Posts Tagged ‘Sid Meier’
I Have (Not a Joke) 300 Tabs Open and This Afternoon I Am Closing Them All: Election Night Links!
I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t been able to tend to my open tabs at all. There’s over 300 — and I’m not leaving this room until I’ve closed them all. Let’s go!
* Really, I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to shamelessly self-promote: I missed announcing my trip to Atlanta for SLSA 2016 and my presentations on “Literary Studies after Blackfish” and the upcoming almost-almost-done issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding,” as well as my New Inquiry review of the (fantastic) end to Liu Cixin’s (fantastic) Three-Body trilogy. My new essay on “Geriatric Zombies” from The Walking Med was namechecked as part of a larger zombie news report in the Seattle Times. Most importantly I haven’t been able to hype my Octavia Butler book, which is printed and apparently shipping. I’ve even held one in my hands!
* Meanwhile, here’s my guess for tonight’s final results, just to get it out of the way: 340-198.
* CFP: Letters to Octavia Butler. CFP: The Comics of Alison Bechdel. CFP: English Studies in Ruins? CFP: The World of Harry Potter.
* A new issue of the Eaton Journal in Archival Research in Science Fiction is out, including a piece from Larisa Mikhaylova on Star Trek fandom in Russia.
* French town upholds law against UFOs.
* Invisible Planets / Invisible Frameworks — Assembling an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF. I’ve been reading the Invisible Planets collection and it’s great.
* Why we should lower the voting age in America.
* Žižek on the lesser evil. Jameson on fascism, but not yet. Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage For 2016 Campaign. Americans, Politics, and Social Media. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say. The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List. No, “we” are not collectively responsible for anything. Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right. Ivanka is the real threat. A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. And did someone order a Constitutional crisis with a 4-4 Supreme Court?
* What Happens if You Vote and Die Before Election Day? Too late for all of us, alas.
* In contrast to the Fordist society observed by Gramsci, power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to avoid the constraints of critical reason. Increasingly, it is non-representational codes—of software, finance, human biology—that mediate between past, present and future, allowing society to cohere. Where, for example, employee engagement cannot be achieved via cultural or psychological means, increasingly business is looking to solutions such as wearable technology, that treat the worker as an item of fixed capital to be monitored physically, rather than human capital to be employed. The key human characteristics are those that are repeated in a quasi-mechanical fashion: footsteps, nightly sleep, respiration, heartbeat. These metronomic qualities of life come to represent each passing moment as yet another one of the same. The New Neoliberalism.
* “We are all Thomas More’s children”: 500 years of Utopia. And at LARB.
* How America Outlawed Adolescence. The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child.
* Inside the NSA’s For-Sale Spy Town. The Indiana Town That Modernism Built.
* Where Ph.D.s Work. IPFW Community Shocked by Restructuring Recommendations. Last month’s strike at Harvard. And its results. A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats.’ Saudi college student in Wisconsin dies after assault. Johns Hopkins threatens to close its interdisciplinary Humanities Center, sparking outcry from students and faculty members. San Diego State University tuition, 1959. How State Budget Cuts Affect Your Education.
* The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity.
* The American Association of University Professors has launched an investigation focused on the dismissal of Nathanial Bork, who had taught philosophy courses at the college for six years before he was dismissed. The AAUP says that his dismissal raises concerns both because of the issues he raises about rigor and also because he was fired shortly after he complained about the situation to the Higher Learning Commission, the college’s accreditor. Further, Bork was active in efforts to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at the college.
* A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award. Love this.
* “University Paid for Bigfoot Expedition.”
* Starship Troopers coming back just as documentary footage of 2016. A darker, grittier Muppet Babies, for a tragic time.
* Quentin Tarantino still insists he’s going to stop at 10 movies.
* Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization.’
* “Capitalism Broke Earth, Let’s Protect Mars.”
* Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup Changing Computing Forever.
* The video for Soul Asylum’s 1993 smash hit featured real missing kids. Some eventually came home; some never did.
* Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery. Football Alters the Brains of Kids as Young as 8. Why treating diabetes keeps getting more expensive. The Other Sister: Returning Home to Care for an Autistic Sibling.
* Inmates Explain How They’d Run Prisons.
* If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women.
* Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow. Bathroom air freshener causes emergency response at nuclear site.
* Why can’t the Star Trek timeline advance?
* The Venom From This Snake Will Make Your Life a Living Hell.
* Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange.
* Why Did This Guy Collect 500 Screenshots of Soda Machines in Video Games? Because He’s a Genius. And elsewhere on the Jacob Brogan science beat: Everyone Poops. Some Animals Eat It. Why?
* Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Thumb U.N. won’t intervene.
* Now Is The Perfect Time For The Indians To Quietly Abandon Chief Wahoo.
* Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces. How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.
* The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year.
* In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history: The Pyramid at the End of the World.
* Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million in Jerry Sandusky Case.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Yellowstone’s “Zone of Death.” And I’ll take this one too: The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic.
* How Doctor Strange went from being a racist Asian caricature to a magical white savior.
* A new favorite poem:
* Animal minds: the new anthropomorphism.
* You weren’t educated, you were trained.
* Twenty-first century Victorians.
* How We Tell Campus Rape Stories After Rolling Stone.
* Native lives matter. Tribe vows to fight North Dakota pipeline through winter. The world watches. A Standing Rock Syllabus.
* Superheroes and sadness. Pixar and sadness.
* Presenting The Black Mirror Expanded Universe.
* Wildlife numbers more than halve since 1970s in mass extinction. Inside the Frozen Zoo That Could Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life.
* The secret history of Teaching with Calvin & Hobbes.
* A bad idea, but fine: The Adventures of Young Dumbledore.
* Kardashev Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist.
* And frankly you had me at LEGO, but I like the rest too: LEGO’s New Line of Female Superheroes Is the Toy We Deserve.
New Fall Syllabus #1: Alternate History!
I’m teaching three classes this semester, ENGLISH 4615/5615 (“Infinite Jest”), ENGLISH 2010 (“Alternate History”), and HOPR 1953 (“Video Game Culture”) (one-credit, pass/fail, now with Pokémon Go!). I’m very excited about all three. The Infinite Jest course is one I’ve wanted to do for a very long time — I came up with the whole idea of adding the new 4615/5615 course number to the Marquette English just so I could do this course — and the alternate-history course has been puttering around in my brain as a pedagogical opportunity for just about as long.
I got a lot of help from folks on Twitter and Facebook with the alternate history novel course, both at the level of generating texts but also at the level of conceptualizing the course a little different so it could be more inclusive, and I’m really grateful for that. I was finally sold by Alexis Lothian on the idea that I was being silly by being resistant to stories like The Lathe of Heaven and “The Book of Martha,” for instance, and that the practical effect of that resistance was to make the class much whiter and much maler than it really needed to be. Now, the course is still pretty white and very male, but the genre itself is, and somehow or another that’s something I want to start to talk about as the semester progresses. The excellent suggestion of Karen Joy Fowler’s story “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” will really help me make that pivot, I think, as will In the United States of Africa (a great novel I couldn’t believe I forgot to include until it was pointed out to me I’d forgotten to include it, I think by Aaron Bady).
A few other things I was very sad to lose:
- I was originally going to do “an alternate history of an alternate history” thing to end the semester, Superman: Red Son, but it just didn’t make sense the way the course took shape. I held on to the idea way too long, and only cut the book two days ago. Sorry, bookstore!
- The whole original point of all this was to use the course as an excuse to teach The Years of Rice and Salt, a book I love which seems just too long too teach in any other context. And it still seems too long to teach (at least at the sophomore level). I had to give it up, and wasn’t able to include even any excerpts because I crammed in too much other stuff. Someday!
- Another thing that fell out of the course was a group presentation structure in which individual groups researched the actual history of the hinge point of each divergence and reported on it. I realized that with the newer, more expansive idea of the course this wasn’t going to work very well for at least half the books, and probably would have been reductive and overdetermined our conversations in practice, so it had to be abandoned as well.
- I really, really wanted to include a Ted Chiang what-if-religion-were-empirically-verifiable story like “Hell Is The Absence of God,” but, again, it seemed just a bit far too off the mark this time.
- I am, indeed, doing literally just one page from The Plot Against America, fulfilling my perverse desire to do so.
- There were many other great suggestions for books that I wasn’t able to use. A few that I really struggled over:
- Life After Life: a Replay-style reincarnation novel about World War I;
- Replay itself, which is just too time-travel-ish for this (though I’ve always really liked it);
- I likewise ruled out some other really good alternate-timeline stories because they were really time travel stories, from my puritanical perspective;
- Something longer from Butler, perhaps Wild Seed (again, just too far afield generically for what I’m hoping to do);
- Something truly (“merely”) generic, like Turtledove or Bring the Jubilee;
- Lion’s Blood, Atomik Aztex, The Indians Won, The Bird Is Gone, The Heirs of Columbus, etc. I was so hung up on the idea of doing The Years of Rice and Salt that it crowded out this space for me (and then I added In the United States of Africa instead, to take on this question from a different direction). Next time.
- Swastika Night, 1984, Handmaid’s Tale, Battle Royale: all good suggestions but didn’t hit the sense of “pastness” required by my conception of alternate history as a genre, as they were all future histories in their original moment of production;
- District 9: only (re-)occurred to me at the last second because I was talking about it to somebody in another context, and didn’t have time to do it because the syllabus was (again) too crammed with too much other stuff. Someone had suggested Born in Flames to me as well, which also would have been great.
- I also really wanted to play some board games like Twilight Struggle, Risk, Axis and Allies, and Chrononauts, but it seemed like it would be unwieldy and pointless with 35 students in the room. I think Civilization could scratch the same itch, though…
All right, with all those caveats, apologies, and thanks, here’s the week by week schedule (and full syllabus with all course procedures)! Three papers, the first two “traditionally scholarly,” the third one with a creative option, as well as a few creative micro-assignments here and there. If there’s anything more I should explain or you have any questions about the decisions I made, feel free to ask in the comments!
| M | Aug. 29 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
in-class writing exercise: “What If…” |
| W | Aug. 31 | class discussion: “What If…” |
| UNIT ONE: ALTERNATE WORLD WAR IIs | ||
| F | Sep. 2 | Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Lucky Strike” |
| M | Sep. 5 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS |
| W | Sep. 7 | Kim Stanley Robinson, “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” |
| F | Sep. 9 | FIRST PAPER GUIDELINES DISTRIBUTED
Star Trek: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (discussion only; watch it on your own!) criticism: H. Bruce Franklin, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” [D2L] |
| M | Sep. 12 | Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, chapters 1-3 |
| W | Sep. 14 | Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, chapters 4-6 |
| F | Sep. 16 | Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, chapters 7-9 |
| M | Sep. 19 | Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, chapters 10-13 |
| W | Sep. 21 | Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (whole book) |
| F | Sep. 23 | The Man in the High Castle (2015 Amazon pilot) (discussion only; watch it on your own!) |
| M | Sep. 26 | Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (discussion only; optional screening date and time TBA) |
| W | Sep. 28 | Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (discussion continues)
· review: Ben Waters, “Debating Inglourious Basterds” [Web] · review: Michael Atkinson, “The Anti-Blockbuster” [Web] · review: Lee Siegel, “Tarantino’s Hollow Violence” [Web] · review: Jeffrey Goldberg, “Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger” [Web] |
| F | Sep. 30 | Lauren Davis, “Quentin Tarantino’s Spin Through Alternate History” [io9.com]
creative writing: Draft a short flash fiction [500-1000 words] or create an artifact, document, or image set in the 2016 of the world of Inglourious Basterds
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (excerpt) [D2L] |
| UNIT TWO: OTHER HISTORIES | ||
| M | Oct. 3 | FIRST PAPER WORKSHOP
Bring in at least your introductory paragraphs, main claim, and an outline of your paper. |
| W | Oct. 5 | Sid Meier’s Civilization
videos: Civilization V timelapse gameplay videos [YouTube] post: Trevor Owens, “Sid Meier’s Colonization: Is It Offensive Enough?” [Web] thread: Lycerius, “I’ve Been Playing the Same Game of Civilization for Almost Ten Years. This Is the Result” [Reddit] |
| F | Oct. 7 | Sid Meier’s Civilization
criticism: Kacper Pobłocki, “Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization” |
| M | Oct. 10 | FIRST PAPER DUE
SECOND PAPER GUIDELINES DISTRIBUTED Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” [D2L] |
| W | Oct. 12 | Karen Joy Fowler, “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” [D2L] |
| F | Oct. 14 | criticism: L. Timmel Duchamp, “Playing with the Big Boys: (Alternate) History in Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘Game Night at the Fox and Goose’” [Web] |
| M | Oct. 17 | Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton |
| W | Oct. 19 | Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton
thinkpiece: Jennifer Schuessler, “Hamilton and History: Are They in Sync?” [Web] interview: Rebecca Onion and Lyra D. Monteiro, “A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems” [Web] |
| F | Oct. 21 | FALL BREAK—NO CLASS |
| M | Oct. 24 | Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain, pgs. 1-66 |
| W | Oct. 26 | Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain, pgs. 67-119 |
| F | Oct. 28 | Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain (whole book) |
| M | Oct. 31 | Abdourahman A. Waberi, In the United States of Africa (part one) |
| W | Nov. 2 | Abdourahman A. Waberi, In the United States of Africa (whole book)
criticism: Justin Izzo, “Historical Reversibility as Ethnographic Afrofuturism: Abdourahman Waberi’s Alternative Africa” |
| F | Nov. 4 | CONFERENCES—CLASS CANCELLED |
| UNIT THREE: DREAMING OF DIFFERENCE | ||
| M | Nov. 7 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 1-4) |
| W | Nov. 9 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 5-6) |
| F | Nov. 11 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 7-9) |
| M | Nov. 14 | SECOND PAPER DUE
FINAL PROJECT GUIDELINES DISTRIBUTED Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 10-13) |
| W | Nov. 16 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 14-16) |
| F | Nov. 18 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (chapters 17-19) |
| M | Nov. 21 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (whole book)
Martin Puchner, “When We Were Clones” [D2L] |
| W | Nov. 23 | THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS |
| F | Nov. 25 | THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS |
| M | Nov. 28 | Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (chapters 1-4) |
| W | Nov. 30 | Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (chapters 5-8) |
| F | Dec. 2 | Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (whole book) |
| M | Dec. 5 | Octavia E. Butler, “The Book of Martha”
creative writing: Imagine God comes to you with the same offer he/she/it brings to Martha. What one change would you make to the world, and why? |
| W | Dec. 7 | Octavia E. Butler, “The Book of Martha” (discussion continues)
creative writing: Draft a flash fiction [500-1000 words] or create an artifact, document, or image set in the world that exists sometime after the end of “The Book of Martha.”
Octavia E. Butler, “Afterword to ‘The Book of Martha’” Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler (excerpt) [D2L] |
| F | Dec. 9 | FINAL PROJECT WORKSHOP
LAST DAY OF CLASS |
| F | Dec. 16 | FINAL ASSIGNMENT DUE BY 12:30 PM |
Saturday Morning’s All Right for Linking
* Bryan Fuller Reveals New ‘Star Trek’ Details, Says Series Will ‘Eventually’ Revisit Characters. Interesting interview that suggests a lot of what is circulating about this series is wrong.
* On the deep, abiding, and highly dispersed influence of Gordon Lish.
* West Virginia in the Anthropocene: At least 23 people have been killed after powerful storms swamped West Virginia on Thursday night, forcing high water rescues across the state and leaving thousands of customers without power through Friday evening, officials said.
* CDC: Flint water crisis “entirely preventable.”
* Why Brexit Is Much Scarier Than You Think. Brexit: The Crisis Begins. The Sterling Depreciation of 2007-2008 and Its Implications for Brexit. A timeline of the coming slow-motion car-crash. “Clusterfuck.” We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. David Cameron Has Secured His Place as One of the Worst Prime Ministers Ever. Boris already flinching. Article 50 as Stalemate. No Takebacks. Brexit and the university. The A-Z of Brexit. Brexit Impact Will Be Felt in Wisconsin. The United Kingdom is the fourth-largest export market for Wisconsin goods, with $824.2 million worth of products shipped from the Badger State last year, or about 3.7% of the state’s exports. Morexit?
* “Worst ‘Zombie States’ in America ‘Deteriorate Faster, Further.’
* Oil Made Venezuela Rich, And Now It’s Making It Poor.
* The central problem is that employment policies that are gender-neutral on paper may not be gender-neutral in effect. After all, most women receive parental benefits only after bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities. Yet fathers usually receive the same benefits without bearing anything close to the same burden. Given this asymmetry, it’s little wonder some recently instituted benefits have given men an advantage.
* Six weeks before the Summer Olympics open in Rio de Janeiro, the laboratory that was set to handle drug testing at the Games has been suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency in a new escalation of the doping crisis in international sports.
* FBI Says There’s No Evidence Orlando Gunman Omar Mateen Had Messaged Men or Had Secret Gay Affairs.
* Can Daenerys Fly to Westeros on Her Dragons?
* What’s The Matter With Poetry?
* This is near my neighborhood, and I can confirm this intersection is singularly terrible.
* And I know things seem bad, but here’s a preview of Civilization 6‘s gameplay. Hang in there!
Wednesday Wega-Links!
* Ken Burns presents: 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 wouldn’t 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.
…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 school’s 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. “Shared governance requires a shared vision and shared trust between faculty and those at the top,” Schickler said. “Many of us believe that the chancellor’s poor decisions have eroded that trust to the breaking point.”
* Call for Provocations: Stealing from the University – 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 it’s that time of the semester again: “Should I go to grad school in the humanities?”
* Dark Posthumanism: The Weird Template.
* 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 Trump’s 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: One of the TAs in an Artificial Intelligence Class Was Actually an A.I.
* How Do You Put Out A Subterranean Fire Beneath A Mountain Of Trash? Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Oof.
* And oof.
* Our Awful Prisons: How They Can Be Changed.
* 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: Poor People Don’t Stand A Chance In Court.
* Huge, if true: 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.”
* Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy.
* If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. A reply.
If those text reproduce ideology, and therefore reproduce empire’s projects of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism, then we can’t just say “nothing is intrinsically wrong.” 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.
* Civilization 6 Has Been Announced And It’s Out This Year.
* The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Have Had Marvel Comics’ Most Fucked-Up Superhero Romance.
Friday Morning Links!
* CFP: Anticipations: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions.
* It’s basically become a standing assignment at the Marquette Tribune to ask me about some weird thing I like once a semester. And while we’re on that subject: a preview of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Hard times at Mizzou. This new enrollment decline — seemingly on top of the demographic dip nationwide — looks like a complete disaster for the troubled campus, which the administration has effortlessly managed to weaponize in pursuit of its own goals. Meanwhile: Melissa Click Breaks Silence, Backs AAUP Inquiry.
* Luxurious College Apartments, Built on Debt.
* The end of tenure in Wisconsin.
* Fukushima: Tokyo was on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, admits former prime minister. Miami’s oceanfront nuclear power plant is leaking.
* What happens if there’s a supervolcano?
* Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English.
* Alternate title: Bernie Sanders has no path to a delegate majority. Even so, that Michigan win was pretty great.
* Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias: How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* In stories of classroom sexual harassment, popular teachers are often the perpetrators.
* Dystopia now: United confirms 10-abreast seating on some of its 777s.
* …just another instance of the bipartisan “smell weakness, then mercilessly swarm” routine that everyone has apparently decided is a healthy and beneficial norm for online life.
* At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump. It’s Getting Harder For Donald Trump To Deny That His Top Aide Assaulted A Reporter. Donald Trump Encourages Violence At His Rallies. His Fans Are Listening. Legitimacy and violence. The plan.
* The arc of history is long, but Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked.
* “Magic in North America”: The Harry Potter franchise veers too close to home.
* Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income. (via)
* 100% absolutely yes: Janelle Monae Will Co-Star in a Movie About the Women Behind the Space Program.
* Former College Student Wins Lawsuit After Being Told Men Were ‘Turned On’ By Her Pregnancy.
* xkcd: Map of the Repositioned United States.
* As a result, the complaint stated, Choudhry was disciplined with a 10 percent reduction in salary for one year and required to write a letter of apology to Sorrell. Sorrell alleged in the lawsuit that she was told by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele that he had “seriously considered terminating the Dean” but had decided not to because “it would ruin the Dean’s career.” Berkeley’s handling of sexual harassment is a disgrace.
* U.N.C. Football Player Who Ended Up Homeless Had C.T.E.
* Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF.
* How many LEGO would it take to…
* A brief history of allergies.
* google spiderman sounds weird truth
* The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age.
* The making of Cosmic Encounter, the greatest boardgame in the galaxy.
* Sleep is important, apparently. I know I miss it.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Orpheus.
* Y’all ready for a tech crash?
* And the worst part is, now they won’t even let us complain!
* And this is very promising: Huntington’s disease gene dispensable in adult mice.
Friday Links!
* I’ll be promoting this relentlessly once everyone gets back from Spring Break, but for now, here’s a taste: some information about my Cultural Preservation Today symposium at the end of the month.
* Deadline extended! CFP for MLA 2016: Feminist Voices in Diasporic Afro-Futurism.
* Faculty Coalition Will Lobby for College Athletes to Be Paid.
* notes on the [inevitable] proletarianisation of the University.
* Two from Freddie: critique drift and the Rich Uncle Pennybags test.
* OnMilwaukee gets nostalgic for the old Milwaukee downtown.
* Dominic Barton, a managing director at McKinsey & Co. and a fellow co-chair, said one CEO (names were carefully guarded) captivated the group’s imagination when he admitted his pay structure would actually allow him to make more in a few years than his whole career by eliminating research and development spending and instead buying back stock. The company wouldn’t exist after 10 years, the CEO added.
* This article has got to be Exhibit A for anyone who thinks talk of “the Anthropocene” is about re-centering Europe. I just can’t seen any argument that would put the date of the Anthropocene at 1610 that wouldn’t push it back into prehistory.
* Illinois lawmakers have put a benefit commonly offered to college employees — tuition breaks for their children — on the chopping block at public universities in response to a big expected cut in state spending on higher education.
* #accelerate: Today, big data is used to boost profits and spy on civilians. But what if it was harnessed for the social good?
* Good Family Feud, or, this is how I die.
* Portland cops charge homeless woman with theft for charging her phone.
* Remembering the great Sir Terry Prachett.
* It took him 25 years but Sid Meier finally made a version of Master of Orion.
* And it can happen here: Springfield, Illinois swears allegiance to Cobra Commander, declares war on G.I. Joes.
Gerry Canavan 
An Especially Worthy Entry in Our Ongoing Series of Wednesday Links
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* ‘Well, Here’s What Won’t Pass,’ Obama Says Before Listing 35 Proposals.
* Aaron Bady’s amazing “African Writers in a New World” interview series at Post 45 continues with Teju Cole.
* Daniel Maguire on the McAdams Case at Marquette. Really hard to believe they’ve somehow managed to create a situation where McAdams has the better side of the argument.
* Ashon Crawley on Ferguson and utopia.
* Cruel optimism and the NFL (or, Life in the Factory of Sadness).
* Meanwhile: Patriots Black Ops Division Kills Opposing Team Leaders In Three States; “All in the Game,” Says Belichick.
* The NCAA, Last Seen Claiming It Has No Jurisdiction Over Decades-Long Academic Fraud at UNC, Says It’s Investigating Academic Fraud at 20 Colleges.
* …or live long enough to become the villain: The Vagina Monologues is now reactionary.
* Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stint as an Advice Columnist for Ebony Magazine. Happy Robert E. Lee Day! …anytime the same state and culture invites you to worship a human being they tried to kill, we should be suspicious of the ways they want us to remember.
* I think I rediscover this fact with the same surprise every couple of years: In 1991, a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had indeed plagiarized parts of his dissertation, but found that it was “impractical to reach, on the available evidence, any conclusions about Dr. King’s reasons for failing to attribute some, but not all, of his sources.” That is, it could have been anything from malicious intent to simple forgetfulness—no one can determine for sure today. They did not recommend a posthumous revocation of his degree, but instead suggested that a letter be attached to the dissertation in the university library noting the passages lacked quotations and citations.
* Neoliberalism and the Degradation of Education (Alternative Routes, Vol. 26). A ton of good links here.
* Teach or perish. Teach and perish.
* 80 rich people now have as much as 50% of the rest of humanity combined. Let’s meet our overlords!
* Science Fiction Under Totalitarian Regimes, Part 2: Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Here was Part 1: Germany.
* Coming soon: Keywords for Radicals.
* On the failure to reclaim the word “slut.”
* When the trains stopped coming down the track, Tryon, NC began to crumble, and since then something disappears each day.
* Groundbreaking Artwork Reimagines Disney Princesses As Office Supplies.
* ‘Cultural Marxism’: a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim. This is a term you see in the comment threads no one is supposed to be reading more and more.
* ‘Overworked’ drone pilots are baling out. Chomsky: Obama’s Drone Program ‘The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times.’
* Lonesome Alito Declares Marriage Only Between A Man And The Sea.
* True crime watch: Milwaukee man says stabbing sister, father was ‘right thing to do.’ Spoiler alert: no.
* I want to believe! Russia Orders Obama: Tell World About Aliens, Or We Will.
* It’s already working! U.S. Air Force Releases Thousands of Pages Of Declassified UFO Files.
* 10 Rules For Making Better Fantasy Maps.
* Trustees Refuse to Reconsider Salaita’s Firing: “That Decision Is Final.”
* Scenes from the class struggle at the University of California.
* How Did We Get Here? The AAUP’s evolving emphasis on collective bargaining.
* The twilight of a particular organizational form should not be confused with the end of worker organization itself. Institutions are not permanent, but workers’ interest in organization is. And besides, the current model is disappearing whether we like it or not.
* Can you name these cities just by looking at their subway maps?
* Broken clock watch: Cuomo wants a train to La Guardia.
* Star Wars considering casting Tatiana Maslany for every role, one assumes.
* Pay Attention, 007! On the Usability of James Bond’s Gadgets.
* Majestic Animals That Could Go Extinct This Century.
* A lifetime of being paranoid about this confirmed.
* The trouble with Harley Quinn. Via io9.
* Sid Meier’s next: Starships.
* And doctors, who have already taken everything from us, want our pizza too. The line must be drawn here!
Written by gerrycanavan
January 21, 2015 at 7:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic fraud, academic freedom, advice, aliens, America, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Barack Obama, Batman, Bill Belichick, Boston University, broken clocks, cities, civilization, class struggle, college sports, comics, cruel optimism, cultural marxism, cultural preservation, die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, Disney, dissertations, doctors, don't read the comments, drones, dying towns, ecology, empire, fantasy, FBI, feminism, Ferguson, football, gadgets, games, gender, Harley Quinn, history, How the University Works, I want to believe, income inequality, interviews, Israel, James Bond, La Guardia, labor, maps, Marquette, marriage equality, mass extinction, medicine, memory, Milwaukee, misogyny, MLK, murder, NCAA, neoliberalism, New England Patriots, New York, NFL, Noam Chomsky, North Carolina, office supplies, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, pizza, plagiarism, politics, princesses, protest, radicals, resistance, revolution, Robert E. Lee, Samuel Alito, science fiction, Sid Meier, Star Wars, State of the Union, Steven Salaita, subways, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, Teju Cole, tenure, terrorism, the line must be drawn here, the rich are different, the truth is out there, totalitarianism, trans* issues, true crime, UFOs, UIUC, UNC, unions, University of California, Utopia, Vagina Monologues, war on education, war on terror, words, writing, zunguzungu