Posts Tagged ‘Shakespeare’
Sunday Reading!
* CFP: Folk Horror. CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2022.
* Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.
* The Future Is Black, Not Bleak: On Afrofuturist Poetry.
* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.
* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members arenât leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away.
* Hustling to get by: side jobs in grad school. Great Books, Graduate Students, and the Value of Fun in Higher Education.
* Microsyllabus: The History of Campus Policing.
* They fought critical race theory. Now theyâre focusing on âcurriculum transparency.â
* Two years since Covid was first confirmed in U.S., the pandemic is worse than anyone imagined. Americaâs second pandemic winter: More virus, less death. Parents and caregivers of young children say they’ve hit pandemic rock bottom. Students are protesting covid policies â and the adults who wonât listen to them. America’s youth turn left.
* Families are in distress after the first month without the expanded child tax credit.
* âIf I Die, I Dieâ: Meat Loaf Spurned COVID Rules Before Death. Inside Meat Loaf’s Health Troubles, Including Vocal Strain, Alcoholism and Onstage Collapses. Meat Loaf Was My Softball Coach.
* Americaâs shift to the right in 2021 is worse news for Democrats than it seems. The long slide: Inside Bidenâs declining popularity as he struggles with multiple crises. âThe Lowest Point in My Lifetimeâ: How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America. Joe Biden Promised Change. He Hasnât Delivered.
* What Does It Mean If Republicans Wonât Debate?
* Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines. Georgia Has a Very Strong Case Against Trump. Would Trump Throw His Own Kids Under the Bus to Save Himself? We May Soon Find Out.
* Florida Advances Bill That Would Ban Making White People Feel Bad about Racism, and No, That’s Not a Joke.
* Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has âProbably Startedâ. How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts. Donât Look Up Is Missing What We Really Need From Climate Change Movies.
* Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tongaâs Volcano. Tonga volcano: islands covered in ash as three deaths confirmed.
* âWhen my last movie UHF came out in 1989, I made a solemn vow to my fans that I would release a major motion picture every 33 years, like clockwork. Iâm very happy to say weâre on schedule,â said Yankovic in a statement. âAnd I am absolutely thrilled that Daniel Radcliffe will be portraying me in the film. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for.â
* The Moon Knight moment.
* The Star Trek century.
* Do you know what’s cooler than One Ring?
* Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Looks Absolutely Incredible, But… Crunch and TT Games.
* Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
* Smedley Butler Helped Build American Empire. Then He Turned Against It.
* The Fall of NC Mutual.
* Mother sues Meta and Snap over daughter’s suicide.
* Where’s the snow? Milwaukee is nearly 15 inches below its average this season.
* At-will employment in Wisconsin apparently means that you can be fired at any time for any reason but you need your boss’s permission to take a new job.
* Acting Mayor Johnson announces public safety plan to tackle gun violence, car thefts and reckless driving in Milwaukee.
* Discrimination has cost Black home owners of billions of dollars of generational wealth. What can change that?
* Huge, if true: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme.
* Shakespeare Noir. The Tragedy of Macbeth Is a Cinematic Feast for Starving Film Lovers.
* 6 Dysfunctional Family Roles and Their Characteristics.
* New Bad Art Friend / West End Caleb mashup just dropped.
* Alcohol consumption can directly cause cancer, new genetic study finds.
* The Medieval Vegetarian.
* The Battle over Howard the Duck.
* This is your only friend in the world right now. It’s gonna be a long night.
* tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life
* They stan.
* We stan.
* What are the most compelling and readable “plotless” novels you’ve ever read? My answer.
* And it’s hard to imagine it wouldnât be better with the pizza in hand.
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in âThe Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butlerâs Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
*Â El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
*Â Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College footballâs leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain WhyâNot Just Howâto Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be âhighest riskâ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
*Â The Closure.
*Â What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Canât Have Both. This Isnât Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. âOne Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.â âI Canât Keep Doing This:â Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trumpâs incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isnât anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nationâs Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didnât Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. Californiaâs slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
*Â Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
*Â Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to âNormal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
*Â The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
*Â Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeerâs âDead Astronautsâ and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: âHamilton: the Musical:â Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders⌠and Itâs Not Halloween.
*Â Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started âinnocently enoughâ and just âgot out of hand.”
*Â Illiberalism Isnât to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. âThe Flag is Coming Downâ: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schoolsâ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
*Â How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
*Â According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have ânational interestsâ they carry out in the international arena. But ânational interestsâ is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countriesâ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientistsâ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
*Â How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This âEquityâ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When Youâre Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
*Â Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with BĂŠnĂŠdicte Boisseron.
* âYou Could Literally See Our Shit From Spaceâ: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trekâs Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the âzone of avoidance.â My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
*Â A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ainât the answer â it censors Black professors like me.
*Â Big Scrabbleâs decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
*Â Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
*Â The Life-Threatening âRideâ That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars:Â Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
*Â Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable:Â Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
*Â Humanities ârisk becoming cherry on topâ of other disciplines.
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
*Â The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
*Â To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
*Â Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
*Â A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didnât Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. âWe will make them hear us.â Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. âYouâre not trying hard enough. Sorry.’Â This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
*Â Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change â But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
*Â To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SFâs Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
*Â Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* âWorse Than Anyone Expectedâ: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. âOpening the Door to Hell Itselfâ: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. âThis situation brings me to despairâ: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. Americaâs Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
* That’ll solve it:Â Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
*Â The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
*Â The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying â but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
* It’s Not Just Millennials â Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe theyâll die before they retire. America has two economiesâand theyâre diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
*Â Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
*Â âFantasy Islandâ: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Ricoâs decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
*Â New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
*Â Thereâs a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompsonâs new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain heâs always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now â thank the mutant gods â theyâre back.
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why donât we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasnât addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the worldâs most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesnât have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if youâre looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if thereâs a massive pool of people around whoâve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
*Â What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
*Â China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
*Â A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
*Â How we invest in our cities is broken.
*Â We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
*Â Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
*Â A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
*Â The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
*Â How a âSesame Streetâ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
*Â MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Arenât Healthy, and Thatâs the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan whoâs the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen IIÂ just remains inscrutable to me.
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Surprise! Links
* Shakespeare in the state park: Why a group of Marquette students created an empowering outlet for creativity that provides students with summer jobs.
* CFP: Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures.
* A historian of concentration camps explains that this will only get worse.
* Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters. Botched family reunifications left migrant children waiting in vans overnight.
*Â It’s not just at GuantĂĄnamo. In a supermax facility on US soil, inmates are force fed â and barred from sharing their stories. An inmate breaks his silence for the first time.
*Â Earth’s carbon dioxide has jumped to the highest level in human history. Can the Paris Climate Goals Save Lives? Yes, a Lot of Them, Researchers Say. Climate change is will cause our third world war. Extreme weather has made half of America look like Tornado Alley. India roasts under heat wave with temperatures above 120 degrees. If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* Meanwhile, the DNC has bravely decided to… forbid candidates from participating in any climate debate.
* Is Chernobyl historically accurate about the things that matter? HBOâs âChernobylâ Doesnât Understand History.
* Learning The Shape Of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019.
* Understand the destruction of the UC system the reclaimUC way.
* Free speech on campus remains the last great mystery.
* The madness of school shooting drills.
* YouTube pivots to pedophiles.
* Not the Catholic Church’s best week.
* “And then heâd still be Captain America, instead of a lying, indolent, murdering sack of shit.”
* I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
* Tremendous wealth mysteriously producing tremendous poverty.
Friday Morning Links!
* Bard & Bourbon is dedicated to performing beautiful, fully staged productions of classical works with a touch of irreverence.  Each production features small non-traditional casts playing multiple parts while getting one actor very drunk over the course of the show.
* Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready.
* Amazon says itâs a leader on fighting climate change. 5,000 employees disagree.
* The biggest tech platforms you can name – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit – serve up this kind of poison on an industrial scale, mushrooming and expanding at a rate that makes catching up with the spread almost impossible. The early neo-Nazi webforum Stormfront is on life support, largely because there is no need for the far-right to stay in an online cul-de-sac; they have free run of the world now. Worst of all, those consuming this economy of hate, which has exploded into an epidemic over the past ten years, are still mostly boys. Meaning, we as a society are going to be living with the effects of this radicalization for the rest of our lives.
* Thirteen trail markers of the conservative outrage machine.
* After Cuts, Jesuits End Ties to Wheeling Jesuit.
* UW-Stevens Point backs away from controversial plan to cut several liberal arts majors.
*Â College-Admissions Hysteria Is Not the Norm:Â A focus on highly selective schools obscures the experience of the vast majority of American undergraduates.
* The Professor and the Adjunct.
* Congrats to the Duke grad union for winning 12-month contracts.
* For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it. The Politics of UFOs.
* I was reminded last night that this is a plot point in The Turner Diaries: White House proposed releasing immigrant detainees in sanctuary cities, targeting political foes.
* When the Koch brothers train journalists.
*Â Texas estimates it may owe feds $223 million after illegally decreasing special education funding.
* Dempocalypse watch:Â Inside Biden and Warren’s Yearslong Feud. Joe Biden May Be Less Electable Than He Looks.
* Trumpâs sister quietly retired in February, and itâs actually a really big deal.
* Shock finding: the corporations write the laws.
* Is Game of Thrones the Last Show Weâll Watch Together?
* The Long, Troubled, and Redemptive History of Latinx Superheroes.
* The first issue of Them magazine profiles the great Janelle Monae.
* Today, thereâs a name for the genre Parks and Rec pioneered: hopepunk. According to Alexandra Rowland, coiner of the term, hopepunk is âabout DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can.â Itâs a melodramatic framing perfect for a cultural moment that treats posting online as a form of ideological warfare. On the dead-end optimism of Parks and Recreation. With a surprisingly long cameo appearance by David Foster Wallace.
* “A quest to understand how human intelligence evolved raises some ethical questions.” Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeysâand yes, they may be smarter.
* Biting my tongue so hard it hurts.
* And I can’t believe this was worth it. What a journey.
Thursday Afternoon Links!
* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!
* I haven’t had a chance to see Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so I’m gratified someone went ahead and wrote my triennial rant about franchise fictions and narrative closure on my behalf.
* Texas Studies in Literature and Language has a special issue on Wes Anderson.
* CFP for the SFRA guaranteed panel at ASLE 19. ASLE 19 (in Davis, CA) is a week after the planned dates for SFRA 19 in Hawaii, so if you’re going to the West Coast anyway it could be almost like a two-for-one…
* The second issue of Fantastika Journal is now available.
* That the things that gave my life meaning growing up have all become vectors for recruitment to misogynistic and white nationalist hate groups is the bitterest surprise of my middle age. That and Trump. Two bitterest surprises.
*Â Nominations Are Open for the 2018 Brittle Paper Awards.
* Ken Liu Presents Broken Stars, A New Anthology of Chinese Short Speculative Fiction.
* The Fall of Wisconsin. How to win Wisconsin back.
* Shakespeare in the state parks.
*Â The Self-Helpification of Academe:Â How feel-good nostrums cover up the universityâs cruelty.
* Another piece on searching for work outside academia.
* Professor Faces Fraud Charges for False Job Offer. Reading the confession letter just makes me cringe.
*Â His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.
* Why Donald Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh Will Mean Challenging Times For Environmental Laws. The Vice Report. The Coming Era of Forced Abortions. The end of net neutrality. The imperial presidency 2.0. Trumpâs Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workersâ Rights. Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did. The issue with Kavanaugh is that he seems completely reactionary, bouncing from one indefensible position to another, without applying any judgment whatsoever. Liberal media in full effect. The Liberal Case for Kavanaugh Is Complete Crap. Heâs a very normal Republican pick â thatâs the problem. Establishment Extremist. What’s coming. It’s bad y’all. Someone investigate precisely how this deal was made and what the terms were. And from the archives: The Three Alitos.
* The Supreme Court: still bad.
* Capitalism is ruining science. The Business Veto: The demise of social democracy shows the precariousness of any project of reform under capitalism.
*Â Inside Chinaâs Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras.
* Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state. How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order.
*Â Silicon Valley Is Bending Over Backward to Cater to the Far Right.
* How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System. Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco.
*Â Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out The Trump Years By Cashing In.
* The end of NATO. âThey Will Die in Tallinnâ: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
* Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents. Trumpâs Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations. âDonât You Know That We Hate You People?â ICE is lawless, racial profiling edition. Where Cities and Counties Are Detaining Immigrants. Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed. Government Told Immigrant Parents to Pay for DNA Tests to Get Kids Back, Advocate Says. As Migrant Families Are Reunited, Some Children Donât Recognize Their Mothers. Deported after Trump order, Central Americans grieve for lost children. ‘What if I lose her forever?’ Undocumented Grover Beach mother deported despite community rallying in her support. Facing a Tuesday deadline to reunite about 100 migrant toddlers with their parents, feds say they’ve reunited 2. Inside The Courts Where Some Immigrants Plead Guilty Without Knowing Whatâs Happening. Now they’re coming for grandmas.
* Woman arrested in assault of 91-year-old Mexican man who was told to âgo back to your country.â
*Â Thereâs been a spate of violent far-right extremism since the 2016 election.
* If you’re anti- antifa, that must mean…
*Â Itâs Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission.
*Â Liberalism, legitimacy, and loving the Parkland kids.
*Â Why Marxâs Capital Still Matters.
* Nixonâs $7B carbon tax forms centerpiece of energy agenda.
* The Industrial Age May Have Actually Been Kind of a Bad Idea.
* An interview with Julia Salazar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, In Her Own Words. Cynthia Nixon: Iâm a democratic socialist. Meanwhile our old pal Joe Crowley looks like he’s trying to get away with something.
*Â We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment.
* Alan Dershowitz is ALL IN on Trump. But he’s not the only person with some truly around-the-bend ideas of what lawsuits can do.
* Weird science: Girls sometimes inherit almost two full sets of their dad’s genes, which seems to cause rare cancers.
*Â An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
* Did… did Milwaukee write this?
*Â Jeff Bezos Is Now $50 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth.
* All 12 Thai Boys Successfully Rescued from Cave after Third Dangerous Mission. The only person unhappy is Elon.
* WHOâs Language on Breastfeeding Really Is Flawed. This was our experience with breastfeeding  for sure; I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people but we needed formula as a supplement from the first night on. That said, the corporate forces that promote formula over breastfeeding are utterly gross.
* When the relationship status truly is complicated.
* Scotland’s official plan if the Loch Ness Monster is found.
* Japan and the stay-at-home dad.
* Reality Winner and the espionage act.
* My Best Friend Lost His Life to the Gig Economy.
* When your child reveals sexual abuse from your parent.
*Â The Socialist Case for School Integration.
* Your town tomorrow:Â Kure residents cut off from outside world due to flooding.
* I knew wearing a tie was making me stupid.
* Bad subtitling is a daily problem for deaf viewers.
*Â How swimming pools became a flashpoint of racial tension in America.
* California brings emissions down below 1990 levels. But it’s not all good news.
* Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. RIP, Papa John.
*Â There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the âwrongâ result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Francoâs rule, Barcelona FCâs stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.
*Â David Graeberâs new book argues that many of us are toiling in dummy jobs with no ostensible purpose. Any poll will show you he has a point. But his thesis is built on scant evidence and dubious claims of a ruling class conspiring to keep us busy. Bullshit jobs exist not due to orchestrated oppression but because of something altogether simpler: bad managers.Â
* An even tougher review of a book that seems like a big step down from Debt.
* The SAT, constantly innovating new ways to make teenagers unhappy.
*Â Through such characters, Mulunehâs work explores the layered psychic realms of blackness and womanhood that the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whom she cites as a major influence, explored through her otherworldly prose. In the process, Mulunehâs work has helped reorient the way black women are perceived. âAs women, especially as African women,â Muluneh said, âwe forgetâand the world forgetsâour positioning in history and religion and culture.â
*Â And amusing ourselves to death: 12 theme parks where the danger is real.
Closing All My Tabs Tuesday
* CFP: Octavia Butler Companion. CFP: MOSF Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Afrofuturism. CFP: Shakespeare and Science Fiction. CFP: Monsters and Monstrosity, A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal. CFP: Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies: New Epistemologies and Relational Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene.
* Classic “you had one job” situation: Credit giant Equifax says Social Security numbers, birth dates of 143 million consumers may have been exposed. How to Protect Yourself from that Massive Equifax Breach. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You.
* A Poem About Your University’s Brand New Institute’s Conference.
* Academe on the Auction Block.
* Adjuncting in Trump Country: What Has Not Changed.
*Â She Was a Rising Star at a Major University. Then a Lecherous Professor Made Her Life Hell.
* What to Do When the Nazis Are Obsessed with Your Field. J.R.R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit.
* What the Rich Won’t Tell You.
* Dreamers at Marquette. Marquette University leaders show support for students affected by DACA announcement. Why ending DACA is so unprecedented. And they tried to warn us: Immigrants Gave Their Info to Obama, Now Trump Could Use It to Deport Them. How to Support Students Facing Immigration Crises: Suggested Policies and Best Practices for UCI Departments/Faculty. The 3 bills Congress could use to protect DACA recipients. The United States Cannot Be Trusted.
*Â Trumpâs Repeal of DACA Is the GOPâs Pathology in a Nutshell:Â An entire country is being held hostage by a thin slice of the Republican electorate, and they answer to no one.
* ICE Wrongly Imprisoned an American Citizen for 1,273 Days. Judges Say Heâs Owed $0. Relatives of Undocumented Children Caught Up in ICE Dragnet. ICE wants to destroy records that show abuses and deaths of immigrants in custody. Dispatches from the Northwestâs immigration dystopia.
* Abandoned States: Places In Idyllic 1960s Postcards Have Transformed Into Scenes Of Abandonment.
*Â Urban artwork gives downtown MKE some color.
*Â An American Dialect Dictionary Is Dying Out. Here Are Some Of Its Best Words.
* Prisoners Face Horrifying Conditions, Limited Drinking Water After Harvey Pounds Texas. Texas Republicans Helped Chemical Plant That Exploded Lobby Against Safety Rules. The devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we’ve entered the age of climate chaos. Parts of Puerto Rico could be without power for 6 months after Irma. Tampa Bay’s Coming Storm. The Nightmare Scenario for Floridaâs Coastal Homeowners. A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been. What Homeowners Insurance Wonât Cover If a Hurricane Hits. Floods in drought season: is this the future for parts of India? State of emergency for fire danger declared for all Washington counties. In the wake of Harvey, itâs time to treat science denial as gross negligenceâand hold those who do the denying accountable. We should be naming hurricanes after Exxon and Chevron, not Harvey and Irma. The cats are all right.
* What is it with New Jersey senators?
* How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt.
*Â The âinternet of thingsâ is creating a more connected world but there is a dark side to giving up our domestic lives to machines. You don’t say!
* The Arctic is now expected to be ice-free by 2040. But of course to the World Economic Forum “entirely preventable civilization-ending catastrophe” is just another word for “opportunity”:
On the upside, the Arctic Council foresees increased shipping once the sea-ice has disappeared. Using the route across the top of the world to sail from northern Europe to north-east Asia can cut the length of voyages by two-fifths compared with travelling via the Suez Canal.
* Gasp! House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers.
* The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
* North Korea: “All Paths Lead to Catastrophe.” What Would War with North Korea Actually Look Like?
* Spider-Man Needs to Be White and Straight, Say Leaked Sony Emails.
* A Timeline of Postapocalyptic Dystopias That Didnât Actually Happen.
* Why Does High School Still Start So Early? Why a later start to the school day could pump $1 billion into Illinois’ economy.
*Â Traces of Crime: How New Yorkâs DNA Techniques Became Tainted.
*Â Winning the white working class for criminal justice reform.
* Star Wars is falling apart. The âStar Warsâ franchise officially has a director problem.
* The Defenders Are Here to Tell You All Lives Matter. What is going on at Marvel TV?
* San Junipero 2: I Told You They Were Actually in Hell.
* A(mother) Solution to the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich Manuscript “solution” rubbished by experts.
* Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. Thatâs a Mistake. Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost. The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools.
* Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history. End of lecture.
*Â The Republican Party Is Building The Electorate That Will Keep It In Power.
*Â The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party.
* Sexual Harassment in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Communities Survey Results.
* The onus should be on universities that rely on SET for employment decisions to provide convincing affirmative evidence that such reliance does not have disparate impact on women, underrepresented minorities, or other protected groups. Because the bias varies by course and institution, affirmative evidence needs to be specific to a given course in a given department in a given university. Absent such specific evidence, SET should not be used for personnel decisions.
* If immigration agents show up at your door. Life after love. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Hemingway called it the saddest short story ever written. Superheroes we can believe in. Statement of teaching philosophy. The child is the father of the man. Abbrs.
* Futurama is coming back again, for a single, audio-only episode.
* But at least they finally found the Savage Land.
Father’s Day Links!
* The entire bloody country hates the AHCA.
*Â Democrats to step up attacks on GOPâs Obamacare repeal effort.
*Â Democratic 2020 contenders? Voters haven’t heard of them. Maybe the best one:
More than a third of voters, 35 percent, said they have never heard of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) â a former governor and national party chairman who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee last year.
*Â Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke rescinds acceptance of Homeland Security post.
* Sad.
* Listen, I’m getting sick of this.
* Plastic polluted Arctic islands are dumping ground for Gulf Stream. An Abandoned US Nuclear Base in Greenland Could Start Leaking Toxic Waste Because of Global Warming.
* Amazon is a very unusual company. I said on Twitter that it was the closest we’re ever going to get to the weird hybrid of monopoly capital and state socialism you get in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and I really think that’s right.
Where will it all end? Mr. Kubica has thought about this. Amazon can be understood as a decades-long effort to shorten the time between âI want itâ and âI have itâ into as brief a period as possible. The logical end of this would be the something Mr. Kubica jestingly called Amazon Imp, short for âimplantâ and also âimpulse,â Mr. Kubica said. It would be a chip inserted under the skin.
âThe imp would sense your impulses and desires,â Mr. Kubica wrote in an email, âand then either virtually fulfill them by stimulating your brain (for a modest payment to Amazon, of course) or it would make a box full of goodies for you appear on your doorstep (for a larger fee, of course).â
Every desire fulfilled. âI am sure that Amazon even now is building it,â Mr. Kubica said.
* Elsewhere in Big Data: Google Doesn’t Know My Dad Died.
* âAt this point it appeared that the left testicle and cord may actually have been removed instead of the right one,â the surgeon, Valley Spencer Long, wrote in a postoperative report, according to court records. Seems like the sort of thing you wouldn’t need to rely on speculation for!
*Â The recordings revealed that fathers engaged in more “rough and tumble play,” such as “tickling, poking, and tumbling,” with boys than girls. On the other hand, “fathers of girls used more sadness language when talking to their child.”
* Jordan Peale’s next: Lovecraft Country.
* Science fiction for the ungovernable: Cory Doctorow’s Walkaways.
* Sounds like Sony and Disney/Marvel will be suing each other soon.
* Alignment chart. Maybe he’s born with it. From our family to yours, Happy Father’s Day. Press start. And the Trump presidency, in one tweet.
Midday Monday Links!
* ICYMI from earlier this morning: SFFTV is once again looking for reviewers of DVDs and TV series. And of course I posted about a million links yesterday too.
* Scandal as performance of Julius Caesar depicts sitting president.
* Senate Intelligence Committee Post-Show Discussion of Hamlet.
* Binghampton mayoral candidate pulls out of race citing death threats.
* It’s terrible when actors read reviews and pitch their performance to the critics.
*Â Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.
*Â The Spy Who Funded Me: Revisiting the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
* The physics of bullets vs. Wonder Woman’s bracelets. Given what is depicted in the film we must be dealing with some sort of magnetic attraction as well, and possibly a forcefield. #teachthecontroversy
* Mysteries of the war on terror: A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules.
* 51 stars? Puerto Rico overwhelmingly votes for statehood.
*Â The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning.
* Obamacare is probably dead. Here’s what will probably happen.
*Â Nevada, with little fanfare or notice, is inching toward a massive health insurance expansion â one that would give the stateâs 2.8 million residents access to a public health insurance option.
*Â Seen in this light, the tax cut is not simply a billionaire giveaway. It is part of an evangelical campaign for the restoration of a conditional, paternal philanthropy that runs contrary to the principle of unqualified access to health care that is represented by the ACAâs inclusion of people with âpre-existing conditionsâ in the insurance markets it regulated. Unqualified access means spreading the cost and risks of ill health and therefore sharing the benefits of maintaining good health. For those evangelicals who view health and disease through the lens of a moral economy, spreading the costs of health care is tantamount to facilitating moral hazard, or encouraging sinful behavior and usurping Godâs judgment.
*Â Questions James Comey Should Be Asked About the FBI While Heâs Under Oath.
*Â 41-year-old adoptee deported after 37 years in the U.S.
* All The Wrong People Are Asking All The Wrong Questions About Fidget Spinners.
* The case for prescription heroin.
* And from the archives! The Periodic Table of Nonsense.
February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…
* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.
* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.
* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.
*Â Fast Forward #289 â Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* Presenting the Nebula finalists.
*Â Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.
* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.
* Comics studies comes of age.
* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* How Trumpâs campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trumpâs Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jonesâs Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trumpâs TlĂśn. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
*Â We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.
* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What Itâs Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of Americaâs New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.
* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.
Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either âsmartâ technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because thatâs who they are, but itâs mainly happening because theyâve set up the system so that itâs nearly impossible for them to get voted out â an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely canât vote out of office.
The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And Iâll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.
* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.
* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!
*Â The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.
* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.
* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administrationâs Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.
* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.
* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.
* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!
* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.
* Why facts don’t change our minds.
* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.
* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.
* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.
* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.
*Â Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* âAlternativeâ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
*Â Now Arizona has responded with a new â and some say bizarre â solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The stateâs manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.
* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!
* Scientists Say Theyâve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true:Â Millennials arenât destroying society â theyâre on the front lines against the forces that are.
*Â Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.
* Radical feminism finds a way.
* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.
* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.
* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.
* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!
*Â 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
*Â What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nationâs only deaf menâs college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.
* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
*Â This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
*Â The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise:Â The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary âF*cking Ignoredâ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You donât know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book
*Â Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
*Â The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive â and potentially lethal â hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere:Â 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.
*Â Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
*Â We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds:Â Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
*Â The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Divisionâs 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
*Â My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek â a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles OâConnell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
*Â Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
*Â Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty:Â An Introduction.
*Â Salaitaâs Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. âIncarcerated Workersâ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A âCatastrophicâ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
*Â The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They donât.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
*Â Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
*Â Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
*Â Why âThe Strangerâ Almost Didnât Get Published.
* Itâs Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
*Â After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: PokĂŠmon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
*Â Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
*Â Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
*Â The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Studentsâ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judgeâs Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the âreader,â a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
*Â How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
*Â âScience thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,â Dr. Janke said. âAll zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.â
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy:Â No Forests on Flat Earth.
*Â Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dasseyâs overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
*Â The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Wonât Report it Because itâs Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clintonâs nearly $18 million job as âhonorary chancellorâ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
*Â How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em:Â US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
*Â Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
*Â The Need For Believable Non-White Characters â Sidekicks, Included.
*Â What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
*Â Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
*Â Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says Americaâs Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as Americaâs First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
*Â 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
*Â The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case:Â A lively new book investigates the siren callâand annoying logisticsâof death fraud.
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* âI donât think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,â said senior strategist Tad Devine. âIt was âHow do we become credible?âââ
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers âstunnedâ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapistâs Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds â to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease â the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temerâs law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the countryâs democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who â though not legally barred from being installed â is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Wonât Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thronesâ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesnât make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Canât Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victimâs name and displays any arrests and gang ties â as well as whether the victim has a rating on the departmentâs list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the departmentâs list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
Wednesday Wega-Links!
* Ken Burns presents:Â The Humanities.
* My Pop Culture Series might have to be all Harry-Potter-themed this fall: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child comes out in July, then the Fantastic Beasts screenplay in November…
* I was hoping the other magic schools wouldnât have four houses. But just tell me which one is Ravenclaw and get it over with.
* Something happens to you out there: Astronauts and the Overview Effect.
* On The Fall of the Faculty.
…administrators have effectively developed a hidden curriculum that they exclusively control to further sideline the faculty. Never mind that the courses offered in this hidden curriculum focus on life skills and various types of political indoctrination related to race, gender, and ethnicity, subjects that the deanlets and deanlings are hardly qualified to teach. Add to this, speech, civility and anti-harassment codes, which administrators use with great effectiveness to silence faculty and student critics who interfere with administrative designs. These same administrators often rely upon outside agencies and licensure groups to discipline the faculty with outside assessment measures, threatening the faculty with the schoolâs possible loss of accreditation. Administrators often interfere with well-running programs, attempting to change their structure to the point of ensuring their failure.
* Banned instructor sues Inver Hills Community College, saying he was defamed. Just incredible.
* Political science department chair Eric Schickler said in an email that there was no longer a bond of mutual trust between faculty and the administration. He added that there were concerns among faculty that major donors were being steered toward supporting the Berkeley Global Campus project in Richmond rather than core campus research and teaching missions. âShared governance requires a shared vision and shared trust between faculty and those at the top,â Schickler said. âMany of us believe that the chancellorâs poor decisions have eroded that trust to the breaking point.â
*Â Call for Provocations: Stealing from the University â extended deadline.
This is our first call for provocations that demand we go beyond familiar complaints and challenge ourselves to organize. Recent student-led uprisings at Missouri, Ohio State, Duke, Appalachian State, and UC Davis, among many others, open up possibilities of re-purposing university-based resources for radical movements. How can we take the relay from these uprisings to expand insurgent practices of studying-in-movement?
* And it looks like itâs that time of the semester again: âShould I go to grad school in the humanities?â
* Dark Posthumanism: The Weird Template.
*Â When Teller directed The Tempest.
* Today in exciting political developments: Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader as a Delegate in California. At least nothing else incredibly dangerous and destabilizing is happening!
* West Virginia is neither a secret socialist stronghold nor a racist fever-dream. It is one of several bleeding edges of a sharply unequal country, where people who never had much are feeling as pressed as they can remember ever being. Some are bigots. Many are not. Some, no doubt, find that Trumpâs cocktail of arrogance and disgust, grievance and triumphalism, reassuringly resembles their own psychic survival strategies, blown up into world-historical dimensions. Others are voting for the socialist for the same reason they voted for the Chicago community organizer: a desire for a more equal society, born out of the lived experience of inequality. Maybe future organizing and leadership, like the decades-long fight that first built the unions and the Democratic party in the coalfields, will show that they are not alone in that. What West Virginia Is Saying.
* Data visualization in the Anthropocene.
* One in five of world’s plant species at risk of extinction. Sea Level Rise Is Here, And Is Gobbling Up Islands.
* Sold in the room: Philip K. Dick Is Getting an Anthology Show, Courtesy of Bryan Cranston and Ronald D. Moore. Elsewhere in TV news: Locke & Key! Uh, Wheel of Time, I guess? Krypton, really?
* And elsewhere in PKD news:Â One of the TAs in an Artificial Intelligence Class Was Actually an A.I.
*Â How Do You Put Out A Subterranean Fire Beneath A Mountain Of Trash? Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Oof.
* And oof.
*Â Our Awful Prisons: How They Can Be Changed.
*Â The one thing rich parents do for their kids that makes all the difference. The answer may shock you!
* This GIF of pre-CGI superhero jumps proves actors are just okay at jumping. The best thing on the Internet this year.
* The law, in its majestic equality:Â Poor People Donât Stand A Chance In Court.
* Huge, if true:Â School principal: ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ cause brain damage.
* Someone’s been watching too much Game of Thrones: “Ultimately, There Is No Narrative without Death.”
*Â Why So Many Smart People Arenât Happy.
* If Philosophy Wonât Diversify, Letâs Call It What It Really Is. A reply.
If those text reproduce ideology, and therefore reproduce empireâs projects of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism, then we canât just say ânothing is intrinsically wrong.â We in fact have to be open to the notion that these texts are entangled in the most violent, destructive ideas in world history. That they are rooted in whiteness and what whiteness meant in those moments: the right to murder and steal and subjugate.
*Â Civilization 6 Has Been Announced And Itâs Out This Year.
*Â The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Have Had Marvel Comicsâ Most Fucked-Up Superhero Romance.
Friday Links Are Just a Party and Parties Aren’t Meant to Last
* Out today, a project very close to my heart: my edited 2016 rerelease of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Here’s the Amazon order page, for you or your favorite academic library!
* The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s. The Mobile Academic.
* The strange story of Hugo Gernsback, who brought science fiction magazines to America.
* Just in time for finals! MLA Eighth Edition: What’s New and Different.
* At LARoB Rebecca Evans reviews the reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Green Earth. David Perry reviews The Secret Life of Stories. Against Star Wars. Inside the Coetzee Collection.
* My desire to see The Twilight Zone has boomeranged on me in the most ironic possible way.
* An independent researcher claims to have discovered a lost civilization in China.
*Â Existential Depression in Gifted Children.
* Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed thereâs no one right way to be a man. Buzzfeed’s The Most Powerful Writing about Prince. Nation Too Sad To F*ck Even Though Itâs What Prince Would Have Wanted.
*Â The Secret Life of Novelizations.
*Â The Hidden Economics of Porn.
*Â Five Hundred Years of Utopia.
* Harriet Tubman once staged a sit-in to get $20. The Treasury just gave her all of them. You have no idea how hardcore Harriet Tubman really was.
*Â The smug style in American liberalism.
* How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.
*Â How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated.
*Â How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months.
* Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. Iâm one of them.
* Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem. Related: 25 Best Wisconsin High Schools: U.S. News Rankings 2016.
* For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it âincremental progress.â Bernie Sanders offers a different way forward. How Sanders fell short. The real scandal.
*Â 12 Reasons Not to Write Lord of the Rings.
*Â I Talked to the Kid Whose Mom Used Craigslist to Find Him a Feminism Tutor, and It Got Weird.
* Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea. Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric.
* Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to societyâs progress. Early cultures kept track of natureâs ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors. But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
*Â Details arise about U.S. Bank robbery in the Alumni Memorial Union.
* Behold, the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
* The Tragic History of RC Cola.
*Â U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.
* Hamilton just won the Pulitzer for drama. Hereâs why it matters for American musicals. And congrats to Emily Nussbaum!
*Â This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress.
* Milwaukeeâs Appeals, Vibrant and Cheap.
*Â First Criminal Charges Handed Down After Flint Water Crisis.
* A man once described as a âperfect donorâ at an August, Georgia sperm bank and who fathered at least 36 children around the world is actually a mentally ill felon whose lies on his donor forms went undiscovered for more than a decade.
*Â We owe Rey and Finnâs friendship to Harrison Fordâs broken leg.
*Â Love It Or List It sued over shoddy renovations, ridiculous falsehoods.
*Â As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters.
* Hello, from the Magic Tavern watch! There’s two noncanonical podcasts from Foon-16 over at One Shot. There’s also a band new, slightly less… rigorous improv podcast from some of the principals involved called Siblings Peculiar.
*Â The U.S.âs Best High School Starts at 9:15 a.m.
*Â Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Offâand Thatâs Screwing Up Science.
*Â New Evidence Suggests That Limbs and Fins Evolved From Fish Gills.
* And rejoice, comrades! Twilight Struggle has come to Steam.
Gerry Canavan 