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

Friday Links!

• Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
• CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
• If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
• I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
• Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
• “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
• Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
• $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
• Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
• History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.

The "cone" is an absolutely insane shape. What if a triangle was a circle. A nightmarish vision from the deranged mind of H.P. Lovecraft

— stu (@rinbcage) March 5, 2021

• Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
• The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
• Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
• How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
• I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
• A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
• We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
• Curation is not cancellation.
• This is why we can’t have nice things.

This is why we can't have nice things. pic.twitter.com/8D8lkEij6k

— Amy is rightfully pissed off now ☭ (@Amysaysfuckalot) March 7, 2021

• The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
• Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
• Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
• “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
• Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
• Unions Are Cool Now.
• The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
• ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
• Life after vaccination.
• “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
• The Invention of murder.
• Inside the incel.
• ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
• The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
• We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
• Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
• The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
• Against WandaVision.
• Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
• What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.

Call me Space Ishmael. Some space years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no space money in my space purse, and nothing particular to interest me on space shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the spacey part of the world.

— Space Moby Dick (@space_moby_dick) March 7, 2021

March Links!

pic.twitter.com/rSVy8EDzeq

— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021

• SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
• Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
• My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
• I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
• My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
• Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
• And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.

• CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
• A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
• How to Build a World.
• How to Land on Mars.
• Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
• “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
• The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
• Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
• I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.

So my pitch for a retcon:
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

If the core of Wandavision were “everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn’t” I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

• An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
• From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
• The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
• The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’

So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.

It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx

— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021

• President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
• The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
• Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
• Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
• New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
• The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.

When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA

— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021

• ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
• When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
• English departments rethink what to call themselves.
• A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
• Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.

from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021

• Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
• What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
• Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
• More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
• The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
• ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
• Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
• Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
• Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.

NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021

I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021

• The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
• Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
• The Tyranny of Parents.
• Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
• A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
• Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
• Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
• The realest tweet.

kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century

— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021

1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021

the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances

— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021

• Chess is bad now. This is good.
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
• The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
• Finally, someone is making sense.
• Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
• Bring back the nervous breakdown!
• Is This the End of Tipping?
• The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
• I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
• All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
• And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.

During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7

— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021

It’s Been a Minute: Links!

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

• Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
• Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
• How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
• How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
• Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
• A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
• Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
• Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
• The Proletarian Fantastic.
• Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
• Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
• Generation C.
• National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.

Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020

Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020

• ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
• Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.

Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY

— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020

The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

• The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
• Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
• Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
• A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
• ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
• The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
• Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
• Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
• When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
• And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
• Fandom and the Future of Trek.
• In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
• If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
• Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
• implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war

Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.

— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020

• Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
• Joe Biden should do everything at once.
• Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
• In the Time of Monsters.
• The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
• How To Avoid Another Trump.
• Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
• For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

• How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
• What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
• It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
• Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
• 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
• Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
• We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
• The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.

my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020

• A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
• Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
• The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
• Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
• Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
• Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
• We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
• And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.

goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020

And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too

• ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
• How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.

One of the things I see people perpetually getting wrong about the aims of various genre categories: science fiction, whatever it’s pretensions, does not do well at predicting the future. Because that’s horror’s turf.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

If I had to speculate further, it’s because science fiction has to follow some sort of rules explicable to the readers of its time. Horror is under no such constraint, thus is better able to reflect or at least dimly mirror a future we cannot grasp + would drive us mad if we did.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020

• Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
• Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.

“Liberals obsess over the polls while Republican judges throw votes in the trash” is a pretty solid explanation of how we got here and how even now two days before the end no one has learned anything

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

Trump, Biden Trade Barbs on Absentee Ballots https://t.co/N0LLGJTbq3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

• America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
• A Possible Majority.
• Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.

Marquette’s administration is now using the illegitimate, anti-demonstration policy it rammed through over student and faculty objections to punish students organizing against budget cuts. Just an outrageous abuse of their authority and complete abrogation of their duty of care.

— Our Marquette (@MarquetteUnited) October 31, 2020

This is really shameful. @PresLovell, please intervene and put a stop to this. https://t.co/7mMnIcvPHc

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2020

• Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
• Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
• U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
• KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
• Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
• White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.

A marker of how messed up American institutions are is that people are legitimately on pins and needles about the outcome of an election where one candidate is up by **12 points** https://t.co/fESg3xdi3q

— Maya Sen (@maya_sen) October 31, 2020

the ole “critical fail” https://t.co/L7ixI3eQQr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

hard to believe there’s just three days until I’m shot dead in the street during post-election civil unrest

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

there’s a HORSE loose in the HOSPITAL and tomorrow
WE
VOTE
THE
HORSE
OUT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020

• Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
• Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
• Respectfully disagree.
• Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
• Dibs.
• How Long Can Gyms Survive?
• And I’m listening…

weirdly, trying to podcast about Vonnegut’s Dr. Kevorkian novelette in the midst of an impending fascist coup has put me in a somewhat dour mood

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020

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

Behold: MEGALINKS

* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.

* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!

* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.

* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.

* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.

* International Conference on ‘The Possible and Impossible Worlds of Science Fiction’ (11 – 12 September 2020, via Zoom).

* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976

* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.

This is a good rule that I’ve tried to informally follow for the past few years. “Student-athlete” is a term of art, created so the NCAA and its member institutions could dodge worker’s compensation claims. Sportswriters don’t have to use it. https://t.co/stZKzAjLIB

— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) August 10, 2020

University of Pittsburgh withholding graduate student access to email until agreeing to assume risk of catching COVID pic.twitter.com/fHbH60iDoT

— Rachel C (@RCoombsScience) August 6, 2020

My [67m] unpaid college athletes [20m, 21m, 19m, 21m, 21m, 18m, 19m, 22m, 20m, 21m, 22m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 18m, 21m, 21m, 20m, 19m, 20m, 18m, 21m, 20m, 22m, 23m, 20m, 19m, 21m, 19m, 23m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 19m, 21m, 20m] are unionizing

— Trevin Flickinger (@trevin_flick) August 10, 2020

* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.

* Survey finds that 40 percent of incoming freshmen at four-year colleges are likely or highly likely not to attend.

* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.

* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.

* Advice for teaching this fall.

* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.

* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.

* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.

* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.

* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.

* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.

* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.

* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.

NEW: @jacobbogage got USPS data showing at least 671 USPS mail sorting machines have been removed across the country since June. Represents a reduction in national mail sorting capacity of 21.4 million pieces of mail per hour. https://t.co/6lOGfByZBC pic.twitter.com/FGV1nto0kn

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) August 14, 2020

Photo taken in Wisconsin. This is happening right before our eyes. They are sabotaging USPS to sabotage vote by mail. This is massive voter suppression and part of their plan to steal the election. pic.twitter.com/QXLWGIHTrz

— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 15, 2020

It has been conceded by everyone of all parties that the majority of Americans who will attempt to vote in November will vote for Joe Biden, and our election is now some sort of mass game show where we will see if the majority of Americans complete the physical challenges or not

— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) August 10, 2020

This is all going to get worse before it gets even worse

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) August 15, 2020

* Love 2 vote in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin State Assembly gerrymander is arguably the most effective partisan gerrymander in the country. Nothing, and I mean nothing, not even if Biden wins by double of what he's polling at now, will break that Republican majority. https://t.co/p9iZTfh7Fp pic.twitter.com/QeyXnjDesC

— Chaz Nuttycombe (@ChazNuttycombe) August 2, 2020

This is the worst gerrymander the country, change my mind. pic.twitter.com/HVS7rYB4sO

— Kiran 🗳 (@MichiganKiran) August 10, 2020

 

* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.

* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.

* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.

* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.

* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.

* Solved that little problem.

* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.

* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.

* gaaaaaaaasp

* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.

* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.

* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.

* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?

* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”

* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.

* it me

* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.

* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.

* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.

* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.

… this is the “hägar the horrible” comic strip framed on biden’s desk. pic.twitter.com/fqNcuW8ceC

— fake nick ramsey @ 🏡 (@nick_ramsey) August 11, 2020

The next time someone runs for president who wasn’t personally selected by Joe Biden for the job could be as far away as 2036. So a single bad decision by Barack Obama in 2008 screwed up the next 20-30 years. https://t.co/JdTKPChPen

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020

it’s awesome how Joe Biden gets to set the direction of the leftmost party in the world’s imperial hyperpower for what could be the most important decade in human history and no one can really explain why he’s the nominee or even how he won exactly

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020

* some conditions may apply https://t.co/yJ8yxSsSZI

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020

* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.” 

* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.

* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.

* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.

* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.

* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.

* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.

* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.

* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?

* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.

* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.

* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/

tag yourself I’m pretty sure I’m Tanis and I don’t like it https://t.co/DIHNkx7S9M

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2020

* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.

* Poetry rebrands.

* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.

* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.

* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.

* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.

* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.

This is such a perfect example of modern innovation in action — wireless charging, which saves us like 0.001 seconds every time we plug in our phones, uses up to *50% more energy*.

Nearly imperceptible convenience, at massive social costhttps://t.co/epfFenCJku

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 5, 2020

* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.

* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.

* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.

* I honestly don’t know.

* Dibs on the screenplay.

Gotta feel for this kid. His 66 person American town is only accessible by road to the Canadian side where most people live, so now he's the only kid his age and because of what's happening in the unconnected rest of the country he's forced to stay on his side indefinitely. https://t.co/OqJjY0xJMA

— Evan Hadfield (@Evan_Hadfield) August 8, 2020

* this is a maritime news article from 2014 describing a ship carrying ammonium nitrate that had been docked/abandoned at the Beirut port since 2013, this is what exploded today. words fail to describe organized negligence at this scale.

* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.

* Zombie stories are going to have to change.

* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.

Funny how it's always "The Simpsons predicted the future" and never "We created ourselves a nightmare world beyond parody".

— Kung Fu Monster D (@Duerer95) August 4, 2020

zizek on sesame street talking to the puppets “no i cannot say, as you do, ‘i love you’ so casually, i believe this is obscene, love is deeply private, so particular it is really almost evil”

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) August 15, 2020

someone check the simulation heat sinks, reality generation is clearly being throttled by high temps pic.twitter.com/W3NlLzSGOx

— lvl 45 chaos chatterton potus (@thetomzone) August 6, 2020

All these tweets about "2020 please end already" remind me of an old communist joke:

Two friends meet in the middle of Bucharest:
– How are you doing these days?
– Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.

— Orel Beilinson (@BeilinsonOrel) August 11, 2020

 

* Imagine how badly you have to screw up as a CEO for anything to try and hold you accountable for anything.

* Alas, Uber!

Uber exists entirely through its wild abuse of existing laws and even then it loses money hand over fist https://t.co/peeHu0EvJy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020

* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.

* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.

* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.

* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.

* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.

* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.

* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.

* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.

* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.

* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!

* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.

Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links

* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…

* For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans.  The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.

“ok what happens when someone dies” really seems to be the armor-piercing question for all these plans to reopen schools

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

The one that gets me is that students have ten minutes between classes regardless of modality or location. Starbucks is closed, library is closed, you’re not allowed to congregate in hallways — where do you go for your 10 AM virtual class between your 9 and 11 in-person classes? https://t.co/vSz7t88uHH

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

There’s also going to be a nonzero number of in-person classes where the instructor is the noncompliant party and I haven’t heard anyone explain what is supposed to happen in that situation https://t.co/MkwlX7GM8d

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 24, 2020

Btw your students know what's up. I've seen so many similar tiktoks over the last month pic.twitter.com/7JZzTl9xGq

— dakoda smith (@feelinggorgias) July 19, 2020

* On a Knife’s Edge.

* Rethinking MLA 2021.

* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.  

* Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.

* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.

* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.

* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.

* 8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.

* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.

* Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

* The Last Giraffes on Earth.

* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.

When men use slurs against us it’s *shoulder shrug* but when we defend ourselves it’s because we’re opportunistic. Fuck this https://t.co/nCyMiZdaNK

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 24, 2020

* Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.

* How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?

* There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.

* Once again: against homework.

My lecture on this starts in half an hour lol https://t.co/DmQRYAj95l https://t.co/SlIornNN5q

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) July 24, 2020

* The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.

I’m incredibly cynical and believe the Republican Party is full of world-historical monsters but seeing the entire apparatus of the right attach themselves to Q has really shaken me https://t.co/lSKM65lp3q

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 26, 2020

* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.

This is really bad. There has been a gigantic, sustained shock in areas of the labor market which are not directly exposed to the virus, but instead exposed to plain old economic conditions. https://t.co/zsNuxCiT5L

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 21, 2020

* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell

* Your Predominantly White Academic Organization (Yes, Even Yours) Is Exactly One Live-Tweeted Racist Event Away from Public Disgrace.

* U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

I think people prior to the Gen X/Millennial cohort genuinely have trouble processing what has happened to basically everything they were raised to think of as “careers” https://t.co/BVreP3Wk3S

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

You can’t even really get a job as a lawyer anymore. My younger cousins w/ nursing degrees don’t have stable gigs, but travel between multiple hospitals. Obviously being a professor is over. Aside from the medical cartel that is only just now starting to crack, jobs don’t exist.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.

* How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.

* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.

* A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

* The Racist History of Tipping.

* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.

* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.

they literally cannot stop threatening us with a good time pic.twitter.com/aryQLXpwvI

— accidentally left-wing (@accidental_left) July 22, 2020

* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

* Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.

* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.

* J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.

* The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.

* Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.

* What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.

* The fight against racism starts at home.

Stares at every white person who keeps asking “how to help” or how they can “do better” 🤨🤨 ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/D1puoZQ1Ng

— Tanya, Laird of Glencoe, Chaotic Black Deathbane (@cypheroftyr) July 25, 2020

* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.

* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.

* Don’t tease us Doc.

* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since

* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today

* cat in the furnace, check

* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked

* Two Americas.

Two Americas pic.twitter.com/hKdXwoiWUU

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 24, 2020

* always has been — always has been

* just an update for all you non-biologists out there that biology twitter is currently in meltdown because a journal editor said some worms are overrated

* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.

* I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you fucking deserve

* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.

* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?

* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?

* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.

* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”

* Yet another Watchmen sequel.

* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’

Wednesday! I Think!

* Special Issue of American Literature: American Game Studies. Deadline for essay submissions is August 1, 2020.

* Amazon, Walmart, FedEx workers plan walkout on Friday. Too soon to declare victory over coronavirus, say experts. Model predicts higher death toll in US amid states reopening. Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality. ‘Heads we win, tails you lose’: how America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit. Federal bailout money bypasses hard-hit N.Y., California for North Dakota, Nebraska. Closed Hospitals Leave Rural Patients ‘Stranded’ as Coronavirus Spreads. The reopening, Texas-style. I’m Reopening My Hair Salon, and I’m Terrified. Under pressure to reopen this fall, school leaders plot unprecedented changes. Teachers union: ‘Scream bloody murder’ if schools reopen against medical advice. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

* How the Coronavirus Might — or Might Not — Slow Research Universities’ Ambitions. As the Trump Administration Offers Relief, Pandemic-Stricken Colleges Ponder the Risks of Taking It. There’s No Simple Way to Reopen Universities. The Evolving Fall Picture. How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America. When universities are hospitals: Losing $3m a day, UVa Health furloughs employees, cuts executive and physician pay.

Our new research shows that even according to Yale's own targeted endowment spend rate, they have underspent $648 million since 2013. But now they invoke austerity and cut budgets across the university? We don't buy it. #spendityale pic.twitter.com/q4FbeYPJaR

— Local 33 UNITE HERE (@33unitehere) April 29, 2020

* The Predicted Coronavirus Catastrophe Hasn’t Arrived In Sweden. What’s Next? Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is worse than America’s but better than New York City’s.

* Life in Wuhan after coronavirus. The post-coronavirus world doesn’t look good for China.

* CDC confirms six more coronavirus symptoms showing up in patients over and over. Study: Most coronavirus patients in hospitals didn’t spike a fever. We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us. The virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen. According to a CDC report, nearly 90% of patients hospitalized with coronavirus (COVID-19) had one or more underlying health conditions. In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead. 6 monkeys given an experimental coronavirus vaccine from Oxford did not catch COVID-19 after heavy exposure, raising hopes for a human vaccine. U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19. U.S. tops 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases — nearly a third of the global total. The successful Asian coronavirus-fighting strategy America refuses to embrace. No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out.

* Coronavirus Relief Often Pays Workers More Than Work. “As each day goes by, it gets more stressful”: Millions struggle amid delays in stimulus and unemployment. Millions can’t access unemployment benefits so actual job losses are likely greater than data shows. How Delivery Apps May Put Your Favorite Restaurant Out of Business. A business of razor-thin margins. The plan. How the Pandemic Will Change Retail. Nearly half of the Q1 decline in GDP can be attributed to healthcare, which is presumably delaying of elective procedures. American optimism is becoming a problem. Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus.

* Trump wants to use coronavirus aid as leverage to force blue states to change immigration policies. To Pressure Iran, Pompeo Turns to the Deal Trump Renounced. Controversial tech company pitches facial recognition to track COVID-19. Companies’ use of thermal cameras to monitor the health of workers and customers worries civil libertarians. No fireworks.

The Blue Angels fly-by is just an extension of this post-WWII/20th century mindset that America still clings to, that every crisis and problem can be solved by spectacles of might and prowess at war.

It's a relic of a bygone era and just feels so impotent and insulting.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020

We don't need to continue sinking money into militarism. We need to completely restructure our economy and undo the damage of Reaganism, which combined war obsession with unequal hypercapitalism.

It's not time to rally around the flag. It's time to reconsider what the flag means

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020

* Social Distancing As Demonstrated in Wes Anderson Films.

* In one month, the meat industry’s supply chain broke. Here’s what you need to know.

* The real state of exception.

* Leave Milwaukee alone! Haven’t we suffered enough?

* The Biden situation. Feminism Should Make You Uncomfortable. Trump’s focus on his base complicates path to reelection. Hell of a way to win an election. Beneath contempt. Climate Activists Need to Keep Turning the Heat Up on Joe Biden. Republicans’ Senate majority is now in very real jeopardy. This entire class of Democrats is not up to the challenge of delivering a basic message HANDED TO THEM ON A SILVER PLATTER. Justin Amash Moves Toward a Third-Party Bid for President.

Decades-old assault allegations are necessarily very hard to adjudicate fairly. But everything that was said about Kavanaugh — why stick with this incredible mediocrity when there are myriad candidates who haven’t been accused of anything? — applies just as completely to Biden.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 29, 2020

* Really helpful thread — solved a problem I was having with my own wifi.

* Game over: FTC goes after board game campaign gone wrong in first crowdfunding case.

* A brief history of the post office. But why tell a version of this story that starts in 1792 when this whole problem can be directly traced to a 2006 law passed by Republicans that required the USPS to refund its pensions for 75 years in advance, a requirement not placed on any other business in existence?

* The Cast of The Goonies Reunites for a Goofy Video and a Good Cause. We Could Be Getting a Goonies Sequel from the Creator of The Goldbergs. Dr. Strange is messy bitch who loves drama. Dinosaurs Is the Only Family Sitcom Grim Enough for This Moment. The last word on Joss Whedon.

* I’m doing my part! Belgians urged to eat frites twice a week to deplete coronavirus potato mountain.

* No one saw it coming, except Netflix: Police Investigating Death of Arizona Man From Chloroquine Phosphate.

* damn that’s bleak. understanding college. in praise of pessimism.

prof asked me what his department could do to improve career outcomes for phd students and I said stop accepting students into your programs who want to be professors.

— Hannah Alpert-Abrams 🤖✊ (@hralperta) April 28, 2020

they have to open the universities in the fall because society depends not on the budding bourgeoisie learning whatever material (which can be done remotely) but on the students having sex. thats basically how ppl accept the legitimacy of all the debt

— m.crumps (@mcrumps) April 28, 2020

all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us” and I’ll look down and whisper “no” pic.twitter.com/tCoLIzphce

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 28, 2020

* And I’ve never felt so seen.

Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links

* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…

* Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality).

* “Speaking of Chip Delany, yesterday on his Facebook page he posted video of this amazing event with Octavia E. Butler. It was held at the Smithsonian in D.C. on November 19, 2004.”

* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery.  It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.

Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020

* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?

* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.

* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.

* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.

* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.

* The One with the Coronavirus.

* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.

* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.

* The sea of blue mats is part of a temporary shelter for the homeless, who will be spaced at least six feet apart.

* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.

* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.

* Ain’t that America?

there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse

— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020

* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.

* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.

* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.

* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.

* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.

* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.

* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.

* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.

It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020

* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.

* Seconded.

* Free Comrade Britney!

* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.

* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.

* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.

* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.

* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.

* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.

City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.

That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020

* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!

* Policing and the English language.

* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”

* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.

* Computer, on screen.

* Being Greta Thunberg.

* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’

* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.

* Nailed it.

* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.

* The return of Rick and Morty.

* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.

CoronaFRI!vus

* Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful. No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing. Without Urgent Action, Coronavirus Could Overwhelm U.S., Estimates Say. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed.

* David Harvey: Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. The Politics of the Pandemic. You and Your Boss Have the Same Interests Right Now. That Is a Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity. Sara Nelson Says People Are Ready for Solidarity. COVID-19 Emergency Tenant Protections. Homeless families occupy vacant homes in LA. Dealing With Coronavirus Requires Bold Action. The Democratic Leadership Won’t Take It.

💯 pic.twitter.com/4XUrxBs6th

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) March 19, 2020

* 9% of Working Americans (14 Million) So Far Have Been Laid Off As Result of Coronavirus; 1 in 4 Workers Have Had Their Hours Reduced; 2% Have Been Fired; 20% Have Postponed a Business Trip; Shock Waves Just Now Beginning to Ripple Through Once-Roaring US Economy. U.S. Jobless Claims Jump to Two-Year High Amid Closures. 2700% increase in unemployment claims in Ohio — midweek. [Calfornia] averages 2,000 unemployment applications a day. Two or three days ago, it received 40,000. On Tuesday, 80,000 applications were filed. JP Morgan is forecasting -14% RGDP growth in Q2. That’s so bad it isn’t even on the historical axis.

History is dialectical but the likelihood that the US will be operating under some version of the USSR’s command economy in a year is just next level

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

The persistent fantasy of a serious crisis that forces even the worst politicians to do the right thing

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 20, 2020

* So, It’s Bad. Free, Widespread Testing Is The Only Way America Goes Back to Normal. This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus. Coronavirus will radically alter the U.S. US sales of guns and ammunition soar amid coronavirus panic buying. The Stimulus Plan That We Need Now.

* Curb Your Enthusiasm: “The Virus.”

* I’m reminded somehow of the way you end a SimCity game by unleashing every disaster on your city as once. The Midwest Is Preparing To Get Hit With Major Floods During The Coronavirus Outbreak. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Locust crisis poses a danger to millions, forecasters warn. Earthquake in Utah. A Huge Chunk of Yellowstone Is Pulsing.

* Weeks Before Virus Panic, Intelligence Chairman Privately Raised Alarm, Sold Stocks. Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness.

weren’t you in the same meeting https://t.co/Zf4xBfAeYO

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet. Amazon Workers Shut Down Warehouse After Employee Is Infected With Coronavirus. The tech execs who don’t agree with ‘soul-stealing’ coronavirus safety measures.

This really hammers home the way in which the Uber model (like that of all “gig economy” employers) is to extract money from workers while making those workers bear all of the risk. https://t.co/2jCKfrfdNn

— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) March 19, 2020

Bellamy imagined a universal monopoly ushering in more or less communism; our version is giving control of the planet to a guy who thinks rich people need to move to outer space to escape environmental collapse https://t.co/36hkp1Ex9W

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020

* Mitt Romney’s $1,000 Isn’t Our Universal Basic Income. Americans may see first round of checks from US government by April 6. I really should have known.

The UK announced it will guarantee everyone’s wages until this thing is over, and Congress is still haggling over like, whats the income cutoff to make someone eligible for the one-time $1200 check

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) March 20, 2020

Not processing yet that we got through this week without Congress finalizing massive action on behalf of tens of millions of unemployed and desperate Americans, whose bills are piling up as we speak

— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 20, 2020

As the proposed amount of the checks vary wildly we get a fun natural experiment in how much has to be on the table before a liberal doesn’t start their analysis with “of course *I* don’t need the money.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 19, 2020

* Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded. In Coronavirus Testing Ramp-Up, U.S. Called Private Sector in Late. How the CDC Botched Basic Science in Its Attempt to Make a Coronavirus Test. Don’t Let Trump Off the Hook.

* I had a lot of question about this, so perhaps it will be useful to you too: No, The World Health Organization Is Not Recommending Against Ibuprofen For Coronavirus Symptoms.

* The world’s fastest supercomputer identified chemicals that could stop coronavirus from spreading, a crucial step toward a treatment. Japanese flu drug ‘clearly effective’ in treating coronavirus, says China. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID‐19: results of an open‐label non‐randomized clinical trial.

* “I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…”: The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers. This is certainly a problem but I became attuned to the reality of coronavirus precisely through these sorts of non-experts while Trump and the CDC were still lying to everyone. I haven’t seen anything better for learning true information about this crisis than Reddit’s upvote/downvote system.

* Today in the trolley problem. Today in the simulation argument. Today in career goals. Today in Star Trek Studies. Today in Watchmen fan fiction. Weird time.

* Rikers Island inmate has contracted coronavirus: officials. How coronavirus could explode at Riker’s Island. Reducing prison population protects us all from coronavirus.

* You Need Me to Have a Mask. ‘It Feels Like a War Zone’: Doctors and Nurses Plead for Masks on Social Media. A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling. Simple math offers alarming answers.

* Rural America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic.

* This picture tells a story about America.

* As Cities Around the World Go on Lockdown, Victims of Domestic Violence Look for a Way Out.

* The COVID-19 Crisis and International Students. Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases. A Brief Letter to an Institution that Believes Extensions are the Accommodations We Need Right Now.

* ‘Panic-gogy’: Teaching Online Classes During The Coronavirus Pandemic. As Schools Look for Guidance, Educators Are Left Asking, ‘What?’ New Coronavirus Package Could Unravel Protections For Students With Disabilities. Is online school illegal? With schools closing from coronavirus, special education concerns give districts pause.

* Waaaaaay ahead of you.

All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is, like, *really* unhappy now, shit.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* GameStop claims it is ‘essential retail’ to remain open amid coronavirus shutdowns. It didn’t work.

* Minnesota and Vermont Just Classified Grocery Clerks as Emergency Workers.

* There’s plenty of food.

* The Quiet Emptiness of a World under Coronavirus.

* The desire for public sex is, of course, nothing new. In his book Tell Me What You Want, sex researcher and Kinsey Institute fellow Justin Lehmiller found it was one of the seven most common fantasies, but the way people are having it in a coronavirus-ridden world definitely is. Now, instead of treating it as nothing more than a novel thrill to “spice things up,” some people are using it as an act of resistance against the virus-induced lockdowns that have squashed so many of the liberties we hold dear. Sex etiquette during the coronavirus.

* Kim Stanley Robinson releases a chapter from his latest novel, though weirdly it’s listed as “news.”

* I spent four months pretending to live on Mars. Here’s what I learned about staying sane and passing time.

* I’m beginning to think you just can’t trust billionaires: When he joined the race last year, the billionaire said he would employ his campaign staff through the November election, even if he weren’t the nominee. But Bloomberg dropped out after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, and he has since fired staffers in multiple waves. His campaign had announced earlier in March that it would launch an independent expenditure group to take on Trump that would employ former campaign staffers in swing states.

* The Sanders worldview wins even as Bernie loses.

we're in a national pandemic with a looming Depression and I believe this is the last we saw of the leading Democratic candidate, over 60 hours agopic.twitter.com/fHoD8UB5TS

— jack allison (@jackallisonLOL) March 20, 2020

Biden beating Bernie and then immediately giving up is an even worse scenario than I expected

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 20, 2020

* You know it’s bad when politicians are leaving elected office to join the priesthood.

* A false accusation nightmare in the Times.

* Moffat leaving Doctor Who seemed like a good exit ramp for me, so I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — but wow, this latest retcon looks like a mess, as well as a pretty clear “find some way to tie this off and wrap it up” directive from the BBC.

* Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto.

* Octavia Butler gave us a few rules for predicting the future.

* An “Extinction Event” for the Comic Shop or “Too Stupid to Quit, Too Dumb to Die”?

* The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Revisited.

* Star Wars in ruins: The Most Problematic ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ Plot Twist Ruined Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy. Disney has embarrassed itself issuing Episode 9 retcons but it really ought to explain why it’s being so elliptical about this one issue for no apparent reason.

* And Star Wars resurgent: The Mandalorian Casts Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano.

* Because you demanded it: A new Disney Princess historical fiction series finds Belle in the French Revolution.

* And they were nearly almost done, too! I swear!

* Hey, it’s me, the first sign of civilization in a culture.

* Coming soon: The Collapsing Empire, Book 3. A Cixin Liu story collection. And some free coronavirus reading: Short Changes, a story collection by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

My My My My Corona

* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.

* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.

This is the most serious crisis the world has faced since 1945 and it is entirely unprepared. Our economic systems simply cannot function with an extended period of social distancing. Huge segments of the economy won’t last the next two weeks if we don’t start thinking fast.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2020

I really haven’t heard anyone talk seriously about what is going to a gig-economy, hourly-wage country when huge segments of ordinary life just shut down completely for who knows how long.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020

Rent is due in 17 days. Do you think workers in the industries being impacted by this are getting paid enough for rent between now and then? What about May rent, 47 days from now, when we might still be doing this?

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020

I was 21 in 2001. I’m 40 now. Global politics has been in a catastrophic, ever-worsening death spiral more or less the entirety of my adult life. It’s a little hard to come to terms with.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 9, 2020

* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?

* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.

* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.

Coronavirus presents college administrations with no easy options, but it can’t be good for the brand to evict the people going into catastrophic debt for an education with one week’s notice and a promise of a slapped together email chain in lieu of the classes they paid for.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020

not to beat this dead horse but it seems like every elite college in the country has simultaneously decided that eviction law, the ADA, accreditation, visa law, and ordinary common sense no longer apply https://t.co/6rDn8EumUi

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020

In the fall, when all this is hopefully over, universities need to really examine how piss poor their emergency plans are, how those piss poor plans disproportionally harm low-income and international students and how badly they communicate and execute those plans.

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020

Telling your students “leave campus today and take your laptop” is not a plan!

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020

this is a whole education in how the university works https://t.co/2HLliBedOT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020

Side note: an institution summarily evicting its students and then having them shot in the street when they get upset about it is about as pure a distillation of the relationship between the neoliberal university and its students as one is likely to find

— Alex Young (@Alex_T_Young) March 11, 2020

* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.

* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.

* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.

* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.

* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.

* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.

I have such a different reading on this moment. I’ve always seen the scientist as being there to insure the virus spreads as scheduled, to preserve the power they have gained in the ruins https://t.co/JOk5qK8tiV

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020

* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.

* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.

* Probably the single biggest problem I have.

Let’s see what else is in the news.

* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.

* Tips for the Depressed.

* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.

* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.

* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.

tired: Bernie hasn’t been vetted! Trump will eat him alive!

wired: It is inappropriate to discuss Biden’s positions, record, or fitness for the presidency, and how dare you

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 8, 2020

* Hundreds Of Staff At The Guardian Have Signed A Letter To The Editor Criticising Its “Transphobic Content.”

* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.

* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.

* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.

* The circle of academic life.

* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.

* Bring on LEGO Super Mario.

* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.

* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.

* Tough week for Alex Jones.

* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.

End of February Mega-Links!

* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.

* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!

* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!

* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!

* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.

Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.

* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.

* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.

* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?

perhaps the real message of The Lord of the Rings was that only people who are well-rested, enjoy plenty of leisure time and have a healthy work/life balance are capable of accomplishing what needs to be done

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) February 22, 2020

* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.

* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”

* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’

* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.

* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.

* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.

* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.

* It worked for me!

why must i "earn" a graduate degree? is it not enough to lie in bed reading octavia butler short stories, unhinged?

— ren / josh / crow (@ymirjotunn) February 18, 2020

* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.

* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.

* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.

* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.

Because of "Watchmen." Decades of historians have been trying to let the world know about this massacre, and it took an alternate history comic book drama to break the wall of racism. IDK whether to laugh or cry, but let no one say fiction has no power in the real world. https://t.co/l7ixJN5JlQ

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 20, 2020

* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?

* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.

* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.

* Serfs of Academe.

* The Job Market Is Killing Me.

* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.

* I volunteer to consult.

* The part I was born to play!

* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…

* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.

* The father of a former student at Sarah Lawrence College –accused of manipulating her school friends, extorting nearly $1 million from them, and profiting from their work as prostitutes – was charged with sex trafficking, forced labor and extortion, in a federal indictment released today.

* How the central administration has consolidated power and deflected dissent at the University of Chicago.

* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.

* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.

* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.

* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!

These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019

* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.

* After Carbon Democracy.

* Actually existing media bias.

* Among the Post-Liberals.

* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.

* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.

* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”

* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.

* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.

* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.

* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”

* Truly, depravity in everything.

* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.  Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.

* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.

* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.

* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.

* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.

* End the GOP.

* The 53-State Solution.

* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.

he’s most famous for his racist policing, endorsed Bush in 2004, was a Republican until his 60s and the 2010, AND was the mayor of a famously corrupt city who used his personal wealth to purchase favorable political outcomes! the NDAs barely crack the top five https://t.co/4KMFiK6bSR

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2020

The central argument for a Bloomberg campaign is that we could have all the fascism and ethnic cleansing of a Trump presidency without being embarrassed about it when we summer in Paris.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2020

* Big yikes.

* Kasy we’re counting on ya.

* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.

* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.

* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.

* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.

* Canada is fake.

* you: trauma me, an intellectual:

* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.

* It’s always amazing when something like the “woman tax” moves from ludicrous, laughable nonsense to explicit policy instantaneously.

* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.

* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.

* Twilight of GameStop.

* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.

* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.

* Universe Sandbox.

* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.

* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.

* Rise of the blur.

* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.

* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.

* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.

* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.

* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.

* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?

* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.

* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.

2HAM2TON
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: TOKYO DRIFT
H4MILTON
HAM FIVE
HAM & TON 6
TON 7
THE HAM OF THE ILTON
HAMILTON PRESENTS: JEFFERSON AND BURR https://t.co/hXQtjYzNeA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2020

* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?

* Free speech and eating meat.

* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.

* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.

* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.

* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”

* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.

* A whatchamacallit by any other name.

A whatchamacallit in different languages:

7. Thingamajig (English)
6. Chingadera (Spanish)
5. Himstergims (Danish)
4. Naninani (Japanese)
3. Zamazingo (Turkish)
2. Dingsbums (German)
1. Huppeldepup (Dutch)

— Adam Sharp (@AdamCSharp) February 17, 2020

* Map of Europe: Agario Style.

* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.

* @ me next time

* The arc of history is long, but…

* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.

just realized wes anderson essentially makes whitesploitation movies and i'm into it

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) April 16, 2018

Happy Captain Picard Day Links!

* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.

* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.

* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).

* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.

* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.

* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.

* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.

* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.

* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.

* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.

This is also why the gig economy has such incredibly high turn-over. Once you’ve put 100k miles on your car for peanuts, you’re suddenly hit with the bill for a new transmission or whatever. Wiped out. These companies chew through desperation and spit out destitution.

— DHH (@dhh) January 28, 2020

* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.

* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.

* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?

* Abolish the Senate!

* It would sell! It would sell.

proud to announce my friends at Pfizer and the MIT Media Lab have a pill you take every morning that makes you forget the day before and believe our government has some fundamental legitimacy; the effects last till around evening, when you'll see ads for it on major news networks

— supererogatory masochism (@PatBlanchfield) January 27, 2020

* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.

* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.

* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.

* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.

* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.

* And in a dark time, true art finds a way.

If there is to be one piece of art left for some alien intelligence to find and ruminate over among the ruins of the human race, I hope it's this one. https://t.co/qkG4vUttUK

— Nathan Ballingrud (@NBallingrud) January 28, 2020

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.