly Cyborg Soldiers Because of Movies Like Terminator.

* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.

* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.

* The allure of science fiction.

* Beyond Gender.

* What was one work of speculative fiction—book, game, movie, tv show, whatever—that profoundly imagined a new future during the last decade and that is likely to have a lasting impact?

Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:

-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019

* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.

* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’

* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.

* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.

* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.

* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.

* Against Critical Thinking.

* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.

* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.

* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.

* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?

* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.

* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.

I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019

* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.

* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself. 

* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.

* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.

* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.

* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.

* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.

I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019

* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.

* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.

* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.

Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019

* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.

I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci

— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019

* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.

* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.

* Always money in the banana stand.

* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.

* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.

* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.

* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?

* You don’t know Bernie.

* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.

why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz

— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019

* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.

Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019

* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”

* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.

* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.

* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.

Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will

— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019

* Second verse same as the first.

* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.

* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.

* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.

* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.

* The age of Instagram face.

* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.

* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.

* What we know about you when you click on this article.

* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.

* 52 Things Learned in 2019.

* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.

* You like doing this?

* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.

focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/gGpowtXKGP

— Ree 🍯🍭 (@TTPrettyInPink) December 13, 2019

* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.

*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!

* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.

* SFRA Review 330 is out!

* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.

* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.

Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh

— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019

The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.

I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019

 

* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.

* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.

* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).

* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.

* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.

Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019

* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.

* 82 Days Underwater.

* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.

* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.

You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP

— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019

* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.

* The Makah are the only Native Americans with an explicit treaty right to hunt whales, but they have not been allowed to do so for 20 years. A recent proposal could change that.

* Against whale watching.

* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.

The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will

— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019

* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.

* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?

* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.

* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.

Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019

Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq

— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019

* The collapse of the profession across all fields.

10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.

— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019

12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end

— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019

* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.

* ‘Brilliant’ Philosophers and ‘Funny’ Psychology Instructors: What a Data-Visualization Tool Tells Us About How Students See Their Professors.

* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.

* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?

* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.

* every academic in the 90s either thought they were going to destroy western rationality by reading books the way some french guy told them to or was terrified that someone else was going to destroy western rationality by reading books the way some french guy told them to

* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.

* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.

* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.

* Meanwhile, in the UK.

Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j

— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019

pic.twitter.com/8fcTezA77G

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019

* Bernie vs. Bernie.

* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.

* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.

It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."

— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019

* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?

* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.

* The fall of Nate Silver.

* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.

Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.

Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS

— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019

* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.

* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.

* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.

* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.

Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm

— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019

* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.

* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”

* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.

* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.

* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.

* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.

* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.

* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.

* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.

* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.

* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.

* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?

* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.

* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.

* This one much less so.

what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019

* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.

* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.

* The end of the middlebrow.

* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?

* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.

* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.

* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.

* hot take on the hot take economy

just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019

* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.

* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.

* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.

* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.

* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.

* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.

* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.

* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.

* Thinking about Bowie’s mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester.

Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019

* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.

* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.

* You’re not going to get away with it.

* statement of teaching philosophy

* How to save money before 40.

* and on the pedestal these words appear

* this isn’t really what twitter is for, but ten years ago today my son died and I basically never talk about it with anyone other than my wife. it’s taken me ten years to realize that I want to talk about it all the time.

* And in your heart, you know it’s canon.

Just a Few Thursday Links!

* Climate change is now a bedtime story.

* Geek temporalities and the spirit of capital.

* In 2001, three frameworks for handling international crises emerged: the War on Terror, an ill-defined “responsibility to protect” struggling countries, and the Caribbean movement for reparations. The first two have failed, but the third may still have something to tell us.

* Most public flagship universities are failing to meet the financial needs of low- and middle-income students, a report finds, and are overly subsidizing wealthier students.

* Ohio State loses its brazen attempt to trademark the most common word in the English language.

* Hype vs. reality at the MIT Media Lab.

* Sociologists against student evaluations.

* STEM Is Overrated.

* Survival, Daniel believed, was possible with the proper accommodations. “One simply needs something along the lines of a greenhouse with good air filtration to grow plants,” he wrote on 4chan, “and a fallout shelter.” Thanks to his mother’s death, he had the means to build one: She’d left him a trust worth $2.6 million.

So with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal under the direction of a new, fanatical leader, Daniel had the freedom to undertake his most ambitious experiment yet. Alone in the house, he chose a spot in his basement and began to dig.

* Fired, then rehired: Once-secret records show how the police arbitration system overturned the firings or discipline of more than 100 questionable Philadelphia cops.

* Trump’s got a taste for human flesh now.

* Lin-Manuel Miranda and the dialectic.

* In the richest country in human history: 9-year-old student’s hot lunch is taken away over a $9.75 unpaid balance, grandmother says. The Ohio boy was given a cheese sandwich to eat instead. The incident happened on his birthday, his grandmother said.

* And has the world moved past the Avatar franchise? Does it even remember Avatar?

Wednesday Night Links!

* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!

Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019

* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.

* The coming death of just about every rock legend.

* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.

* The job so nice they posted it twice: Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.

* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.

* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: “The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.” But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.

* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.

* “The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.”

* Liberalism can’t defend itself.

* Whose Apollo Program?

* Another world is possible.

* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.

* The great enrollment crash.

* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.

* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.

It turns out that handing over research universities to a handful of billionaire sociopaths was a bad idea https://t.co/HCTJasWOfO

— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019

The MIT fiasco should underscore how fundamentally toxic the entire philanthropy- & billionaire-reliant funding model is for education & research, period. Should be easy to picture the countless email threads just like the Ito/Epstein chats with Saudi princes, opioid dealers, etc

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019

I know “the ivory tower of leftist academia” is a thing people murmur incessantly, but anyone in a university community knows they’re hidebound institutions that hoover money and prop oligarchies on every level, and if the Epstein MIT news gets us talking more about that: Good

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019

* Her University Publicly Accused Her of Using Meth. Here’s How It Came to That, and Here’s What Happened Next.

* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.

* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.

* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.

I laughed so hard at this pic.twitter.com/wCb8XiUnUZ

— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019

* Another free speech exception.

* Inside Liberty University.

“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”

Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.

An autocratic president and a hedge fund operating under cover of a university mission isn't what distinguishes Liberty U from other big privates. https://t.co/mczFLujfiP

— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019

* Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity. But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.

* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.

* ‘UVA has ruined us’: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”

* Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.

* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.

* The administrators who handle sexual-misconduct investigations aren’t sticking around for long. That’s because they have one of the toughest jobs on campus.

* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.

* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.

again, the *purpose* of these exercises is to traumatize children. this is *the purpose.* it is a social pedagogy. and there is a strong chance that anyone who tells you otherwise is literally invested in or otherwise monetizing that trauma https://t.co/hRN2xl2JZL

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019

* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.

* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.

* UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.

* Climate change is here. Climate change isn’t an intangible future risk. It’s here now, and it’s killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.

* Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.

* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!

* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia: Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.

* Agribusiness against the Amazon.

* “When I say state’s rights,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.

* Today in the wisdom of markets.

* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.

* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”

* What’s Missing From “White Fragility”: Robin DiAngelo’s idea changed how white progressives talk about themselves—and little else.

* And speaking of white fragility.

That people expect to have pleasant fun trips to former slave plantations tells you everything you need to know about this country's failure to deal with the legacy of slavery.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019

* Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.

* TWO MONTHS BEFORE my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companion’s arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.

* The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained.

* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.

* In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.

* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.

* Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Harris’s “Criminal Justice” Plan Is Not Progressive.

* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Biden’s Candidacy.

* Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.

* Imagine if we had a democracy.

* Trump’s already cancelling elections.

* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.

* The case for changing the voting age to zero.

* The Fall of the Meritocracy.

* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.

* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

* Ex-lawyer who stole from clients in part to finance his ‘Excuseman’ character given 3 years in prison.

* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is

* extremely normal very normal

"A 7- or 8-year-old boy was separated from his father, without any explanation… The child was under the delusion
that his father had been killed +
believed that he would also be killed. This child ultimately
required emergency psychiatric care."

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019

* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.

* Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.

* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.

* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.

* How We Shut Down the Nation’s Largest Child Detention Center.

* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!

* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldn’t exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.

* Frenchest news item of all time: man dies having “adulterous relationship with a perfect stranger” on business trip; court rules it was a work accident.

* The struggle to save Day-Glo.

* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?

* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.

* A history of Tetris randomizers.

* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.

* 44 African Architectural Styles.

* Where there were more than 2,000 staff cartoonists at work a century ago, and 180 as recently as the 1980s, contemporary estimates are grim: a 2011 survey by The Herb Block Foundation, an educational nonprofit, estimated that fewer than 40 such jobs still exist.

* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.

* Woman Shares 18th Century Student Disciplinary Records In Response To ‘Millennials Are The Worst’ Claim.

* A people’s history of labor history.

* They solved the Geedis mystery.

* The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man From 1988 – “Dominion.”

* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.

* Cheese can’t fake the funk.

* Every culture tells a different story about why it cages animals, which nearly all of them do. The stories evolve, and the cages do too.

* Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.

* Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.

* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.

Lego from the 1997 container loss, a monster in my pocket, bungs and balloon wands, cereal packet toys from the 50s and 60s, pegs and pen tops, Vanish bottle caps from a spill in 2015. All found on Cornish beaches. #oceanplastic #anthropocene #plasticheritage pic.twitter.com/AWZGBT6Ktd

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) September 9, 2019

* Disney still innovating ways to ruin the Muppets faster and faster; now the series don’t even need to be made to be bad.

* A thread/sincere plea: if you a member of the mainstream/popular press and are writing an article about fandom, you can officially nix any of the following, as it has already been written in 20+ other “101” style articles about fans/fan culture…

* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.

* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.

Monday Morning Links!

* Now this I’d watch.

* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.

* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.

* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.

* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!

* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.

* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.

* Demand for disability accommodations for schoolwork and testing has swelled. But access to them is unequal and the process is vulnerable to abuse.

* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.

* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.

Some of y’all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK

— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019

* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.

* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.

* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c

— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019

you, an intellectual: we can’t afford a better society

me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they’re currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes

— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019

I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 4, 2019

* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.

Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019

* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”

* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?

* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”

* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?

* The Wisconsin veto has always been a deranged executive power, but it too only becomes a problem when a Democrat is governor.

* The weird contracts of the Fast and Furious franchise, which legislate who is allowed to ever lose a fight.

* Phone farms and late capitalism.

* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.

wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it

— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019

* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.

in this regard, Yang’s “higher ground” remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we’re going to hear more and more of. don’t mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth

— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019

(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019

* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.

* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.

* Biden, Inc.

Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019

* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.

* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.

* The story of Native American dispossession is too easily swept aside, but new visualisations should make it unforgettable.

* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.

* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?

I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu

— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019

* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report

* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.

* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.

Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 31, 2019

* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.

* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.

* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.

2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA

— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019

* Charles Manson was a Republican.

* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.

* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?

* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.

* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.

Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”

* Rituals of Childhood.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?

OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?

* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.

* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.

* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.

* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.

* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.

* Did someone say my name?

* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.

* Quantum computing.

* Self-help.

* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.

Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!

* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.

* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.

* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.

* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.

* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.

* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.

* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.

* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.

* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.

* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.

* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.

* Brexit vs. Roko’s basilisk.

* Let’s talk about peeing in space.

* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.

* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!

* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.

* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.

* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.

* How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.

* All Along the Ivory Tower.

* Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.

Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.

* ‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.

* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.

* But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.

* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.

* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.

* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”

imagine being a billionaire and funneling all your stolen money into a fantasy plan to colonize mars like a cartoon villain instead of just like, planting trees

— ghoulia👻 (@c00lia) July 24, 2019

Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019

The glacier "Ok" used to be a glacier but lost its status as such in 2014 when it had shrunk too much. This is a brand new memorial shield in its honour. #climatechange pic.twitter.com/0YlIewvDJe

— Olafur Margeirsson (@IcelandicEcon) July 19, 2019

“the face app reveals a desire for a future which will never arrive” -just a friendly Wednesday afternoon text exchange

— Sarah Osment (@sm_osment) July 17, 2019

* To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.

* Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.

* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.

* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.

https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985

Children were hungry, children were traumatized. They consistently cried and some wept in their interviews with me. One 6 yo girl, detained all alone, could only say "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared" over and over again. She couldn't even say her own name.

— Brandi Buchman (@BBuchman_CNS) July 12, 2019

Forget about history; it’s like we didn’t learn anything from every single Twilight Zone episode.

— (((Goldwasser))) (@PurestRobin) July 16, 2019

* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.

* Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.

Qualified immunity is so out of control that these cases barely register. But here's another one from the 9th Circuit: Cops got qualified immunity for stealing someone's money because it isn't "clearly established" that cops can't steal your money. https://t.co/YSFqBraiHO

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 25, 2019

* Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.

* It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.

That two-tweet sequence really is remarkable. "Aha! This demonstrates that the president's entire project has always been about white supremacy! (a beat) I reiterate my call to him to work with me on the kind of immigration policy we can both agree on"

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 14, 2019

my 32-year-old self strongly relates to this pic.twitter.com/AM9py4b7t9

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 25, 2019

Pelosi Concerned Outspoken Progressive Flank Of Party Could Harm Democrats’ Reputation As Ineffectual Cowards https://t.co/bF91vZf4oy pic.twitter.com/Zna5ZvvFZH

— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 25, 2019

 

* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.

It's tempting to think "oh man how can they be this stupid," but the truth is Pelosi and Schumer want McConnell to use the debt ceiling against them. They want the excuse to go back to their base and say "sorry, we tried, but those damn Republicans won't let us do anything." https://t.co/BYEqppv2jo

— derek davison (@dwdavison) July 22, 2019

* What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.

* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.

* How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.

* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.

somewhere or another William Gibson describes the role of the science fiction writer as predicting what happened two years ago https://t.co/uDuTBck6kg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 25, 2019

* For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.

* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.

* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.

* Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!

* The end of the Supreme Court.

* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.

* Teenage pricks.

* The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?

* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.

* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.

* In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.

* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.

* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.

Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.

* Nothing gold can stay dead.

* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”

* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.

* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.

* MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.

* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.

* Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.

* Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.

* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.

* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.

* Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.

* “A high school gave 336 students fake AP exams when the district didn’t have funding to pay for the real ones. Students didn’t find out until real scores were posted online.”

* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”

* The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.

* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.

In 1989, the cash-strapped Soviet Union paid Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate & a destroyer in exchange for $3 bln worth of Pepsi. This caused Pepsi to become the 6th largest military power in the world for a moment, before they sold the fleet for scrap recycling. pic.twitter.com/zlsPLEV7re

— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) July 1, 2019

* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.

* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.

* Kodak and the cold war.

* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.

* Meth-gators in Alabama!

* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!

giant alligator flick Crawl is bad but actually good bc a) rising sea levels have made its setting broadly relatable & b) it's a competent, unpretentious genre movie, a dying mode that might be extinct in 10 years

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) July 16, 2019

* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!

* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.

* Hacking the insulin pump.

* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.

* How the retweet ruined the Internet.

* Archaeology of the 99%.

* The Millennial nuns.

* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.

* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.

It won;t happen but I always thought, what with the Picard series getting press, that a good plot point for a future trek is a split between a defeated but hostile Borg Collective and a newly emergent Borg Cooperative.

— John Leavitt 🌹 (@LeavittAlone) July 21, 2019

* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.

* A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”

* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.

* How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.

* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.

* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.

* Sexism and the car crash dummy.

* Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.

* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!

* It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.

* Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.

* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”

* I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.

* The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.

been saying it for years, and will keep saying it: anomized precarity and a privatized forever war have offered a more fertile breeding ground for fascism – and stronger obstacles to resisting it – than a mass mobilized world war followed by a global depression ever could

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 27, 2019

* He did.

* And the good news is: We can’t lose!