Posts Tagged ‘smartphones’
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!
* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!
* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…
* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.
* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.
* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.
* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.
* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.
* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.
* This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.
* Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.
* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.
* The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.
* Death at a Penn State Fraternity.
* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.
* African Science Fiction, at LARB.
* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.
* Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.
* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.
* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.
* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.
* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.
* This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.
* A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.
* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.
* “Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”
* They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
* When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.
* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.
* Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.
* How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.
* What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.
* Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.
* * ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!
* Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.
* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.
* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”
* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.
* We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!
* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’
* An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.
* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?
* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.
* Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.
* The Digital Humanities Bust.
* We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.
* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?
* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.
* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.
Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.
That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.
* Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.
* Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.
* Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.
* The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
* In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.
* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.
* Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
* The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.
* I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.
* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.
* I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”
* An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.
* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.
* The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.
* The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!
* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
Gerry Canavan 