First Day of School Links!

* Some late but very nice press for my Octavia Butler book: I was on an episode of the nationally syndicated radio show Viewpoints Radio this week, and the book had a lovely review in LARB!

* CFP: Artificial Life: Debating Medical Modernity (April 19-21, UC Riverside).

* $75 million dollars to philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

* And on the pedestal these words appear.

* 12 People Face Misdemeanor Charges for Giving Food to The Homeless in El Cajon.

* A girl-power moment for Medieval Times, where a woman has the lead for the first time. I have wanted to take my kids to Medieval Times ever since listening to the Doughboys episode about it a few months ago.

* Like the story about the sexual assaults of the US gymnastics team, there is something about Eliza Dushku’s story of being abused as a child by adults who were trusted with her care that is just so heartbreaking.

* Meanwhile, McKayla Maroney is facing a $100,000 for violating her NDA with USA Gymnastics.

* A list of the teen-sex movies that I grew up on in the late 1970s/ 1980s. Keep in mind: Every one of these was considered a *comedy.*

* ‘Every day I am crushed’: the stateless man held without trial by Australia for eight years.

* ICE Keeps Raiding Hospitals and Mistreating Disabled Children. Feds planning massive Northern California immigration sweep to strike against sanctuary laws. DHS and DOJ Want to Arrest Mayors of Sanctuary Cities.

The deepest problem, as I see it, is the underlying assumption that things like the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution are the things that stop tyranny and authoritarianism in this country.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 15, 2018

Tyrannies in America—especially the most durable and dangerous—are built on the rule of law, the courts, and on constitutionalism.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 15, 2018

* How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’ and caused a wave of panic. America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era. These are fascinating but I still have every confidence that the explanation we have been given for this event is bullshit and that the truth will come out in a decade or so. Pandemonium and Rage in Hawaii.

* “Wisconsin school apologizes for slavery homework assignment.”

* Foxconn boondoggle nearing $4.5 billion.

* “Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn. It has haunted her ever since.”

* Activists charged with Confederate statue toppling no longer face felonies.

* Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland.

* The True History of Luke Skywalker’s Monastic Retreat.

* Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea.

* How the Female Stars of The Breakfast ClubFought to Remove a Sexist Scene, and Won.

* Tired of winning. So tired.

oh, like obama didn't cheat on his pregnant 3rd wife w/a porn star, grab numerous women by the pussy, call actual nazis “very fine people,” lie over 2700 times in his first year in office, pass a tax bill to massively enrich himself, endorse a pedophile for the United States Sena

— Ben Wexler (@mrbenwexler) January 16, 2018

* And of course you had me at “Gorgeous Images of the Planet Jupiter.”

Wednesday Links!

(…though Tuesday’s links are still perfectly good…)

* I’m really excited to see that the Jameson talk on the army as a figure for utopia I talked about at the end of my Battle: Los Angeles essay is becoming a book (with some collected responses).

* One of my favorite Ted Chiang stories, “Understand” has been adapted as a radio drama at the BBC. Go listen!

* If you’re local, don’t forget! Mad Max: Fury Road discussion on campus today at 5 PM!

* We Don’t Need to Reform America’s Criminal Justice System, We Need to Tear It Down.

* Superheroes in a Time of Terror: Rushdie’s 1001 Nights.

* Language and the Postapocalyptic World.

* Doctors Without Borders airstrike: US alters story for fourth time in four days.

* The FBI’s probe into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail has expanded to include a second private technology company, which said Tuesday it plans to provide the law enforcement agency with data it preserved from Clinton’s account.

* Against Joe Biden.

* Two great tastes: For decades, researchers have debated whether a major asteroid strike or enormous volcanic eruptions led to the demise of dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago. According to a new study, the answer might be somewhere in between: The asteroid impact accelerated the eruptions of volcanoes, and together, these catastrophes led to the mass extinction.

* The Vancouver public-speaking and drama instructor sees his reasons for assigning Alcor US$80,000 of life insurance benefits to have his brain cryopreserved as strictly pragmatic.

* Kristof said that more preschoolers are shot dead each year than are on-duty police officers. For children aged 0-4, that is accurate for the past six years. For children aged 3-5, the statement is true in most years, but not in every year. We rate the claim Mostly True.

* Twenty-first century problems: Can Crowdfunding Save This Town from White Supremacy?

* Yale Just Released 170,000 Incredible Photos of Depression-Era America.

* Free college, pro and con.

* Stay classy, Milwaukee.

* Texas’s war on birthright babies.

* A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Board that looks at what role credit scores play in committed relationships suggests that daters might want to start using the metric as well. The researchers found that credit scores — or whatever personal qualities credit scores might represent — actually play a pretty big role in whether people form and stay in committed relationships. People with higher credit scores are more likely to form committed relationships and marriages and then stay in them. In addition, how well matched the couple’s credit scores are initially is a good predictor of whether they stay together in the long term.

* This might be even worse than the drill bits: Greenfield Police Using Pink Handcuffs, Wearing New Pins For Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

* Get a head start on next week: “It’s time to abolish Columbus Day.”

* And at this point I have no idea what sort of milk I should be drinking. Thanks, Obama.

Weekend Links

* Because you demanded it! The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is now available in Kindle format as well for just $9.99.

* SFRA CFP: “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” June 25-27 at Stony Brook.

* Mark Bould on African Science Fiction 101.

* The Moral Hazard of Big Data.

* Racism, monuments, and historical memory.

* The Anthropocene Project. An Encyclopedia (2014–).

* The Crusades: Teach the controversy!

* Friendship Is Complicated: Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony.

* “In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names.”

* Now, a union that’s been rapidly organizing adjuncts around the country thinks that number should quintuple. Last night, on a conference call with organizers across the country, the SEIU decided to extend the franchise with a similar aspirational benchmark: A “new minimum compensation standard” of $15,000. Per course. Including benefits. To put this in perspective, a tenure-track professor earning $50,000 on a 4/4 (100% teaching, no research, no service) is paid $6250 a course — so this is definitely a realistic target.

* 12 Tech Fads in Higher Ed.

* Auburn Approves $14-Million Scoreboard, College Football’s Largest.

* Scott Walker thinks my university has fat to trim. Yet my department is barely scraping by.

* Scott Walker amends the Girl Scout Oath. From otherscottwalkeredits.tumblr.com.

* The disjuncture then comes when I consider how we are encouraged to carry ourselves in the academy. I feel a lot of pressure to professionalize, and the prescriptions for professionalization often run counter to my way of being in the world. I also struggle with the directive that I am supposed to professionalize my students. I don’t hold with the idea that I should train students to be better workers, because the content of “better” — more obedient, more efficient, whatever — runs counter to what I want to teach. In my feminist theories courses, I say, “Yeah, I  just gave you assignments with deadlines! But I also want to say to you, what’s so great about work? Why do we believe work is supposed to be edifying? Should we always have to be productive? Why do we imagine work as something that gives us dignity? What if it’s just wearing us down?” My history in punk totally informs these attempts to practice other ways of being in a classroom, and other ways of being a professor.

* Jury Awards $400,000 to Professor Laid Off by Clark Atlanta U. This is an amazing result especially considering that there are 53 other people eligible for a payout.

* Thousands Of Dominicans Woke Up This Week Without Citizenship In Any Country.

* How Science Fiction Will Help Us Go to Mars.

* Paging J. Walter Weatherman: Family arrested in fake kidnapping plot to teach 6-year-old stranger danger, police say.

* And here is where we see the true malignant force that drives the Internet: It is the purest mechanism yet through which everyone can express every idiot opinion they have about everything to everyone else.

* Ableism, neurotypicality, and the vaccine debate.

* Mississippi, #1 in vaccination. The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works.

* Rufus King named one of the most challenging high schools in America.

* We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That’s a Very, Very Bad Idea. I say teach the controversy!

* Dibs on the screenplay: Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism.

* Science is magic: Engineers Developing a Retainer That Could Let the Hearing Impaired Experience Sound With Their Tongue.

* Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results.

* The Beginning of Mein Kampf, as Told by Coca-Cola. Alas, nothing gold can stay.

* Why every member of the crew should have been courtmartialed after Generations.

* Parents who raise their kids without religion are doing just fine, studies say, possibly even better. Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly. And their kids care less about what’s cool, which—say it with me—only makes them cooler.

* Teen mom sends breast milk to baby she gave up for adoption. Dad Refuses to Give Up Newborn Son With Down Syndrome. Armenia, we need to talk.

* How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being A Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement.

* DC Comics will rebrand, again. More details.

* Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America. I’ve seen a lot of celebration of this fact that seems not to see the improving economy as a factor.

* Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews: This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender.

* Canada’s Highest Court Affirms The Right To Doctor-Assisted Suicide.

* We Are Watching Brian Williams’ Entire Career Implode.

* And it’s a little unbelievable that it’s taken this long: Netflix reportedly developing new live-action series based on Legend of Zelda.