Posts Tagged ‘Superman’
Don’t Fall Behind, Spring Ahead with These Sunday Morning Links
* The R.D. Mullen Fellowship is calling for applications. The deadline this year is April 2, 2018.
* Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector.
* For Your Consideration: African Speculative Fiction Society Nommos 2018.
* I had a few bad parents during my time in One Hour, One Life but only one of them outright abandoned me. Most of them, even if they could barely care for themselves, tried to keep me alive. “We’re going to die,” one mother told me when I spawned into the game with her in the middle of a barren wilderness. We did, but she carried me with her every step of the way through our brief lives. ‘One Hour, One Life’: This Game Broke My Heart and Restored My Faith in Humanity.
* We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake.
* Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future.
* Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they’re not actually left-wing places at all.
* Fewer foreign students exacerbate financial challenges for some U.S. universities.
* What passes for intellectualism on the right.
* Unpaid internships are back.
* All The Movies I Didn’t See.
My guess is, having elected, much to their surprise, a lunatic as the most powerful man on the planet, a man who boasts of ‘his’ nukes being bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, a man who could actually be crazy enough to unleash a nuclear warhead on millions, the Americans are sorely missing a time when the white man did something right.
* A slow, cerebral, Miracleman depiction of Barry Allen losing all touch with his humanity Dr.-Manhattan-style seems like the only way for The Flash to proceed from here.
* Black Panther crosses $1 billion.
* “President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.”
* Echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today’s immigration debate.
* We’ll Never See This Politically Themed Black-ish Episode Because of ‘Creative Differences.’
* How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps.
* This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town.
* YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.
* Super Mario as it was meant to be experienced.
* The Singularity in theory and practice.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* I Felt Despair About Climate Change—Until a Brush With Death Changed My Mind. “Leukemia and climate change have more in common than you might think.”
* Remembering The Hobbit: The Text Adventure.
* And a much-too-long-delayed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The oceans are warming. It’s altering turtle reproduction so that the vast majority of offspring are female. It was mistake to drop acid with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Pure evil. I’ll do anything for a good grade. Dear science. Dr. Bees. On sequels. I have this nightmare where a giant monster chases me. I’m going to give you a pill that’ll double your intelligence. Welcome to robot heaven. Penguin have a much happier version of the Titanic story. Finegan’s Wake. You are watching The Nihilist Channel. Where do you think all these fossils come from? Get me a scientist! Purposelessness is the only real super villain. Daddy, can I ask you something? The fundamental kid utility function. And my whole life has been one string of failures. Please send help.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”
* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
Sunday Links!
* CFP: Economics and SF.
* DACA at Marquette. Editorial: Marquette must support diversity by declaring sanctuary campus.
* Marquette to create new race and ethnics studies program.
* Pillars of Academia: The colleges that produce the most altruistic students, by state.
* On Dec. 20, 2011, Stockley attempted to stop Smith after a suspected drug transaction. When Smith did not stop, a high-speed chase began. The then-officer shot at Smith’s car during the chase, apparently screaming, “I’m going to kill this motherfucker, don’t you know it!”
* The Case against Civilization.
* How do you feed a zoo during a disaster?
* The NASA Team That Kills Spacecraft.
* I watched my patients die of poverty for 40 years. It’s time for single-payer.
* Today, almost every piece of software comes with a disclaimer on its user license that basically says that the product may not work as intended and that its maker may stop supporting it at any time, and that’s the user’s problem. It’s a wonder companies don’t insert “nyah nyah nyah nyah” into the tiny-print legalese. Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability.
* Also works as the control structure for academia: the game.
* A Deep Dive Into BoJack Horseman’s Heartbreaking Dementia Episode.
* More opioid prescriptions than people in some California counties.
* “Every morning at about 5 o’clock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE.” Widow of victim in suspected Kansas hate crime faced deportation after husband’s death. U.S. Army kills contracts for hundreds of immigrant recruits. Some face deportation. White House Weighs Lowering Refugee Quota to Below 50,000.
* On Clinton’s book, just one.
* College admins behaving badly.
* But Harvard takes the prize, twice over.
* Berekely a close second. Kudos to the Daily Californian for working out that this is likely all a scam. Failure to confirm.
* Bosses behaving badly all over.
* Trump Inc: Inside the president’s not-so-blind trust.
* No matter how he leaves the White House, we’ll never be rid of Trump—and all that he represents about America. #AlwaysTrump.
* Flying Coach Is So Cramped It Could Be a Death Trap.
* Teachers in U.S. paid nearly 60 percent less than other professionals, report finds.
* It Cinematic Universe Correct Viewing Order.
* Suicides peak in middle age. So why do we call it a young person’s tragedy?
* Former Sheriff David Clarke must revise thesis or risk losing degree, docs reveal.
* No Apology, No Explanation: Fox News And The Seth Rich Story.
* Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters.’ Twitter Says It Fixed Feature ‘Bug’ That Let Marketers Target People Who Use the N-Word.
* The Best Look at the Future of the Star Trek Universe Comes From a Video Game. Meanwhile, not a great sign: CBS Won’t Allow Any Reviews of Star Trek: Discovery Before It Airs.
* Actually a pretty fun issue, even if this approach to R2-D2 has always pissed me off.
* Return of the J.J. And yet another delay.
* Jor-El is bad (again) (apparently).
* Another EVE Online scam for your rubbernecking pleasure.
* The great nutrient collapse.
* Big Oil Will Have to Pay Up, Like Big Tobacco.
* Background Checks for Voting? But their emails.
* Solving the mystery of the internet’s most beloved — and notorious — fanfic.
* Sign language interpreter used gibberish, warned of bears, monsters during Hurricane Irma update.
* Happy anniversary to the most important Twitter exchange of all time.
* Watchmen spinoffs really getting out of hand now.
* And Nintendo decides maybe it wants that license to print money after all.
Grim Procrastination Wednesday Links!
* Nuclear war: It’s not all good news! “The White House, including the national-security team, was unaware President Trump was preparing to speak publicly about North Korea when he did so Tuesday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.” And from way back in January: Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
* Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm.
* When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism: The pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic—and an entire industry.
* FBI conducted predawn raid of former Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s home.
* California Crops Rot as Immigration Crackdown Creates Farmworker Shortage. Justice Dept. Backs Ohio’s Effort to Purge Infrequent Voters From Rolls. The looming debt ceiling fight, explained.
* You’re not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth.
* Frozen on Broadway! Springsteen on Broadway!
* Wisconsin taxpayers would need until 2043 to recoup nearly $3 billion in Foxconn payments. Foxconn has a long history of lying about its plans to open plants and create jobs.
* They say our best years are behind us, but ‘Driverless’ Van in Virginia Is Driven by Man Dressed Like a Car Seat.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Somehow this one dropped out of the link post yesterday, but you know it hits all my buttons: Senate Parliamentarian Challenges Key Provisions of Health Bill.
* itshappening.gif. Democrats should be prepared to litigate pardons on every level, in advance. This is good too: Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes. We’re on the Brink of an Authoritarian Crisis. The Crisis Is Upon Us.
* Five poll numbers that should make Democrats uneasy. The fire next time. Signs of sanity from Chuck Schumer of all people, who’s been saying such things lately. 6 Months in, Is Trump’s America Living Up to Liberals’ Worst Fears? If Clinton Had Won.
* Connecticut mother facing deportation seeks sanctuary in local church.
* My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer.
* The Millennials Are the American Earthquake.
* The year is 2525. All life on Earth is extinct. Jared Kushner has just submitted a final corrected SF-86.
* Presenting Anthony Scaramucci’s deleted tweets. Inside Hunt & Fish, where beauties trawl for sugar daddies. One last time. And of course.
* Why does DC Comics hate Superman? It’s bizarre.
* Game of Thrones’s Medieval Crap.
* Rhapsody for the Anthropocene.
* The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel. Against Academic Conferences. I’m a long-married introvert who doesn’t drink, so if they outlawed conferences I’d probably come out pretty far ahead of the game — but I will say that #notallconferences are like what Matthew describes here: when I give a talk at the specialist conferences I usually go to there’s usually at least 20-30 people in the audience at each panel. (Maybe not at the early morning slot, but…) If panels are being that poorly attended as a rule, it’s likely a problem with the organization of the conference itself. I know my career has benefited a lot from finding out early which conferences were the right ones for me to be attending, and all of the opportunities that have made my career what it is came out of them. So it’s tough for me to say they’re not worth doing.
* I Studied the Humanities, and Now…
* Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay?
* Mapped: the United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.
* Cool world history visualization project at chronas.org.
* Adam Roberts previews what everyone says is the best European SF no one in America has ever heard of, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
* Die old and leave an incredible story.
* From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
* 29 minutes from New York to DC is a thing that is never going to happen.
* Chipotle Suffers Another Setback As Rats Fall From Restaurant Ceiling. Still, when you’re in the mood, Chipotle can really hit the spot.
* 7 Black Alt-History Projects That Would Be Better Than Confederate.
* 21 Today: The Rise of Speculative Fiction in Africa, year by year.
* Comic-Con seemed fun this year: Star Trek! Westworld! Stranger Things! Thor! Infinity War! Ready Player One! Ted Chiang! Flashpoint? Even Justice League looks reasonably competent. This seems… important for the sequel? And the dream of the 90s is alive in Captain Marvel.
* Lean in.
Memorial Day Links!
* This weekend I got a chance to read an advance copy of Iain M. Banks, from the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series. It’s great! Highly recommended for fans of the Culture or of space opera more generally. Alfred Bester, which I also read this weekend, was great too!
* Anyway, who’s ready to be a walking blood-bag for an immortal tech lich?
* What Will Kill Neoliberalism? My money is on the managerial class one but with cash-for-sterilization and euthanasia payouts for the poors.
* 50 años de Cien años de soledad.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* In the United States, the Trump Organization took Mr. Davies’s coat of arms for its own, making one small adjustment — replacing the word “Integritas,” Latin for integrity, with “Trump.”
* What Mr. Trump got was a pair of lawsuits: one filed by Ms. Nwanguma and the other by one of Candidate Trump’s most fervent young admirers among the white nationalist movement, Mr. Heimbach.
* This country is officially a global laughing stock. Or worse.
* That third bill, the “Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver in Honor of State and Local Law Enforcement Act,” which appeared in a tweeted photo of White House strategist Steve Bannon’s policy agenda, would see immigration violations traditionally treated as civil infractions transformed into criminal violations, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Speaking before judiciary committee members Thursday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the provision would “turn millions of Americans into criminals overnight.” Nadler added that the legislation was “straight out of the Donald Trump mass deportation playbook.”
* I’m Cory Booker, for #TheResistance.
* How low do you have to sink to lose an election in this country? Republicans have been trying to answer that question for years. But they’ve been unable to find out, because Democrats somehow keep failing to beat them.
* Sheriff’s Clarke Definitely Real Medals. Washington Post breaks down Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s pins, to Clarke’s ire.
* “Solar power delivers cheapest unsubsidised electricity ever, anywhere, by any technology.”
* The night before the University of California Board of Regents voted to raise student tuition to help cash-strapped campuses, they threw themselves a party at the luxury Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and billed the university. The tab for the Jan. 25 banquet: $17,600 for 65 people, or $270 a head.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Three trillion and counting.
* “11 Years Old, a Mom, and Pushed to Marry Her Rapist in Florida.”
* Threads thinking about slavery, history, and ethical reasoning from @zunguzungu and @BigMeanInternet.
* It looks like Trump somehow managed to ruin even Fargo.
* Science fiction, the future that failed. I would buy this self-help book. The law, in its majestic equality. When you’re sad. Social media is ruining everything. White people, no! Shades of Satan!
* *This* is how you issue a heartfelt and meaningful apology.
* And Nintendo says I may, someday, have a Switch.
Thursday Links!
* Deadline extended: Special Issue: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Narrative, Characters, Media, and Event.
* CFP: Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction.
* After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.
* The banality of evil in Baltimore.
* “Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles.” Every revelation in this story is stunning. Trump leans on ‘fake news’ line to combat reports of West Wing dysfunction. Donald Trump says all negative polls about him are fake news. Check out this fake news about voter fraud. Yemen Withdraws Permission for U.S. Antiterror Ground Missions. Milwaukee passes resolution opposing Trump travel ban. White House rattled by McCarthy’s spoof of Spicer. White House Denies Report That Bannon Had to Be Reminded He Wasn’t President Amidst Travel-Ban Chaos. Probably best to put this in writing ahead of time. The simple fact is that Trump has never had real friends in the sense you or I think of the term. Never Believe the Republicans’ B.S. Ever Again. How Each Senator Voted on Trump’s Cabinet and Administration Nominees. Five Theses on Trump. To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007.
* Elsewhere in Duke News! Bernie and the Duke Grad Student Unionization Movement.
* Apparently those who support income redistribution through aggressive top marginal taxation are still willing to accept union busting and poor parent shaming before considering direct infusions of cash. No matter how lofty their rhetoric, there is an intuitive desire within mainstream American liberalism to believe that the trouble in education is not so obvious as poor people not having enough money to do well—but rather, that poor parents are to blame for not being enough like middle class ones. DeVos Was Inevitable. Democrats reject her, but they helped pave the road to education nominee DeVos.
* The 10 US colleges that stand to lose the most from Trump’s immigration ban. American Universities Must Take a Stand.
* The Nervous Civil Servant’s Guide to Defying an Illegal Order.
* Meet Antifa, the Most Reasonable People in America.
* The Wisdom of Science Fiction in the Age of Trump.
* “All the pieces of the neo-Nazi solution to climate change already exist.”
* Dakota Access Pipeline Is Back On, Skipping Environmental Review.
* The New Yorker celebrates the great Mo Willems.
* Much has been written about the toxicity of internet “call out” culture over the past five years. But less has been said about the prevalence of efforts to fire people, one of that culture’s creepiest and most authoritarian features.
* Doctor Strange Has Now Made More Money At Box Office Than Man Of Steel. DC is really bad at this.
* Liberalism looks and feels like a waiting period that may never end. A primary purpose of this tactic is to allow policymakers and elites to announce their intention to do something about a problem while hoping the problem goes away on its own as public attention dies down or as they move on with their careers.
* We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change.
* Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network—to be called “Elevate”—of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes—for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. Theoretically.
* The Singularity has already happened.
* 150 Years to Alpha Centauri. But it’s no place to raise your kids.
* Make stamp-collecting great again.
* Teaching is not longer a middle class job. College professor isn’t either, pretty much anywhere but a town like Milwaukee.
* The Arc of History Is Long But Republicans Are Moving To Scrap Rules That Limit Overdraft Fees.
* A clever study showing how protests impact election outcomes, using rain.
* A general strike could transform American politics. But we’re nowhere near being able to call one.
* Capitalism is struggling to reproduce the misery and terror required for worker compliance.
* Even baseball hates baseball.
* Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy.
* I don’t think there’s been a better postmortem on the election, and what it means for the coming decades, than this by Mike Davis: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class.
In addition, as Brookings researchers have recently shown, since 2000 a paradoxical core-periphery dynamic has emerged within the political system. Republicans have increased their national electoral clout yet have steadily lost strength in the economic-powerhouse metropolitan counties. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output — just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.”
* Trump believes his base desires cruelty above all else. Here is today’s case study.
* “Uncle Biden” has done a lot to mask the fact that the real Joe Biden fought desegregation, wrote the 1994 crime bill, and appeared to side with Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill during Thomas’s confirmation hearings. The hyper-competent “Texts From Hillary” made it more difficult for the real Clinton to rebut charges of shadiness and corruption, and also served to mask over the fact that she had never won a closely fought election. Liberal Fan Fiction.
* When Details in a Story Can Put People at Risk.
* He speaks for us all: “Man found stuck in waist-deep mud has no idea how he got there, officials say.”
* The best news anybody’s gotten since 1997.
* What it’s like to lose your short-term memory.
* Ubiquitous surveillance watch.
* A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months. Oh, well, that explains everything, doesn’t it.
* Rick and Morty and Bojack and existentialism.
* Yes Weekly interviews the great Fred Chappell.
* What a horrible night to have a curse.
* And this is a really good start, but I’m sure we can find a way to do worse.
