Posts Tagged ‘solitary confinement’
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Friday Links!
* The ‘1619 Project’ Isn’t Anti-American — It’s Anti-White Identity Politics.
If Erickson and Co. would simply choose to identify as Americans – instead of as white Americans – then they’d free themselves from the compulsion to defend Thomas Jefferson’s sainthood, and belittle Sally Hemings’s suffering. If they would only seek meaning and belonging through identification with every American whose deeds affirmed our republic’s highest ideals – instead of with those whose pigmentation affirmed their racial pride – they could feel themselves ennobled by MLK’s heroism, and unthreatened by a frank accounting of the Founding Fathers’ crimes.
* Most Canadians Are Now Better Off Than Most Americans.
* How Paying for College Is Changing Middle-Class Life.
* Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media.
* Welcome to the US, Greta. With your help we can save the planet and ourselves.
* But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the high-definition simulation we call reality, and to unravel the physical mysteries of our world? A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts.
* ‘Nobody cared’: A woman gave birth alone in a jail cell after her cries for help were ignored, lawsuit says. Trump administration leaves menstruating migrant girls ‘bleeding through’ underwear at detention centres, lawsuit claims. The Trump Administration Wants To Start DNA Testing Undocumented Immigrants In Government Custody. When Solitary Confinement Is A Death Sentence. CDC reports 900 mumps cases in migrant detention facilities over past year.
* Every day with this guy. It’s a truly astounding record of achievement.
* How Democrats Can Win Back Rural Wisconsin.
* The DNC Doesn’t Want a Climate Debate for a Reason.
The DNC has shown what it represents: plutocratic interests and their deep commitment to human extinction. Even a lightweight Ivy League skateposer like Beto has a better sense of where the political culture is headed than the DNC does. Greta Thunberg arrived yesterday in New York City after crossing the Atlantic in a small, janky-looking zero-carbon boat from Europe. She and the many other people around the world fighting capitalism and the fossil fuel industry are our best hope — not only for the future, but for the present.
* just manipulating markets lol
* YouTube is a very bad company.
* Big Pharma Is Starting to Pay for the Opioid Crisis. Make Those Payments Count.
* Same joke but about PornHub planting trees to fight climate change.
* How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
* By and large, arbitration just shouldn’t exist.
* The largest study of same-sex sexual behavior finds there is no gay gene.
* Mark Twain wrote his own sad projections about Huck in 1891, when he planned a sequel: “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.”
* Garak and Bashir: The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relationship That Should’ve Been.
* What is it with the kids today and Friends?
* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. Wild to see how some of these communities have limped on or evolved into cults since becoming irrelevant.
* I nearly cried reading this.
* And if you want a vision of the future.
Behold! Links!
* CFP: Forming the Future.
* CFP: The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces (Warsaw, December 2019).
* CFP: Decolonizing the Undead.
* CFP: Adaptation and Nostalgia.
* In Urging Faculty Not to Unionize, Marquette Cites Catholic Identity. Better doublecheck that citation.
* I went on a little tear about Slaughterhouse Five some people seemed to like.
* Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures.
* Science fiction and the path back.
* What Western Media Got Wrong About China’s Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth.’
* My point in observing that atmospheric carbon levels have gone up about about 14% while Game of Thrones has been a thing is that geological time is now faster than pop-cultural time. This has only ever been true before of earthquakes and volcanoes.
* Counterpoint: Climate change should be the subject of every DNC debate.
* There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for a disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place. Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years. Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Housing policy is climate policy. Striking at the End of the World. Climate Change Drove Neanderthals to Cannibalism, New Research Suggests. Fascism and ecology. Fascism, ecology, and misogyny. Neoliberal catastrophism. The road to civilizational collapse. Sounds like a lovely place for the last 10,000 people alive to hold up. Now do I have your attention?
* It’s only going to get worse: Trump Just Purged DHS Because Its Leaders Weren’t Breaking the Law Enough. Trump told border agents to break U.S. law and defy judicial orders.They all belong in jail.
* Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats.’
* Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the “embarrassing” kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for “elites” from “elite” institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class.
* Huge, if true: Assessment Is an Enormous Waste of Time.
* Exciting new horizons in making student evaluations even worse.
* Teaching in the time of Campus Reform.
* ‘I started dreading going to class’: Women speak out about sexual harassment experiences at Duke. Elsewhere on the Duke beat: Duke to Pay $112.5M Over Allegations of Falsified Research. Duke’s Nursing School Failed Them. They Say Their Race Played a Role.
* The death of an adjunct. This is how you kill a profession. How to talk to NTT faculty. There’s a lot of pain in academia today. So many workers/scholars are feeling left behind in the job market. If you are, too, you’re not alone. I talk to 8 working-class scholars who have been pushed out of the academy in this special Working episode.
* Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research. Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated. What happens to faculty after a college closes?
* A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?
* The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend.
* I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?
* Amazing coincidences happen every day.
* The digital humanities debacle.
* Unsilencing the writing workshop: creative writing heresy from Beth Nguyen.
* Chinese schools are using facial recognition on students. But should they? I say teach the controversy.
* Start school later! This is the lowest hanging fruit for educational improvement there is.
* A Note From Your Colleagues With Hearing Loss: Just Use a Microphone Already.
* Love to live in an apartheid state: “GOP leaders criticize Gov. Tony Evers’ lead pipe replacement plan, raising concerns that too much money would go to Milwaukee.” And a flashback to October: As the tax dollars paid to the state rose 19% between 2009 and 2015, an increase of more than $400 million, the amount of revenue the state shared with the county did not grow, according to county officials.
* Buzzfeed returns to Baraboo, Wisconsin, site of the infamous Nazi prom photo.
* ‘Disgusted by it:’ Whitefish Bay High School students accused of using racist language.
* Make Milwaukee Socialist Again.
* Abigail Nussbaum’s Us link roundup.
* In the history of gaming there are just 14 playable black female characters.
* Real Native history in a video game: An Indigenous take on The Oregon Trail.
* The Suprising History of the Ball Pit.
* All the absolute worst people in the world, working together and on the same page.
* Bidenwatch: when the cool uncle becomes the creepy uncle.
* The Senate having another extremely normal one.
* Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to dril. Give it to Bill Watterson, too!
* Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. ‘Think of the mothers of sons’: Notre Dame mom begs female students to stop wearing leggings, sparking protests. Sports-Bra Outrage.
* “New bills would ban pelvic exams without consent.” You mean they aren’t already — what?
* The US government is holding Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement again. It’s a vindictive, unconscionable attack on a brave truth teller.
* The changing face of homelessness in America in 2019.
* The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century.
* Minimum wage increases are associated with reduced numbers of suicide deaths.
* Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths.
* 13% of the world’s companies are ‘zombies.’ That’s not healthy.
* Today in the richest society in human history: Why I Am Stockpiling Insulin in My Fridge. The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.
* Epilepsy patient refuses to leave Vancouver hospital until her health needs are met.
* The keeper of the secret: one man’s devotion to uncovering the details of a single lynching case from the 1920s.
* A majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds.
* They tried to warn us: Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries.
* The Joker trailer legitimately seems like an SNL digital short about trying to make a prestige, Oscar-bait comic book movie. I can’t believe it’s real.
* The Deep Space Nine Anniversary Documentary Is Hitting Theaters for One Day Only.
* Fossil found from the day the dinosaurs died? Seems hard to believe, but wow.
* Click this link if you dare, but remember that some things that are learned cannot be unlearned.
* Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped.
* It’s Rupert Murdoch’s world, we’re just all going to die in it. I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.
* The rent is still too damn high.
* Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won’t Heal. This week in Hell World.
* First photo of a black hole. An informative Twitter thread.
* How Animators Created the Spider-Verse.
* That’s me in the corner. Atheism and democracy.
* How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care.
* A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.
* Depressing, yes, but also sort of comforting.
* Just going to go ahead and green-light this Goodfellas sequel.
* I assume this is already a CBS procedural.
* Putting academic knowledge to real world use: Experts Determine Whether Tyrion And Sansa Are Still Married On ‘Game Of Thrones.’
Phew! Almost to the end now!
* About ten years too late, it’s a start: How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?
* The Avengers: Endgame theory that Ant-Man kills Thanos by expanding inside his butt, explained.
* Miracles and wonders: Unless I’m mistaken this is the first time gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has ever gone to human trials.
* It is amusing the Dungeons and Dragons- a game for small children- has a more accurate model of intelligence than the Quilette people do: it’s a minor bonus to an extremely noisy stochastic process that is easily swamped by situational advantage modifiers.
* Meet Leigh Cordner, Medieval Times’ creative director.
* Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex.
* The unexpected philosophical depths of the clicker game Universal Paperclips.
* Just kidding! There’s no plan for either problem.
* Great news from the elite world of comics podcasting.
* Coming Spring 2026: Fatigue: A Star Wars Story.
* Isn’t it pretty to think so?
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.
Supersized ICFA Weekend Links!
* Hey, ICFAites! I’m posting this too late to hype yesterday’s talk on Black Panther and Wakanda as Nation, but there’s still time to hype my Rogue One roundtable at 8:30 and the Modern Masters of Science Fiction book signing at 12:30…
* One week from today! Buffy at 20!
* I really appreciated The New Inquiry‘s most recent issue on prison abolition, including this piece on home monitoring, this one on deaf inmates, and this one on bureaucratic malice.
* Awesome IndieGoGo success story: Nimuno LEGO tape.
* Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse.
* Teach the controversy: Did the CIA really astrally project to Mars in 1984?
* Neat project I’m coming late to: Young People Read Old SFF.
* “Mr. Thursday.” By Emily St. John Mandel.
* The Gig Economy and Working Yourself to Death.
* What Happens If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan? How to survive a nuclear blast.
* Other genres merely represent everyday life. Science fiction hopes to change it.
* New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being.
* The Existential Hokiness of Rick & Morty.
* Purplish Haze: The Science Fiction Vision of Jimi Hendrix.
* “Comrade, Can You Paint My Horse?” Soviet Kids’ Books Today.
* Being Kim Stanley Robinson. After the Great Dithering.
Julia muppet
Credit: Sesame Workshop
* Sesame Street’s newest puppet is a four-year-old with autism.
* Disabled Americans: Stop Murdering Us.
* “Let’s talk about the weird psychosexual energy in Beauty and the Beast.”
* “Humpback whales are organizing in huge numbers, and no one knows why.”
* Animal rights lawyer says zoos are solitary confinement for animals. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other. The beginning of the end of meat. Scientists are messing around with 3-D printed cheese.
* Great news: Authorities believe they’ve captured the individual responsible for most of the JCC bomb threats. The Slip-Up That Caught the Jewish Center Bomb Caller.
* With a 10-day supply of opioids, 1 in 5 become long-term users. Drugs are killing so many people in Ohio that cold-storage trailers are being used as morgues.
* With Trump Poised to Change the Legal Landscape, the Clock May Be Ticking on Graduate Unions. The shamelessness with which college administrations have courted this outcome is amazing, even by college administration standards.
* How One Family Is Beating the NCAA at Its Own Game.
* Here’s the Important Stuff That Happens in Iron Fist So You Don’t Have to Watch It. Netflix and Marvel’s Iron Fist is an ill-conceived, poorly written disaster. The Iron Fist TV Series Is Marvel and Netflix’s First Big Failure. Five Comments on Iron Fist.
* Paranoia in the Trump White House. Trumpism and academia. Trump’s Cuts. A day in the life of a poor American under Trump’s proposed budget. North Korea. The Incredible Cruelty of Trumpcare. Trumpcare goes down. Democrats Will Filibuster Neil Grouch’s Nomination. What to ask about Russian hacking. New York Attorney General Steps Up Scrutiny of White House. Why they voted Trump. r/Donald. It’s a better time to be doing any kind of leftist politics than it was a decade ago. Well, we’ll see…
* It’s hard in all this mess to pay attention to the little things, but man.
* My fascism will be big, beautiful, and sustainable, or it will be bullshit.
* Overall, Obama’s performance in office looks like most American presidencies since Reagan, not altering all that much at home while pressing ahead with imperial tasks abroad—in effect, a largely conventional stewardship of neo-liberal capitalism and military-diplomatic expansionism. No new direction for either society or empire emerged under him. Obama’s rule was in this sense essentially stand-pat: business as usual. On another plane, however, his tenure was innovative. For he is the first celebrity President—that is, a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that. Catapulted into the White House on colour charisma and economic crisis, and commanding the first congressional supermajority since Carter, Obama in office continued to be an accomplished vote-winner and champion money-raiser. But celebrity is not leadership, and is not transferrable. The personality it projects allows no diffusion. Of its nature, it requires a certain isolation. Obama, relishing his aura and aware of the risks of diluting it, made little attempt to mobilize the populace who cast their ballots for him, and reserved the largesse showered on him by big money for further acclamation at the polls. What mattered was his personal popularity. His party hardly counted, and his policies had little political carry-through.
* What If Students Only Went to School Four Days a Week?
* Body cameras and the nightmare state.
* When corporations colonize academia.
* White, Irish, and undocumented in America.
* Children as young as 3 detained 500 days — and counting — in disgraceful immigrant prisons. Rape Victims Aren’t Seeking Help For Fear Of Deportation, Police Say. Banking on Deportation. There was an Africa trade meeting with no Africans because all their visas got denied.
* Sheriff David Clarke’s jail forced a woman to give birth while in shackles. The newborn died.
* The long now: A Computer-Generated Coliseum that Will Disintegrate for 1,000 Years.
* Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.
* A special issue of Orbit devoted to David Foster Wallace.
* Functional illiteracy in Detroit.
* Why Does Mt. Rushmore Exist?
* Everybody in the NBA is obsessed with PB&J sandwiches.
* Missing Richard Simmons turned out super gross. Don’t listen.
* Congress Moves to Strike Internet Privacy Rules From Obama Era.
* I’ve been really interested in this: A major study finding that voter ID laws hurt minorities isn’t standing up well under scrutiny. A follow-up study suggests voter ID laws may not have a big effect on elections.
* Are we raising racists? Pay attention to what your kids watch on their screens.
* Tomb of Santa uncovered in Siberia.
* Educational attainment in America.
* The Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson Marriage Will Never Ever Return “Up To Infinity” Says Dan Slott.
* Or a tweet. Probably a tweet.
* A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman.
* Trans, Disabled, And Tired Of Fighting To Get Into Bathrooms.
* Appliances used to last decades.
* A year in Eden: Remaining cast of TV show finally leave their remote Highland home.
Now the remaining cast of a TV show have finally left their remote home – to virtual anonymity.
Instead of being crowned reality TV celebrities and fought over by agents, the 10 who made it through the 12 months have learned that only four episodes have been shown – the last seven months ago.
* Mr. Rogers vs. the Ku Klux Klan.
* Andy Daly reviews Review.
* CFP: Chuck Berry in the Anthropocene.
* SNL quick change, Jeff Sessions to mermaid.
* I still believe in a place called Duckburg.
* No.
* Action Lad and the Living Sword!
* And the arc of history is long, but there’s an Attack from Mars pinball machine remake coming later this year.
Weekend Links!
* Are you at AWP? Or in DC generally? Jaimee is! She’ll be doing a book signing at the Waywiser Table at 12:30 Saturday and then reading at the Waywiser reading at 7:30 PM at the Den.
* This is so outrageous. 21 years in the US, arrived at 14, two US citizen children, arrested at a scheduled check-in with ICE. You could hardly find more compelling proof that this is entirely and exclusively about cruelty.
* “Pentagon journal explores what could happen if a president called for Muslim internment camps.” Gee, I wonder.
* Meanwhile, in another classic authoritarian maneuver, the outsized ego at the heart of the Trumpist seizure of power has surrounded himself with an obliging retinue of enablers and quisling yes-men. Trump likes to divide people between “haters and losers”—a cheap shot that is actually a fairly useful way to categorize his own team. It’s Already Happened Here. How to Stop an Autocracy. Profiles in Courage: Rand Paul, Civil Libertarian.
* Every day. Something crazy happens every day.
* The history of this era is going to be so, so unbelievable.
* Neither Nordstrom nor Ivanka but International Socialism.
* It’s getting to the point where you can’t even call for the wanton slaughter of students without some PC SJW raising a stink about it.
* How Political Fear Works. Beware of Self-Censorship. Who Benefits From Trump’s Chaos? What’s in it For The Collaborators? There Are No Good Reasons Not To Fight.
* Obama’s Lost Army: When Obama Killed OFA.
* I liked this: The Meitheal Manifesto: Thirteen Agreements to Save the World.
* Some rare good news on the climate.
* Darkest thing I’ve ever seen, first for one the one reason and then for the other.
* The arc of history is long, but Mac malware is slowly catching up to its Windows rivals.
* Solitary Confinement Is a Great American Shame.
* Remembering Richard Rorty on Trump (and the reformist left) (again).
* No one is reading those reference letters. “Truly, this is the single easiest fix in academic culture.”
* Science education in the time of Trump.
* You can’t argue with facts, little brother.
* Bees aren’t endangered anymore! Surprisingly easy fix actually.
* Everything is hot now and getting hotter. Everything seems off or wrong and it is hard to get your bearings because so few of the old landmarks remain. It is hard to believe that some things ever happened, that certain places ever existed. Sometimes I am convinced my memory is wrong or fooling me. The idea that there might be a United States. The idea that this vast and unruly countryside, these ruined cities, these endless refugee camps, might have once been something else. If no one invades us now and only some countries send food and aid, it is only because they too are under stress. Or because we are so fucked up and so many of us have so many weapons. Somewhere in the lost places, there are still nukes, too. Jeff VanderMeer’s “Trump Land.”
* SF Cities Beyond Blade Runner.
* Graverobbing the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
* Source map from the first great comic book crossover.
* TGIF!
* Oh, this was so brutal to read. There but for the grace of God go I at least for now.
Here are my vitals: I have more than $200,000 in student loans and $46,000 in credit card debt—all accumulated during my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., and then search for a tenure-track job. My annual salary translates to a little more than $3,000 in monthly take-home pay. I pay $800 a month in rent, $1,100 in credit card bills (paying only the monthly minimums), $350 in student loans, and have $285 a month car payment. I also pay the usual insurances, utilities, groceries, gas, et al. I don’t have cable. Or a kitchen table. Or blinds on any of my windows. I’ve cancelled all magazine and newspaper subscriptions—an actual dilemma for a journalism professor. For my first year in Bangor I didn’t even have a bed. Instead I slept on a Target air mattress until it lost its breath; then I moved to the couch (which I had purchased on credit), until my back finally demanded I buy a bed (credit, again).
* And of course you had me at A New Deep Space Nine Documentary Reveals What Would Have Happened in Season Eight. Here’s another good writeup.
Tuesday Links! Just for You
* My review won’t appear in The New Inquiry for a couple weeks, but Liu Cixin’s Death’s End is finally out today. I read it this summer and it’s great. Go get it!
* A local talk I’ll be giving this Saturday afternoon at the Milwaukee Public Library: 150 Years of H.G. Wells in Milwaukee.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee Public Library beat! Milwaukee Public Library to forgive fines for patrons who visit the library.
* CFP: Flannery O’Connor and Popular Culture. CFP: Modern Fiction Studies: The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies. CFP: Essays on the Evil Dead Anthology. CFP: ICFA 2017.
* Star Trek: Discovery Has Been Delayed Until May 2017. I never saw how they’d make January, even before it was nearly October and they didn’t have a cast yet.
* Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever.
* Professor Cottom’s Graduate School Guidance.docx
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* Too Much and Too Little: A History of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
* With outcomes so uneven, it is no wonder that MFAs are the bastard children of English departments.
* Saint Louis University must pay $367,000 in damages to a former professor who alleged she was denied tenure because of her gender. That’s what a Missouri court decided late last week following a trial by jury. The university says it’s “disappointed” in the verdict and is reviewing its options.
* What does it cost to run a department at UCLA for a year? or, who will pay the salary of the English department?
* This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program’s criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament.
* New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity.
* Haitian-American Roxane Gay Becomes First Black Woman Writer for Marvel Comics.
* From 2014: The Future According to Stanisław Lem.
* Parenting and moral panic, 2016.
* If You Change a Baby’s Diaper in Arizona, You Can Now Be Convicted of Child Molestation.
* “Very pessimistic.” The idea that they could actually somehow manage to blow the lead they’d built up over the summer is horrifying.
* It Sure Seems Like Hillary Clinton’s Tech Guy Asked Reddit for Email Advice.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Defendants who can’t afford bail more likely to plead guilty as a way out, studies show.
* Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester. After court threat, state of Michigan removed Flint’s power to sue. WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer). 37 Years in Solitary Confinement and Even the State Can’t Explain Why. Nation’s largest police union endorses Trump. And right here in Milwaukee: An Inmate Died Of Thirst In A Jail Run By A Loudly Pro-Trump Sheriff.
* A Prison Literature Syllabus.
* The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.
* How the failed politics of “humanitarian intervention” were born in 1980s Afghanistan.
* Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.
* Romeo and Juliet in Wisconsin.
* The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult ‘trash.’
* “I await an apology from Chancellor Dirks, and Dean Hesse,” explained Hadweh. “The university threw me under the bus, and publicly blamed me, without ever even contacting me. It seems that because I’m Palestinian studying Palestine, I’m guilty until proven innocent. To defend the course, we had to mobilize an international outcry of scholars and students to stand up for academic freedom. This never should have happened.”
* I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke.
* The Woman Who Is Allergic to Water.
* Feral Cats and Ecological Disaster.
* The name of the character in the excerpt, GBW Ponce, comes actually from the Ponzi scheme, among other things. There’s a Thomas Frank piece that I once read somewhere (I think it was Harper’s), where he said that civilization is basically a gigantic ponzi scheme. With our obsession with data and with predicting the future, it’s as if we were trying to cancel the future and its uncertainties, in order to make the present feel safer. The IMF has projections for the growth of EVERY economy on the planet which stretch to two-three-four and even more years: why let reality run its course when we can model it and predict it, right? So, the idea behind that character was that by “scientifically” predicting every inch of life, it’s as if we borrowed against our unknown future to live the present with fewer uncertainties and anxieties. But that’s precisely what causes more anxiety, this idea of a life that could fit entirely in an Excel spreadsheet.
* Moderator Announces Topics for First Presidential Debate.
* Definitely, definitely, definitely aliens.
* All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. Shame to get all the way through 312 and then swap #1 and #2…
* Elsewhere in the numerical sublime: Every He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figure, ranked.
* Teach the controversy! “Peter Thiel Would Make A Great Supreme Court Justice.”
* The Bonkers Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe.
* Someone Removed The Music From ‘Dancing In The Street’ And I Can’t Stop Laughing.
* Run it like a sandwich: After Texas high school builds $60-million stadium, rival district plans one for nearly $70 million.
* Class size matters a lot, research shows.
* Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?
* Page B13: Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates.
* And never forget that the Monkees are DCU canon.
Monday Night Links!
* I had two short pieces come out this weekend: a review essay on Star Trek: Beyond at LARB and a flash review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child right here at WordPress.
* CFP: Vector Special Issue: Science Fiction and Music. The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
* Point: Earwolf has a new Hamilton podcast, seemingly along the lines of The Incomparable’s but with higher profile guests. Counterpoint: You Should Be Terrified That People Who Enjoy “Hamilton” Run Our Country.
* To Learn About ‘Hamilton’ Ticket Bots, We Wrote Our Own Bot.
* “So Below”: A Comic about Understanding Land.
* Peak Thinkpiece? “Centuries ago, explorers like Columbus and Vasco da Gama played a real-life version of Pokémon Go.” When colonialism is a game. Pokémon Go: Who owns the virtual space around your home? Werner Herzog: Would You Die for the Pokémons? Would You Kill?
* A new genre of leftist literature arose between the wars, urging the young to build a brave new world. In the first of two articles, a forgotten dream is remembered. Here’s part two.
* The Huntington has put up some of Butler’s notes on writing Kindred.
* Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction.
* The Cosby Next Time: Former Fox News Booker Says She Was Sexually Harassed and ‘Psychologically Tortured’ by Roger Ailes for More Than 20 Years.
* Teasing Arrested Development season five, and the long-rumored recut of season four, at TCA.
* The good news is, we’re all going to live. Here’s the bad news.
* 6 Human Activities That Pose The Biggest Threat To The World’s Drinking Water. America Has Never Seen a Hot Weather Outlook Like This. And an upcoming conference at Marquette: Public Policy and American Drinking Water.
* Early Animals Could’ve Caused Earth’s First Mass Extinction Simply By Existing.
* How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure.
* What Are Young Non-Working Men Doing?
* Is Rolling Stone about to get throttled in court over UVA rape report?
* Ableism, Mass Murder, and Silence.
* Race and dermatology. Space and cardiology.
* The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood.
* Zombie bacteria that awaken from old corpses might sound like the stuff of an “X-Files” episode. The premise is far from a complete fiction, however.
* Metaphors too on the nose: rise of the corpse flowers.
* Elsewhere on the zombie beat: The Walking Dead Comic Nearly Ended a Lot Sooner Than Anyone Expected. That’s sort of amazing, honestly.
* Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children.
* J.K. Rowling Says Harry Potter is Done After Cursed Child.
* The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices.
* Trans* identity will be reclassified by the WHO.
* Black Art Matters: A Roundtable on the Black Radical Imagination.
* News you can use: How to land a passenger jet without any flight controls.
* Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. How Prisons Overtook Schools as the Foremost American Institutions. Why Preschool Teachers Struggle To Make Ends Meet.
* This Rick and Morty clip reading from an actual trial transcript shows what how weirdly perfect the two voices work as a comedic duo, independently of any narrative context.
* I say the teach the controversy.
* The Syllabus as a Contract: How do you deal with clever students who find loopholes you didn’t intend?
* College learning takes 2.76 hours/day.
* I grew up thinking journalism was just for rich white people. I was mostly right.
* Ghostbusters and liberal feminism. The Spiritualist Origins of Ghostbusters.
* This time the nostalgia industry is trained on my heart like a laser.
* Self-identified Jedi and political atheism, yes really.
* Automation and the end of liberal democracy.
* They told me capital was a vampire, and man, they nailed it.
* As an artist, what can I consider if I want to de-objectify and add power to female characters?
* Politics roundup! State roll calls: What RNC and DNC delegates want you to know. Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go. Trump’s Likeliest Path to Victory May Be an Electoral College Tie. Bounce! Disability Rights at the DNC. Seven Minutes. The GOP’s Dilemma: How Low Can He Go? Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty? All the same, a pretty incredible chart. From the archives: Norman Mailer Goes to the RNC. How And Why Trump Will Try to Ditch the Debates. Donald Trump as a One Man Constitutional Crisis. An Anti-Trump Electoral Strategy That Isn’t Pro-Clinton. Revenge of the Ghostwriters. A Historic Dud. Obscene Media Spectacle. American Horror Story. Is Donald Trump OK? “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We are the 5%. And we’re still allowed to vote.
* And the kids are all right: Trump, Clinton more disliked by millennials than Voldemort.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Postcoloniality Animality. CFP: Critical Essays on American Horror Story.
* 10 Cities Where Crime Is Soaring. But there’s a solution, and I call it MONORAIL! STREETCAR! Goddamnit Milwaukee.
* Mount St. Mary’s Ableist Plan To Push Out Vulnerable Students. Also from David Perry: Adventures in Universal Design: That Viral Picture of Ramps Set in Stairs.
* During question time at the Salem Rotary, Stone was asked what happened to Sweet Briar. His theory is the old board simply gave up. He had been on accrediting teams that had looked at the school’s finances in the recent past — and never found a hint of trouble. Amazing.
* Magic Money and the Partially Funded Sabbatical.
* Union-busting at Duke: a brief history.
* What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox? A little more analysis of the situation from Adam Kotsko.
* Is ISIS No Longer a Good Place to Work?
* Was Justice Scalia a Good Legal Writer? The Supreme Court After Scalia.
* The last time there has been a vacancy of the length the GOP now proposes was more than 170 years ago. Supreme Court Nominees Considered in Election Years Are Usually Confirmed.
* Hillary Clinton is losing faith in her “Latino firewall” in Nevada. Is Nevada Feeling the Bern? Polls predict a tie.
* The U.S. government wants a backdoor into every iPhone.
* After years in solitary, a woman struggles to carry on.
* The Uncertain Path to Full Professor.
* Undiscovered J R R Tolkien poems found in 1936 school magazine.
* No Man’s Sky: the game where you can explore 18 quintillion planets.
* Exotic Cosmic Locales Available as Space Tourism Posters.
* And finally someone has taken Judge Judy to task.
Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost
* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.
* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.
* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.
* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.
* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.
* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.
* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.
* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.
* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.
* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.
* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.
* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.
* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.
* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.
* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.
* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!
* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.
* Coca-Cola and the denialists.
* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.
* What If Stalin Had Computers?
* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.
* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.
* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.
* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.
* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”
* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.
* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”
* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”
* Understanding Neal Stephenson.
* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.
* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.
* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.
* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.
* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?
* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?
* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.
* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.
* An oral history of Six Feet Under.
* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.
* The new Cold War is a Corn War.
* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.
* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.
* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.
* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.
* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?
* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.
* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.
* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.
* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.
* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!
* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.
* Hell, with same-day delivery.
* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.
* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.
* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.
* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.
In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”
* Science proves the universe is slowly dying
* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.
* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.
* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.
* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”
* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.
* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.
* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.
* Don’t bring your dogs to work.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.
* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.
* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.
* Don’t say it unless you mean it.
* And we shall Truffle Shuffle no more forever.
Wednesday Links!
* Fans aren’t the irrational ones. They know how to seize pleasure from the world and hold tight even as it hurts them. If fandom is simply an obedient response to the signals of the consumer market, it is an obedience which threatens to overrun its master while saying yes.
* Another “I’m a professor” essay.
What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.
* Tenure, Fairness, and Fear(lessness).
But that is not really something that makes professors special. Rather, it is good for people to make their lives less fearsome and their minds less fearful. Those of us who have some of that privilege in our working lives should hold our heads high and try to be allies to others who are working to get their share of it. There’s no shame in having security, only in keeping other people from it.
* In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure,” System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.
* Can the University of Wisconsin Survive Governor Walker?
* Unless you are in highly unusual circumstances, really, do not think of adjuncting as a long-term career.
* What different colleges could do with $400 million.
* In Heated State-Budget Fights, Students Strive to Be Heard.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union: Five Trustees, Including Daniel Libeskind, Abruptly Resign.
* The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.
* But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.
* And then there was Rand, scooping the Democrats again.
* Concerned that kindergarten has become overly academic in recent years, this suburban school district south of Baltimore is introducing a new curriculum in the fall for 5-year-olds. Chief among its features is a most old-fashioned concept: play.
* From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.
* How Utah Became A Bizarre, Blissful Epicenter For Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.
* New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.
* Apple is finally fixing the reason your Mac and iPhone’s Wi-Fi sucks.
* The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.
* Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies.
* music is inefficient beep bop boop
* Why Franklin Richards Is The Most Ridiculous Character In All Of Comics.
* Information wants to be free! With regard to the pornographic material Osama Bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in the operational files. The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA. To the extent that this material exists, the CIA would be prohibited by 18 USC Section 1461 from mailing obscene matter.
* Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.
* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.
Ten Thousand Tuesday Links
* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.
* Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?
* Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.
* Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.
* How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.
* Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.
* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.
* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.
* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.
* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.
* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.
* America is still incredibly segregated.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.
* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!
* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.
* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.
* NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.
* Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation, which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.
* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.
* What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.
* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.
* Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!
* Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.
* The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.
* 100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.
* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.
* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.
* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.
* Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.
* Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.
* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.
* Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.
* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”
* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.
* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.
* Language is like gymnastics.
* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.
Sunday Night Links!
* But trains loaded with millions of gallons of crude oil thread the thickly populated areas of some of the nation’s biggest cities. Including Milwaukee.
* Love Song for a Neoliberal University: StarbucksU.
* Corinthian Colleges Inc. shut down its remaining 28 for-profit career schools, ending classes for about 16,000 students, in the biggest collapse in U.S. higher education.
* I’m not anti-technology, or anti-innovation. And I think traditional colleges are deeply flawed. But I am very, very much against expanding the money-laundering side of our financial aid system. And that is the coal mine into which the ASU-EdX canary is being lowered.
* Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life.
* On the deep grammar of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
* Hell didn’t exist, so we built it: the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
* What It’s Like to Be a Girl in America’s Juvenile Justice System.
* This is the toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the West. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of Western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized. Aside from being repugnant in its own right, this formula, by design, is deeply deceptive as propaganda: It creates the impression among Western populations that we are the victims but not the perpetrators of heinous violence, that terrorism is something done to us but that we never commit ourselves, that “primitive, radical and inhumanely violent” describes the enemy tribe but not our own.
* When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.
* Tom DeLay: People keep forgetting that God ‘wrote the Constitution.’
* Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip? Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company.
* Entire Treasury Department Competing For Same Goldman Sachs Job Opening.
* 23 maps and charts on language.
* Before And After: Earthquake Destroys Kathmandu’s Centuries-Old Landmarks.
* How Well Does ‘Daredevil’ Handle Disability Issues?
* Tetris: The Unauthorized Biography.
* An Abandoned Island in The Middle of NYC.
* Native Hawaiians are fighting off an invasion of astronomers. The Heart of the Hawaiian Peoples’ Arguments Against the Telescope on Mauna Kea.
* And some local interest from the Decolonial Atlas: The Great Lakes in Ojibwe.
Playing Monday Catch-Up Links
* Jaimee finally has a webpage! You can see all her online poems here.
* Announcing the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.
* Reminder: Mullen fellowship applications are due April 1.
* Relativism: The spontaneous ideology of the undergraduate.
* The trolley and the psychopath.
* Tired of the same old dystopias? Randomized Dystopia suggests a right that your fictional tyranny could deny its citizens!
* What if we educated and designed for resistance, through iterative performance and play?
* A good start: The University of Phoenix has lost half its students in the last five years.
* I began pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2006. My incoming cohort had nine students–seven in English Language and Literature, two in English and Women’s Studies. When we entered the program, all of us aspired to the tenure-track. The last of us just defended her dissertation this January, making ours the first cohort in several years with a 100% completion rate. Nine years out, only one of us has a tenure track professorship.
* #altac: Northeastern University seeks an intellectually nimble, entrepreneurial, explode-the-boundaries thinker to join the Office of the President as Special Assistant for Presidential Strategy & Initiatives. This job ad truly is a transcendent parody of our age, down to the shameless sucking up to the president of the university that constitutes 2/3 of the text.
* Budget cuts kill The Dictionary of American Regional English.
* The Long, Ugly History of Racism at American Universities.
* I Saw My Admissions Files Before Yale Destroyed Them.
* Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper.
* The Unmanageable University.
* What NYU Pays Its Top Earners, And What Most Of Your Professors Make.
* “There is no point in having that chat as long as the system is mismanaged,” said Steven Cohen, president of the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges, which represents most faculty. Cohen pointed to central office costs that are rising as faculty numbers decline.
* The war against humanities at Britain’s universities.
* On NYU and the future of graduate student unionism.
* I teach philosophy at Columbia. But some of my best students are inmates.
* Why Is So Much of Our Discussion of Higher Ed Driven by Elite Institutions?
* It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt.
* Following up on the future of rhetoric and composition. I also liked this one from Freddie: “It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates.”
* There is certainly an important and urgent conversation to be had about academic freedom and whether that is being constrained by trigger warnings and the like, but the discourse of students’ self-infantilization misdirects us from the larger picture. That, I think, is definitely not a story of student-initiated “cocooning,” but rather the transformation of the category of “student” into “consumer” and “future donor.”
* How Sweet Briar’s Board Decided to Close the College. But don’t worry, there’s a plan: Faculty Propose Sweet Briar Shift Focus to STEM.
* Law School Dean Average Tenure Is 2.78 Years, An All-Time Low.
* #disrupt morality: “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”
* 3 Cops Caught On Tape Brutally Beating Unarmed Michigan Man With No Apparent Provocation. Private Prison Operator Set To Rake In $17 Million With New 400-Bed Detention Center. Teen Was Kept In Solitary Confinement For 143 Days Before Even Facing Trial. Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison.
* What are your chances of going to prison?
* Dollars, Death and the LAPD.
The officers sued the LAPD for discrimination for keeping them in desk jobs. Last week a jury awarded them $4 million. In other words, the refusal to let them go back to the streets to shoot more people is, in the eyes of our court system, worth more than four times as much as the life of an innocent man. Much more than that when you consider that they drew and continue to draw near six figure salaries for sitting at a desk.
* The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison.
* UN erects memorial to victims of transatlantic slave trade.
* World’s most honest headline watch: Wall Street welcomes expected Chuck Schumer promotion.
* Antarctica Recorded Hotter Temperatures Than They’ve Ever Seen This Week.
* Framing China as an environmental villain only serves to excuse American inaction.
* Even with California deep in drought, the federal agency hasn’t assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustain sensitive habitats in the national forest. The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.
* Too Bad, That Rumor About A New Star Trek TV Show Is Absolutely False. But it’s not all bad news: they may have tricked Idris Elba into playing a Klingon.
* The True Story of Pretty Woman’s Original Dark Ending.
* The Deadly Global War for Sand.
* SMBC vs. the Rebus. And vs. modernity.
* I Started Milwaukee’s Epic Bloody Mary Garnish Wars.
* Photographer Johan Bävman documents the world of dads and their babies in a country where fathers are encouraged to take a generous amount of paternity leave.
* Dean Smith Willed $200 to Each of His Former Players to ‘Enjoy a Dinner Out.’ You’ll never believe what happened next. But!
* Teaching human evolution at the University of Kentucky.
* We Should Be Able To Detect Spaceships Moving Near The Speed Of Light.
* Snowpiercer forever: Russia unveils plan for superhighway from London to Alaska.
* Kapow! Attack of the feminist superheroes.
* The future is now: Miles Morales and Kamala Khan join the female Thor and Captain “The Falcon” America as Avengers post-Secret Wars.
* Things Marvel Needs to Think About for the Black Panther Movie.
* Marxists Internet Archive: Subjects: Arts: Literature: Children’s Literature.
* Ruins found in remote Argentinian jungle ‘may be secret Nazi hideout.’
* 15 Secrets Hiding in the World of Game of Thrones.
* Listen to part of Carlin’s Summerfest 1972 show — before he got arrested.
* This 19th Century ‘Stench Map’ Shows How Smells Reshaped New York City.
* The ethics of playing to lose.
* And make mine del Toro:
You say horror is inherently political. How so?
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
Gerry Canavan 
Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise
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* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR’s The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I’ve put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!
* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.
* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.
* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and “ratings agencies could downgrade the university’s credit by as many as two notches.” In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators’ overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.
* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.
* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.
* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city’s schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.
* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.
* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
* …disaster relief and the “disaster narrative” is central to the development of the American welfare state.
* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.
I don’t know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it’s an idea I’ll be thinking about a while. There’s a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can “withdraw” consent.
* “Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others.” The Case for Staying Home from Work.
* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.
* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:
* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.
* The case against the Supreme Court.
* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.
* Corey Robin on the emerging “right to be forgotten.”
* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.
* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can’t-believe-they-haven’t-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.
* That’s they’re actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.
* Provocation: It’s not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.
* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.
* SMBC on proof by induction.
* The only link from this list you really need: There’s A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.
* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont’s own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 27, 2014 at 10:25 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, America, austerity, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, comics, consent, continuity, course evaluations, democracy, disaster capitalism, Don't mention the war, Ello, Fanon, film, financial aid, gentrification, Google, governmentality, grad student life, graduate school, How the University Works, humanitarianism of a particular sort, Iraq, ISIS, Jack Kirby, Kim Stanley Robinson, legalism, liberalism, logic, Marvel, metacommentary, military interventionism, Milwaukee, misogyny, mousetrap, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, presenteeism, proof by induction, public health, race, rape, rape culture, Red Mars, rule of law, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, Silicon Valley, social media, solitary confinement, Star Trek, superheroes, Supreme Court, Syria, television, the courts, the end of culture, The Expendabelles, the law, The Lucky Strike, the mental fog of proceduralism, the right to be forgotten, torture, true crime, tuition, University of Chicago, Vermont, war on education, welfare state, Y: The Last Man