Posts Tagged ‘Star Trek Picard’
Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!
- ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”
- 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
- Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
- Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
- “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
- This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.
- It’s still Christmas somewhere.
- Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
- The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
- A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
- China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
- Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
- Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
- Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
- The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
- Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
- Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.
- Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
- Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
- A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
- El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
- The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
- Effective altruism takes an L.
- It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
- An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
- to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
- Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
- Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
- Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
- The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
- America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
- They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
- Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
- If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
- Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.
- Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
- Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
- Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
- Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
- The Dark History of Hysteria.
- Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
- We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
- The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
- Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
- Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
- With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
- If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?
- The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
- So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
- I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
- LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
- Testing LEGO Investments.
- Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
- Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
- Film History According to Tarantino.
- The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
- Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
- It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
- I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
- A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
- Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
- A Century of Serious Difficulty.
- Is It Art?
- So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
- MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
- I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
- Fitting.
- And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!
It’s Been a Minute: Links!
- There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
- I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
- Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
- Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.
- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.
- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
* And even in the time of coronavirus, progress marches on.
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.
It’s Monday Everywhere But In Your Heart Links
* Very regrettably, SFRA 2020 has been cancelled. The 2020 Science Fictions, Popular Cultures conference at HawaiiCon might be our next chance…
* The Best Solo Board Games, or Welcome to the Gloomhaven Century. And while we’re on the subject: the Frosthaven kickstarter starts this week!
* I’ve been debating about whether to ‘go public’ on having coronavirus – which I kind of did inadvertently this morning. So, now I may as well share my experience(s) with you in order to help those who are worried about it or who are thinking they might have it. Here goes…
* ‘Since I Became Symptomatic.’
* Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. With Coronavirus Disrupting College, Should Every Student Pass? Marquette goes pass/fail (if you want it). Forced off campus by coronavirus, students aren’t won over by online education. Coronavirus threatens the UW system. If the Coronavirus Collapses State Budgets, What Will Happen to Public Colleges? Will Coronavirus Close Your College for Good? Liberty University once again finds a way to do the worst possible thing. It will only get weirder. After Coronavirus, the Deluge. And I’ll look down and whisper… no.
* How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask. Pandemics Show How the Free Market Fails Us. The Lockdown Is an Opportunity to Redefine What Our Economy Is For. Coronavirus May Add Billions to the Nation’s Health Care Bill. Canada’s Coronavirus Response Shows Why We Need Medicare for All to Fight This Pandemic. ‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide. Rural Towns Insulated From Coronavirus Now May Take A Harder Hit Later. This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It. Workers Are More Valuable Than CEOs.
* The Curve Is Not Flat Enough. Illinois reports death of infant with coronavirus. Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. Doctors And Nurses Say More People Are Dying Of COVID-19 In The US Than We Know. Zoochosis. Who’s to blame. Some U.S. Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse Than Wuhan’s. The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases. 13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital. Inside a Brooklyn Hospital Right Now. How the Pandemic Will End. A 9/11 Every Day for a Month.
* The World Needs Masks. China Makes Them — But Has Been Hoarding Them.
* Having cancelled the Olympics, Japan discovers that it too is awash in coronavirus.
* Study ‘Clearly Shows’ Putin Did an Amazing Job Secretly Brewing Up the Novel Coronavirus.
* More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection. Blood from people who recover from coronavirus could provide a treatment.
* EPA suspends enforcement of environmental laws amid coronavirus.
* A record 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits as the coronavirus slams economy. Record-breaking unemployment claims may be vast undercount. Coronavirus unemployment benefits. Here’s who qualifies and how much they get. How do 3 million newly unemployed people get health care? Why Is America Choosing Mass Unemployment? Coronavirus Shock Is Destroying Americans’ Retirement Dreams. MLMs are using the coronavirus to recruit new sellers. Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure. Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country amid the coronavirus crisis. Trump Wants to ‘Reopen America.’ Here’s What Happens if We Do. Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform.
* Now that’s what I call setting expectations. The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV. Inside Joe Biden’s bizarre coronavirus bunker. He’s gonna lose, folks. The amazing thing. The tough choice. Andrew Cuomo’s Coronavirus Response Doesn’t Mean He’s Crush-Worthy. Report: Fox News is worried about legal action after misleading viewers about coronavirus.
* That time Hemingway was quarantined with his sick kid, his wife, and his mistress. Animal Crossing and social distancing. Abbey Road restored to original glory while everybody and their cameras are stuck indoors.
* Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance.
* Once is misfortune; twice looks like carelessness.
* A story of the twentieth century.
* This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.
…
We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.
* A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has ignited a firestorm of controversy.
* #actually there’s at least one more copy of Data’s engrams still in B4 so this is definitely not over. Elsewhere on the Picard beat: Star Trek: Picard is the dark reboot that boldly goes where nobody wanted it to. Star Trek: Picard, Fancy Sheets, and the Meaning of Home.
* These Researchers Want You to Live In a Fungus Megastructure.
* Rick and Morty Just Released a Short Samurai Film and It’s Awesome.
* The Dispossessed, Part II: May You Get Reborn on Anarres!
* The only good Twitter account is this Third Amendment memes one.
* Polarized Near-Infrared view of Saturn, processed using Cassini data taken in November 2012. NASA Data Shows Something Leaking Out of Uranus.
My My My My Corona
* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.
* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.
* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?
* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.
* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.
* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.
* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.
* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.
* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.
* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.
* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.
* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.
* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.
* Probably the single biggest problem I have.
Let’s see what else is in the news.
* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.
* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.
* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.
* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.
* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.
* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.
* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.
* The circle of academic life.
* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.
* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.
* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.
* Tough week for Alex Jones.
* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Gerry Canavan 