Posts Tagged ‘Supreme Court’
Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!
* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.
* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.
* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.
* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.
* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.
* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.
* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.
* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.
* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.
* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.
* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.
* Let’s talk about peeing in space.
* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.
* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!
* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.
* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.
* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.
* Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.
Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.
* ‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.
* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.
* But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.
* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.
* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.
* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”
* To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.
* Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.
* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.
* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.
https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985
* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.
* Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.
* Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.
* It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.
* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.
* What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.
* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.
* How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.
* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.
* For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.
* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.
* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.
* Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!
* The end of the Supreme Court.
* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.
* The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?
* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.
* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.
* In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.
* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.
* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.
* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.
Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.
* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”
* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.
* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.
* MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.
* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.
* Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.
* Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.
* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.
* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.
* Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.
* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”
* The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.
* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.
* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.
* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.
* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.
* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!
* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!
* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.
* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.
* How the retweet ruined the Internet.
* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.
* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.
* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.
* A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”
* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.
* How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.
* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.
* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.
* Sexism and the car crash dummy.
* Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.
* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!
* It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.
* Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.
* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”
* I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.
* The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.
* He did.
* And the good news is: We can’t lose!
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* CFP: Tolkien/Whedon.
* A people’s history of New Coke.
* The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage.
* Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.
* Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say. Scientists are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.
* Ugly academic war ends with unprecedented apology from USC, $50-million settlement.
* The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim. Alaska is having an environmental and political meltdown. Alaskan glaciers melt at fastest pace in centuries. Trump Administration Is Suppressing Science and Public Opinion to Drill the Arctic Refuge. Six shocking climate events that happened around the world this week. Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans? A Ferocious Heat in Delhi. India staring at a water apocalypse. All Mississippi Beaches Close Due To Toxic Algae Bloom. The Internet Is Drowning. Fish die-offs in Wisconsin expected to double by 2050, quadruple by 2100, report says. Breaching a ‘carbon threshold’ could lead to mass extinction. And sure let’s go back to killing all the bees while we’re at it.
* Fear of immigration raids looms as plans for ICE ‘family operation’ move forward. FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches. (81% of ‘suspects’ flagged by Met’s police facial recognition technology innocent, independent report says.) Hungry, Scared and Sick: Inside the Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex. ‘It’s a Terrible Existence’: The Crisis of Emergency Dialysis Care for Undocumented Immigrants. ICE deports dozens of Cambodian refugees. Officials expect Trump to try and add citizenship question to the census via executive action this week — an idea officials say was not a serious one as recently as Wednesday. Attorney General Barr tells SC reporters he’s found a legal recourse on Census question. Trump Lied to the Supreme Court, and Four Justices Don’t Care. Whatever’s coming, the career folks couldn’t abide.
* On the migrant crisis, European governments are failing the first test of climate change.
* The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders.
* Amazon Workers Plan Prime Day Strike at Minnesota Warehouse.
* Democratic candidates’ school integration plans, explained.
* Democrats will never allow the system to be reformed.
* But this time around, I don’t think 2007–8 produced anything. The resulting policies were, if anything, even more neoliberal. But the problem is that neoliberalism has lost its attractiveness and legitimacy, so is now enforced by authoritarian and right-populist means.
* The Millennial Condition: History, Revolution, and Generational Analysis.
* To see how the Koch brothers’ free-market utopia operates, look no further than Corpus Christi.
* I’ve always been cold on Russiagate, but I’ll believe any conspiracy theory you have to sell me about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained. The Mystery Around Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune and How He Made It. How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime. Epstein indictment renews questions about earlier case handled by Trump Cabinet official. When Jeffrey Epstein Joked About Sex Abuse. DA knew Jeffrey Epstein was a dangerous pedophile when arguing for leniency. Flashback to 2003. Inside Epstein’s $56 Million Mansion: Photos of Bill Clinton, Woody Allen and Saudi Crown Prince. Barr won’t recuse, again.
* So much corruption you can’t even keep it all straight: Investigation Intensifies Into Top Trump Fund-raiser.
* Nancy Pelosi Has Chosen Her War, and It’s With Her Own Party’s Future.
* Progressive Boomers Are Making It Impossible For Cities To Fix The Housing Crisis.
* The Bernie-Warren Suicide Pact to Save America.
* Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It. Don’t Count on U.S. Regulators to Make Self-Driving Cars Safe for Pedestrians.
* MSP troopers blow through stop sign, arrest driver that ran into them.
* Most Americans like to think of their country as a meritocracy, a system that rewards hard work and intelligence over privilege. But if you look at how things actually work, @sarahrlnrd argues, it’s clear the U.S. is more of an aristocracy…
* Far from Home saving the MCU from itself.
* MLMs Are A Nightmare For Women And Everyone They Know.
* When Philip K. Dick turned to Christianity.
* Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now.
* When a car crashed outside of tiny Tonopah, Nevada, volunteer EMS workers raced to the scene in minutes. But ever since Tonopah’s hospital closed, the town is now hours away from the nearest emergency room.
* Another animal intelligence roundup.
* Zoos Called It a ‘Rescue.’ But Are the Elephants Really Better Off? Despite mounting evidence that elephants find captivity torturous, some American zoos still acquire them from Africa — aided by a tall tale about why they needed to leave home.
* Principal Refused to Call the Holocaust a Fact. Five seconds later: Principal Who Tried to Stay ‘Politically Neutral’ About Holocaust Is Removed.
* Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt.
* On average, older adults spend over half their waking hours alone.
* A retired teacher found some seahorses off Long Beach. Then he built a secret world for them.
* The Rise of the Professional Dungeon Master.
* Baseball has a home-run problem.
* Will Impossible Burgers be the norm for Gen Z?
* And if aliens call, what should we do? Scientists want your opinion.
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
Just Another Monday Morning Linkpost
* I asked “If you were going to do a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM lit crit class where the gimmick was that you always returned to a foundational text for application, what would you choose?” and got some really good ideas. Right now, if I do it rather than a multiple-choice or wheel-of-fortune variant, it looks like it’s going to be Frankenstein.
* CFP for SFRA 2019, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
* Her Eyes Weren’t Watching God: The Empathetic Secular Vision of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin – Building a World.
* Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in first look at ‘Lord Of The Rings’ author’s biopic. Deadwood Movie Confirmed for Spring 2019 Premiere. And the new Aladdin movie looks worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.
* This week I went on a journey into the madness of The Phantom Podcast, which reviews the Star Wars prequel trilogy as if the series began with Episode 1, and I regret nothing. Scroll all the way down.
* Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided: There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.
* Students and Faculty Plan Walkout Over Johns Hopkins’ ICE Contract.
* How to Make Grad School More Humane.
* Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate.
* International Graduate-Student Enrollments and Applications Drop for 2nd Year in a Row.
* WTF Is Going on at Wright State? Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
* “Student Loan Relief or Paid Vacation? These Workers Get a Choice.” Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans.
* Every tweet in this thread is enraging. Every one.
* Julian Glander’s Art Sqool is about Froshmin, a small, round person who is going to an art school run by an artificial intelligence that is going to help Froshmin become a great artist. Or at least some kind of artist. Actually, thinking about it, the weird little robot who evaluates all of your art doesn’t make any promises about ability or skill or fame or recognition as a product of the time that Froshmin spends at Art Sqool. Wait, shit, is this a scam?
* When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation.
* When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)
* How Flight Attendants Grounded Trump’s Shutdown.
* The battle for the future of Stonehenge.
* 250 dead, $91 billion in damages: 2018 was a catastrophic year for U.S. weather; 4th-warmest for globe. A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan. Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases. Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. Global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. The end of the Colorado. Polar thinking.
* Latinos, blacks breathe 40 percent more pollution than whites in California, study says.
* Liberal Democrats Formally Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry. More here.
* Ugh. Gotta preserve this flawless system.
* Please Stop Writing Nancy Pelosi Fan Fiction.
* Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Dead.
* Meanwhile, it sounds like things going great in Britain.
* Brett Kavanaugh Just Declared War on Roe v. Wade.
* Parable of the Talents watch: Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency.
* “I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book.
* Sesame Workshop has finally given up on Bert and Ernie.
* On the end of The Good Place.
* Patreon planning to completely betray its user base, of course.
* Google is already way down that road. As is everyone else.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York’s establishment Dems to eliminate her district.
* Headlines from the end of the world: “Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate.”
* Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows. 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.
* “Hackers using black-market Israeli ICE-breakers to extort a billionaire who’s replacing his employees with robots, at the behest of a shadowy tabloid/petromonarchy alliance, is actually the cyberpunk future we were promised, and yet.” But for real.
* On Jaws 4. On a legally distinct Harry Potter.
* Young engineer upgraded the LEGO bionic arm he built for himself.
* I’m amazed it’s even legal to sell these paintings in Germany.
* Finland gave people free money. It didn’t help them get jobs — but does that matter?
* The meat industry vs. lab-grown meat.
* An antibiotic-style treatment for cancer? Let’s hope.
Sunday Reading, A Great Idea Whose Time Has Come
* SFFTV Special Issue CFP: Global Utopian Film and TV in the Age of Dystopia.
* CFP: The Sixth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 27-29, 2019.
* CFP: 20th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe.
* Pasadena on Her Mind: Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Her Hometown.
* The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talks to the great Lisa Yaszek.
* When your stalker signs up for your class.
* When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals. To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates—has not improved over 6 years.
* US academics feel the invisible hand of politicians and big agriculture.
* Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor for using the N-word during a class discussion about a James Baldwin book in which the word appeared — and for sharing essays on the history of the word with students who complained to him about it. “Teaching & the N-word: Questions to Consider.” I have always personally abided by the use/mention distinction out of deference to black artists and what I see as an injunction not to rewrite their work for them (which has always seemed, to me, like centering whiteness too, just in a different way). But the social consensus around that is *rapidly* changing; I’m not at all sure what’s best, and it seems like a pedagogical minefield that the contemporary moment is completely unprepared to think through in a careful way.
* Fairfax was preparing to be Va. governor. Then Northam said he was staying put.
* Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet. Students Are Preparing for the First Major U.S. Climate Strike Next Month. There’s a big hole in the world’s most important glacier. Hell yeah, Upper Midwest. Climate signs.
* The Anthropocene started in 1492. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.
* How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth.
* ‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings.
* Lord of the Rings as D&D Campaign.
* Trump Allies Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Hiding or Dead. It Started on QAnon.
* The U.S. Needs to Stay Out of Venezuela.
* Snopes officially declares Facebook unfactcheckable.
* Automated background checks are deciding who’s fit for a home.
* New York Insurers Can Evaluate Your Social Media Use—If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed.
* We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole.
* As Drug Prices Rise, Is Boston’s Prosperity Based On A Moral Crime?
* Invincible has a solid voice cast, but for some reason I thought this show was going to be live action, and now I’m broken-hearted.
* Cop watch: FBI Warned Law Enforcement Agencies of Threat Posed by Non-Existent ‘Pro-Choice Extremists.’ Revealed: FBI investigated civil rights group as ‘terrorism’ threat and viewed KKK as victims. No Heat for Days at a Jail in Brooklyn Where Hundreds of Inmates Are Sick and ‘Frantic.’ Mentally Ill Prisoners Are Held Past Release Dates, Lawsuit Claims. Prison gerrymandering is distorting democracy in states across the Midwest and nationwide, leaving incarcerated people with inequitable representation—or none at all. ICE Agents Are Using Pennsylvania’s Courthouses as a Stalking Ground. The State Supreme Court Can Stop Them. One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases. The criminal justice system also has an ‘alternative facts’ problem. The FBI Has Your DNA Now.
* This was cool: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.
* Wisconsin basketball star has no plans to stop protesting racism during the national anthem.
* Breaking: everyone from uncontacted and isolated tribes is in the Bad Place.
* A new study finds Americans take the pain of girls less seriously than that of boys.
* Will Anyone Save Black Colleges?
* A spectre is haunting the 2020 Democratic primary.
* Let children be bored again. I ran this parenting suggestion by my seven year old and got a big thumbs down.
* I wish there were a different author than Jesse Singal, but the story is genuinely fascinating: How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author’s Budding Career.
* New to podcasts? Choose your genre!
* And these stamps sure are pretty.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
