Posts Tagged ‘snow’
Tuesday Links!
* FiveThirtyEight has been doing a great series on Mars colonization. Today’s entries are all about space sex. Also: Everything About Mars Is The Worst.
* Also at FiveThirtyEight: The Odds You’ll Fill Out A Perfect Bracket.
* TRAPPIST-1 seems like a no-go for humanity, but three of the worlds are close enough for life to hop between them.
* New York 2140 vs. The Collapsing Empire: Which New Sci-Fi Novel Is for You?
* ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Turns 20, from my “Buffy at 20″ co-organizer James South.
* On the coming apocalypse (and other’s people’s babies).
Your grandchildren were murdered by your parents.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2017
* What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
* From the archives: Snow Days Under Socialism.
* No, big snowstorms like this aren’t normal.
* America elected a parasite. Let’s take away health insurance from 24 million people. Or 26 million, who’s counting. This Level of Corruption Is Unprecedented in the Modern History of the Presidency. Gotta save money to steal money. “Senate Democrats prepare for spring battle over Trump’s border wall.”
24 million people losing insurance is roughly equivalent to the population of:
VT
AL
ND
SD
DE
MT
RI
ME
NH
ID
WV
NE
NM
KS
WY**combined**.
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 13, 2017
more people will lose health insurance under trumpcare than the entire population of florida
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 13, 2017
Fun fact: AHCA is projected to kill 17,000 people its 1st year. If all 301 GOP congressmen vote for it, each will have murdered 56 Americans
— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) March 13, 2017
find a man who smiles at you the way Paul Ryan smiles at a rise in the infant mortality rate
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 13, 2017
Ah good, Paul Ryan is finally clearing up some misconceptions about the GOP's health plan: pic.twitter.com/FWRiMb30Ni
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) March 14, 2017
TRUMP: I will use the bodies of dead 64-year-olds to build my wall.
DEMOCRATS: lol I thought you said Mexico would pay for it— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2017
* Remember the People America’s Healthcare System Has Already Killed.
* The university in ruins, Trump edition.
* The Party of Eugenics. They both are, honestly, but the GOP is just so much more vulgar about it.
* At every moment when Trump might have been stopped, when he might have been forced into bankruptcy, had his credit denied, had his loans called in, his licenses revoked, at every juncture where he might have been convicted of a crime or sent to jail—and, again, this is well before he makes his successful bid for the White House—some unplanned and unintended conspiracy of economic reason and political lowlifery mobilizes to protect him. (And it really is unplanned and unintended. The genius of the American system is how the Invisible Hand works to produce systemic vice rather than incidental virtue.)
* We’re heading towards something very ugly: Employers can ban staff from wearing headscarves, European court rules.
* American Empire: The Reboot.
* Seeing red: Membership triples for the Democratic Socialists of America.
* The Onion struggling to lampoon Trump.
* Violent video games found not to affect empathy, again.
* The hype for Logan seems to be reaching comical proportions, but still, you’d be hard-pressed to find another recent superhero movie that was worth emulating.
* Should a Chimpanzee Be Considered a Person?
* MMMBop: Hanson announces 25th anniversary tour as your death rapidly approaches.
* The economics of airline classes.
* Bowie impersonates other singers like Springsteen, Lou Reed. Everything has been bullshit since Bowie died.
* Because you demanded it! Young Sheldon.
* USA Today discovers Hello from the Magic Tavern. They’ve hit a real stride lately as story events have allowed them to move away from their standard format — and they were great before.
* Every Author on Your English Syllabus, Summed Up in a Single Sentence.
* It’s Donald Trump’s Fault Iron Fist Is Bad, Not Marvel’s, Says Star Finn Jones. If you say so.
* A People’s History of the Marvel Universe. Via Abigail Nussbaum’s second Hugos post.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 14, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, aging, AHCA, airlines, America, animal personhood, animals, apes, apocalypse, austerity, because you demanded it, Big Bang Theory, Bowie, bracketology, Buffy, CBS, chimpanzees, class struggle, climate change, conferences, democratic socialism, Donald Trump, ecology, empire, English classes, eugenics, Europe, extrasolar planets, FiveThirtyEight, games, general election 2016, Hanson, health care, Hello from the Magic Tavern, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugos, I grow old, infant mortality, international students, Iron Fist, Islamophobia, John Scalzi, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Logan, longevity, March Madness, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Mexico, MMMBop, monkeys, moral panic, mortality, movies, music, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York 2140, outer space, Paul Ryan, podcasts, politics, race, racism, Republicans, satire, sex, snow, socialism, Springsteen, Steve King, super-agers, superheroes, syllabi, television, The Collapsing Empire, The Onion, the university in ruins, Trappist-1, Trumpcare, Veep, violence, visas, white people, Wolverine, Young Sheldon
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.
* Fast Forward #289 – 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.
* 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 Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s 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. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
* 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 It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
REPUBLICANS: Hi, we’re ethnic cleansers!
DEMOCRATS: And *we’re* the loyal opposition!
BOTH: And together we’re [INHUMAN SCREECHING]
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2017
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s 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 “smart” 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 that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t 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 I’ll 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!
* 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 Administration’s 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.
* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s 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 They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.
* 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.
Republicans seek however many votes they need to relegalize slavery.
Democrats seek one vote less than they would need to ever do anything.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2017
* 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!
* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nation’s only deaf men’s 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 4chan, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academia freedom, ACLU, actually existing media bias, advertising, Alex Jones, algorithms, America, Americorps, Andrew Cuomo, animal intelligence, animal liberation, animals, apocalypse, Arizona, arts, authoritarianism, authorship, autocracy, basketball, bees, Benjamin Kunkel, biopunk, Black Mirror, Borges, cancer, capitalism, Captain Planet, cartoons, catastrophe, CFPs, charter schools, Chicago, children's literature, China, class struggle, climate change, collapse, college basketball, comics, conspiracy theories, continents, crisis, cultural preservation, death penalty, Death Star, deep state, democracy, Democrats, deportation, disability, domesticity, Don Bluth, Donald Trump, dystopia, Earthseed, ecology, entrapment, equality, Expanded Universe, extrasolar planets, facts, fascism, FBI, feminism, Forrest Fenn, free speech, Gamergate, gay rights, general election 2020, gerrymandering, glitter, Hero's Journey, history, How the University Works, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, Japanese, juking the stats, Kim Stanley Robinson, legitimacy, lies and lying liars, life finds a way, March Madness, marriage equality, Mars, medicine, melancholy, midterm election 2018, millennials, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, Moral Mondays, museums, music, NASA, NCAA, NEA, Nebula Awards, NEH, neoliberalism, never tell me the odds, New Jersey, New Zealand, Nina Riggs, North Carolina, nuclear war, obituary, Octavia Butler, oil spills, open mikes, our brains don't work, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, outer space, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Tricksters, parenting, Peter Singer, philosophy, podcasts, police state, political parties, politics, polls, prosthetics, protest, race, racism, reality-based community, refugees, religion, Republicans, resistance, Rust Belt, Sally Hemings, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, segregation, Shakespeare, sharks, sitting, slavery, snow, socialism, Sophie's Choice, space law, SpaceX, Springsteen, Standing Rock, standup comedy, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg, success, suicide, superheroes, syphilis, teaching, Terminator: Genisys, the Anthropocene, the archives, The Butter Battle Book, the Capitalocene, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The Martian, the Moon, the Rockies, the suburbs, Thomas Jefferson, Trappist-1, treasure, trolls, Tumblr, Uber, Upper Midwest, UVM, video games, voter ID, voter suppression, Wall-E, Walt Whitman, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, we're all gonna die, winter, zombies
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part One!
* I had a great time as the guest on this week’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talking about my Octavia Butler book, which has gotten some nice attention lately, including an interview in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last weekend as well. I was also on Radio Free Marquette this week, talking Rogue One…
* Another great Butler piece making the rounds right now: My Neighbor Octavia.
* A New Inquiry syllabus on Speculating Futures. Wired‘s first-ever science fiction issue.
* Monday’s Electoral College results prove the institution is an utter joke. Original Sin: The Electoral College as a Pro-Slavery Tool. The Left and Long Shots. Trump Is Unambiguously Illegible to be President. Meanwhile, on the lawlessness beat: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump. Amid outcry, N.C. GOP passes law to curb Democratic governor’s power.
* Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell’s Angels, and Trump. Look, all I’m saying is let’s at least give Nyarlathotep a chance. The Government Is Out of the Equality Business. When tyranny takes hold. Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt. It’s Trump’s America now. Time to get over our attachment to facts. And on that note: Too good not to believe.
* Not that we’re doing much better over here: Vox and the rise of explaintainment.
* How to Defeat an Autocrat: Flocking Behavior. Grassroots organizing in the Age of Trump.
* The worst possible Democrat at the worst possible time, forever and ever amen. What the Hell Is Wrong with America’s Establishment Liberals? Of course they are. The Year in Faux Protests. And no, I’m not over it yet: The Last 10 Weeks Of 2016 Campaign Stops In One Handy Gif. How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election.
* My President Was Black. The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America.
* I am terrified about where all this seems to be heading, on every level.
* Colby-Sawyer Eliminates Five Majors to Stay Afloat. English was on the list.
* More on Hungerford and not-reading. Elsewhere at LARB: Graham J. Murphy on the Ancillary Justice trilogy.
* How Bad Was Imperial Cybersecurity in Rogue One? Why Jack Kirby is (Probably) the Forgotten Father of Star Wars and Rogue One. The Obscenely Complex Way the Rebels Stole the Death Star Plans in the Original Star Wars Expanded Universe. And behold the power of this fully operational alt-right boycott.
so, Rogue One is the dirty work that allows the smooth and shiny surface of myth and ideology to be smooth and shiny.
— Ben Robertson (@BenRobertson) December 20, 2016
* More and more I find the unpublished and unwritten versions of stories as interesting or more interesting than the published versions — which is as true of Harry Potter as anything else.
* Dear tech community: your threat model just changed.
* You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news.
* You won’t believe how many Girl Scouts joined the Polish underground in WWII.
* In 2010, renowned string theory expert Erik Verlinde from the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics proposed that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but rather an “emergent phenomenon.” And now, one hundred years after Einstein published the final version of his general theory of relativity, Verlinde published his paper expounding on his stance on gravity—with a big claim that challenges the very foundation of physics as we know it. Big question is whether gravity is a bug they haven’t patched yet, or if gravity is the patch.
* TNT decides that a modern-day Civil War show doesn’t sound like fun anymore. But a show humanizing the KKK, sure….
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over, sitcom edition.
* History in the Anthropocene.
* EPA: Oh, yeah, we were lying before.
* Arms Control in the Age of Trump: Lessons from the Nuclear Freeze Movement. And some timely clickbait: How would you know if a nuclear war started?
* Spoilers: What Really Happens After You Die?
* More news from the future: Feds unveil rule requiring cars to ‘talk’ to each other.
* It can get worse, DC Cinematic Universe edition.
* Academic papers you can use: Where does trash float in the Great Lakes?
* And the war has even come to the Shire: Whitefish Bay to trap and remove coyotes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 20, 2016 at 11:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, actually existing media bias, alt right, America, Amy Hungerford, Ancillary Justice, arms trade, authoritarianism, autocracy, boycotts, cars, Chicago, Chile, Chuck Schumer, Civil War, class struggle, Colbert Report, Colby-Sawyer, collapse, corruption, coups, coyotes, Daily Show, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, DC Comics, death, democracy, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, English departments, EPA, equality, ethics laws, Expanded Universe, explaintainment, fake news, fascism, flocking behavior, futurity, game theory, Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, general election 2016, Girl Scouts, gravity, Great Lakes, Harley Quinn, Harry Potter, health care, Hell's Angels, history, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, hydrofracking, Infinite Jest, interviews, Ivanka, Jack Kirby, John Oliver, KKK, liberalism, Marquette, Michigan, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, mortality, my scholarly empire, Newt Gingrich, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organizing, oxy, physics, podcasts, Poland, politics, pollution, post-truth, professional wrestling, protest, reality TV, resistance, Roe v. Wade, Rogue One, Rust Belt, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, sitcoms, slavery, Slytherin, smugness, snow, Star Wars, structure, superheroes, swing states, Ta-Nehisi Coates, technology, television, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Constitution, the courts, the law, The New Inquiry, the news, the Shire, there's only one story and we tell it over and over, trash, Tressie McMillan Cottom, tyranny, UWM, Vox, water, Whitefish Bay, Wired, women, World War II
No, *These* Are the Weekend Links
* I have a short entry in SFRA Review‘s ongoing “101” series for science fiction scholars, “Ecology 101.”
* Avoiding gender bias in reference writing.
* Presenting The Journal of Hate Studies.
* Peter Jackson Freely Admits The Hobbit‘s Production Was a Shambles.
* How property rights in outer space may lead to a scramble to exploit the moon’s resources.
* Academic job market watch: Simplify the Job Application Process.
* CNN Reporter Suspended Two Weeks For Tweet Expressing Sympathy Toward Syrian Refugees.
* Black Tape Over Black Faculty Portraits at Harvard Law School.
* I can’t believe they found a way to make it creepier.
* The hawk and the mouse are playing the same sport, but the hawk is playing it much better.
* Adaptation of Unfilmable Vonnegut Novel Now Has Slim Chance of Not Being Terrible.
* Goodnight Moon and modernism.
* The news for Obamacare just gets worse and worse. Death spiral?
* These Are the Most Spectacular Nature Photos of the Year.
* Most movies would be lucky to open to $50 million. Four weeks before its debut, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has more than that in the bank.
* Adaptation of Unfilmable Vonnegut Novel Now Has Slim Chance of Not Being Terrible.
* It was thirty years ago today.
* I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 20, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, academic journals, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, alphabets, baby it's cold outside, Barack Obama, beholders, books, Captain Worf, Cat's Cradle, Christmas, CNN, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, Episode 7, Fargo, feminism, film, games, gender, Goodnight Moon, Harvard, hate, health care, How the University Works, Jared Fogle, Klingtons, letters of recommendation, Lord of the Rings, Milwaukee, misogyny, modernism, monkeys, Mr. Snuffleupagus, my scholarly empire, nature, neoliberalism, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, photography, politics, prereqs, property, race, racism, red mercury, refugees, science fiction, Sesame Street, sexism, snow, Star Trek, Star Wars, Subway, teaching, terrorism, the courts, The Force Awakens, The Hobbit, the law, the Moon, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Wisconsin
Wednesday Links! No Fooling.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 17: Brand/Branding/Rebrand.
* Jackson was paid $7.1 million in 2012, more than any other college president in the nation, and continues to be paid at that level. Just in case you don’t click through, the headline to that piece reads “Report: R.P.I. facing $1 billion in debts, liabilities.” So you know she’s worth every penny of that salary.
* But did you know the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets less than half the public money per student that Madison Area Technical College gets and less than a third of what goes to Milwaukee Area Technical College?
* And speaking of UWM: After Extinction, at UWM April 30-May 2.
* Meanwhile, at Duke: Response to President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth. The original incident is described here.
* Unsettling the University, at UCR April 2-3.
* But what also became clear was that she and I have radically different visions of what constitutes the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System and how it might be preserved and protected. Through the course of our conversation it became increasingly clear to me that in the current situation in Wisconsin we find ourselves in what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “a differend,” a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement.” Despite all parties–Regents, chancellors, faculty, staff, students, and alumni–being committed to the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System, it seems impossible to agree upon a rule of judgment or any set of criteria by which to adjudicate our different visions of what that well-being would look like.
* Dept. Names More Than 550 Colleges It Has Put Under Extra Financial Scrutiny.
* Salaita lawyers: ‘No doubt’ that UI, prof had agreement for employment.
* Over time, however, more and more departments failed to meet that standard; last year some 60 units were out of compliance, according to information gathered by the union. At Bridgewater State University, one of the worst offenders, for example, adjuncts taught more than 15 percent of courses in 16 large departments in 2014-15. Some 50 percent of classes in the English department were taught by part-time faculty, along with 40 percent in math and computer science. In philosophy, it was 63 percent of classes. Bridgewater officials did not respond to a request for comment.
* Google Maps turned your streets into Pac-Man yesterday, though I can’t imagine how anyone could have missed this news.
* The Entire History of ‘Doctor Who’ Illustrated as a Tapestry.
* 24 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.
* California Snowpack Hits All-Time Low, 8 Percent Of Average.
* Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.
* Chomsky: The Death of American Universities.
* There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
* The Trevor Noah train wreck.
* “Lutheran pastor resigns after being linked to threatening email.” That’s… something.
* Italian grandmother causes illness with cocoa expired in 1990.
* Why You Should Really Be Afraid of the Zombie Apocalypse.
* Gas Siphoning Coverup May Have Caused East Village Explosion. Jesus Christ.
* But there’s at least one unforeseen upside when all episodes are released at once: The writers don’t get the chance to self-correct in the middle of the season.
* The Long And Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl.
* The Americans renewed for season four. Hooray!
* Study: Not Many Disco Songs About Daytime. But of course more work is required.
* Oh my God, Becky, look at this vigorous debate among scholars about the true origin of the straight male preference for a curvier backside.
* I can”t believe they’re bringing this thing back: The X-Files Could Have Ended With a West Wing Crossover.
* And Paul F. Tompkins picks his best episodes from a prolific podcasting career. My tragedy is I’ve heard all these. Perhaps you’ve heard he’s got a new one out today…
Written by gerrycanavan
April 1, 2015 at 8:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, After Extinction, apocalypse, arson, art, austerity, auteur theory, Batgirl, branding, butts, buzzwords, California, Center for 21st Century Studies, China, cocoa, conferences, crossovers, cyberbullying, Daily Show, DC Comics, Department of Education, Detroit, disco, Doctor Who, Duke, English departments, evolutionary psychology, expiration dates, fire, Google Maps, history, How the University Works, iPhones, Italy, John Pat Leary, Kimmy Schmidt, Michael Jackson, Milwaukee, mismanagement, music, natural gas, neoliberalism, Noam Chomsky, Pac-Man, Paul F. Tompkins, philosophy, photography, podcasts, Pokémon, police corruption, police state, prank calls, race, racism, religion, Russell Crowe, sex, Sir Mix-a-Lot, snow, Spontaneanation, Steven Salaita, tapestries, tenure, The Americans, the courts, the law, The Onion, train wrecks, Trevor Noah, true crime, UC Riverside, UIUC, UWM, West Wing, Women in Refrigerators, words, X-Files, zombies
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird
Junior Associate Dean of Closing All My Tabs Links
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is “temporarily out of stock,” but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t place your order! Cyborg Lincoln commands it!
* #SnomgIcanteven2015. Good luck, East Coast!
* The Day the Purpose of College Changed. Great piece. I’ve added it to Wednesday’s reading in the Cultural Preservation course, alongside readings from Bérubé and Bousquet that I added to the syllabus this year.
* The idea behind it is simple: Get donations, and give them to contingent faculty members in need.
* Scott Walker can’t afford to let Bobby Jindal be the only candidate in the race who destroyed education in his state. And while we’re on the subject: Dropkick Murphys Order Scott Walker To Stop Using Their Music: ‘We Literally Hate You!’
* I’m going to have to differ with former president Clinton and possible future president Bush. To me, Arizona State looks like a dystopia, rather than a model for the future. ASU is pretty clearly set up as a factory of credentialing, and any lip-service to educational excellence, particularly in the undergraduate sphere, is exactly that.
* What provosts think. The crucial takeaway: Say Nothing if you Want a Job. Elsewhere in academic freedom: Fox News Raises Alarm Over College Course About Race. Other universities could stand to learn something from ASU’s statement on the subject:
The university, however, issued a statement Friday after the segment, reading:
This course uses literature and rhetoric to look at how stories shape people’s understandings and experiences of race. It encourages students to examine how people talk about — or avoid talking about — race in the contemporary United States. This is an interdisciplinary course, so students will draw on history, literature, speeches and cultural changes — from scholarly texts to humor. The class is designed to empower students to confront the difficult and often thorny issues that surround us today and reach thoughtful conclusions rather than display gut reactions. A university is an academic environment where we discuss and debate a wide array of viewpoints.
* Of course, in addition to everything else ASU is also the school that’s trying to force its composition adjuncts into a 5/5 workload with minimal salary increase, so I’m not going to lose my mind defending it or anything.
* Part everyman tale, as far as English departments go, and part lesson in unintended consequences, Maryland English’s story looks something like this. Between 1996 and 2011, the number of majors actually grew, from 641 to 850 students. Then the university rolled out a new, faculty-backed general education program. Unlike the old general education program, which centered on the liberal arts and required a literature course, the new one offers students much more flexibility in how to fulfill their various requirements. So students who aren’t interested in the liberal arts can much more easily avoid them. Part of the idea was to take some of the burden off departments, such as English, that fulfilled requirements for many students under the old system. Faculty members generally supported the idea.
But then the numbers got funny. In the spring of 2012, the English department lost 88 majors. The following year, it lost 79 – then 128 more majors 12 months later. Between spring and fall 2014, 66 more majors fell from the rolls. Over all, the department lost 363 majors — about 40 percent — and the numbers continue to fall. I basically get called out personally as the article goes on:
One of the more controversial departmental reform topics is how to change the English program itself, including by creating more recruitment-oriented, lower-level courses. Cartwright said there’s a demonstrated interest in updated versions of Great Books courses, but also in what he said some have called “zombie courses” – pejoratively, not descriptively. Those include courses on such popular genres as science fiction, fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkein, regional literature or children’s literature.
Cartwright said there’s some feeling among his colleagues that such offerings equate to “dumbing down” the curriculum. But he said others feel there’s value in meeting students “where they are.” And of course there are professors whose areas of expertise are in those fields and vouch for their importance.
* Rise of the medical humanities.
* Associate Dean of Eureka Moments. Now accepting applications.
* The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem. A Hereditary Meritocracy.
* Greek Conservative Spokesman Concedes Defeat to Anti-Austerity Left. Greece: Phase One. I guess I’ll take the “Eeyore” side of the bet:
@BigMeanInternet sabotaged by crooks elsewhere in Europe, leftist project discredited, etc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
* Audio edition of Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library. KSR!
* How Amazon series misreads The Man in the High Castle. I’m glad someone got to this thinkypiece before I did; I’m crossing it off my list.
* The State department wants Frozen PSAs to finally convince the powerful children’s voting bloc to support climate change legislation.
* A new wave of videogames offers lessons in powerlessness, scarcity and inevitable failure. What makes them so compelling? And from the archives: Desert Bus: The Very Worst Video Game Ever Created.
* Free speech, and other things that cost $91,000,000.00.
* Massive open online sexual harassment.
* Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from.
* The bacteria at USC depend on energy, too, but they obtain it in a fundamentally different fashion. They don’t breathe in the sense that you and I do. In the most extreme cases, they don’t consume any conventional food, either. Instead, they power themselves in the most elemental way: by eating and breathing electricity. You were supposed to find us bacteria that eat garbage and shit electricity. I swear to god, I don’t know what you scientists are even doing sometimes.
* American Sniper is a racist, militaristic movie. But it has much to teach us if we want to build a successful antiwar movement. Learning from American Sniper.
* Why they throw subway cars away in the ocean.
* Great video bringing a kid’s imagination to life.
* Andrew Cuomo rips teacher unions as selfish ‘industry’ more interested in members’ rights than student needs. #ReadyforCuomo
* When the Boss Says, ‘Don’t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid.’
* Gasp: Rationale for anti-ACA case continues to unravel.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15: Wellness.
* “No king, no king, lalalala” in three dozen languages. Apropos of nothing, of course.
* Ninth Circuit Panel Suggests Perjury Prosecution For Lying Prosecutors. You mean that’s not the rule already?
* The age of miracles: Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES.
* The murderers of Charlie Hebdo prove that Puritan thugs (broadly defined) do in fact exist. However, this does not mean (contra McKinney and his supporters, educated and otherwise) that all those speaking out against Puritan thugs are beyond reproach. Nor does it place a seal forever upon the righteousness of comics creators or comics scholars. Is comics scholarship an academic field devoted to the understanding and discussion of comics, bringing a wide range of knowledge and approaches to a complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes flawed, sometimes undervalued, and perhaps sometimes overvalued medium? Or is comics scholarship to be devoted to boosterism, advocacy, and sacralization?If Charlie Hebdo’s accomplishment was to fight against all priesthoods, then surely it does them little honor to try to set up a priesthood in their name, handing down stern pronouncements about how their work must be read and understood.
* Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate.
* Great moments in he said/she said: Maybe Drunk, Sleeping Woman Wanted to Be Set on Fire.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
The phrase “raising doubts” should get hazard pay for its role in this article. http://t.co/nGvVWQ2emm
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
Could the officer have done something transparently impossible, or did the police lie? I leave that question to the philosophers.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
* Deflategate by the numbers: Data Show The Patriots Have Fumbled The Ball Far Less Than Any Other NFL Team.
* How to write like J.K. Rowling.
* The headline reads, “Pope Uses Balloons As Peace Symbols After Dove Debacle.”
* Pope Francis Wants To Cross The U.S.-Mexico Border As A ‘Beautiful Gesture Of Brotherhood.’
* The New Measles: One of the most infectious viruses on the planet is making a comeback in the United States, and many doctors have never even seen it. How Anti-Vaxxers Ruined Disneyland For Themselves (And Everyone Else.) Measles is horrible.
* The idea that a major problem with climate change is “sunburn” is just so incredibly, blisteringly stupid I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.
* More bad news: Negative tweets mean you’re probably going to die of a heart attack, study says.
* I’ve let so many tabs pile up since my last link post I have no choice but to do a “nightmare headlines” lightning round: Burglar gets 30 years in prison for raping 101-year-old woman in home. Father of ailing twins can only donate his liver to one of them. Vanderbilt Woman Didn’t Think She’d Been Raped Until She Saw Video Of It. Nearly two dozen cats seized from a Md. home, then euthanized touches off a furor. Prison Visitor Says Guards Made Her Prove She Was Menstruating By Letting Them Inspect Her Vagina. Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts. Here’s A Spider So Awful You’ll Wish It Would Only Bite You To Death.
* Mamas, don’t let your cities grow up to be gambling metropolises.
* Weird op-ed (linking to Serial) that seems to argue that extreme prosecutorial coercion through overcharging and oversentencing is a feature, rather than a bug. That said, I’d thought the podcast itself had explicitly explained why strangulation is associated with “premeditation,” though perhaps that’s only something I saw on Reddit.
* #serialseason2: Who killed Padmé Amidala? I actually like this theory fan rewrite a lot.
* George Lucas said Disney killed all his ideas for New Star Wars movies. Okay, so they did one thing right.
* The precession of simulacra: Car Manufacturers Have Been Faking Our Engine Noises.
* Peak Vox, but I actually found it interesting: Here are 9 surprising facts about feces you may not know.
* Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet.
* Median weekly earnings by educational attainment in 2014.
* Federal Prison Sentence Begins for Anti-Drone Activist.
* The Princess Bride, the new film from Francois Truffaut.
* The Star Wars tipping point.
* How to tell if you are in a High Fantasy novel.
* Would Crashing Through a Wall Actually Kill the Kool-Aid Man?
* My current favorite video: Marquette in the 1980s.
* And here they all are, together forever. All 1,547 Star Trek lens flares.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 26, 2015 at 8:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, America, American Sniper, Andrew Cuomo, anxiety, ASU, audiobooks, austerity, bacteria, Barack Obama, Big Data, Bobby Jindal, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, climate change, college, composition, coral reefs, credentialism, cultural preservation, Desert Bus, East Coast, ecology, English departments, eureka moments, fantasy, Fox News, free speech, Frozen, games, ghosts, Google, Greece, health care, hereditary office, How the University Works, imagination, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marc Bousquet, meritocracy, Michael Bérubé, MOOCs, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Native American issues, Nazis, New York, Pacific Edge, pedagogy, Penn and Teller, Philip K. Dick, politics, race, racism, Reagan, salary confidentiality, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexual harassment, snow, teaching, the Left, The Man in the High Castle, the power is yours, Tolkien, Twilight of the Elites, University of Wisconsin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, wellness, what it is I think I'm doing, white privilege, whiteness, Wisconsin, words, writing, zombies