new fall course: “Histories of Anti-Capitalism”!

I’ve got a great schedule lined up for Fall: a special version of my Tolkien course partnering with UWM and linking up with the Haggerty’s “Art of the Manuscript” exhibit, and a grad special topics course called “Histories of Anti-Capitalism.” Here’s a course description — suggestions very welcome!

Other English Fall course descriptions are trickling in here…

Course Title: Histories of Anti-Capitalism

Coure Description: “We live in capitalism,” Ursula K. Le Guin once said. “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” This course will take a long view of anti-capitalist thought, from the Luddite revolt of the early nineteenth century to the ongoing climate strikes of Greta Thunberg—investigating where resistance to capitalism has flourished and where it has failed, as well as where it has intersected with important trends in feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, LGBTQ+, ecological, and disability activism. We will also explore the speculative literary genre of utopia, and explore how its utopian, quasi-utopian, heterotopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have reflected, inspired, and critiqued the left’s centuries-long struggle against capitalist realism.

Readings: We will consider a wide mix of literary, historical, and critical-theoretical documents of anti-capitalist and counter-hegemonic thought from the last two-hundred-plus years. A final reading list is still being constructed (and very open to suggestions!), but major literary authors could include such figures as Edward Bellamy, Samuel Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Chinua Achebe, Gene Roddenberry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and major theorists could include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Vandana Shiva, Enrique Dussel, Donna Haraway, David Graeber, and José Esteban Muñoz, among many others.

Assignments: Final critical paper or creative project; symposium presentation; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic and informed class participation

Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!

• SFFTV 15.1! SFRA Review 52.1! And some upcoming projects: a special issue of SFFTV on disability! Uneven Futures!
• Syllabus for Film Theory: Disability & Technology.
• CFP: Anticolonialism as Theory Symposium. CFP: Popular Fiction. The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.
• A great piece from Adam Kotsko on having to come to terms with the unfortunate late work of a great thinker who helped shape his career.
• “Lena” is a true story. You knew it was when you read it.
• 40 useful concepts you should know.
• Drawing blood: notes on Maus. The real reason some people are so afraid of ‘Maus.’ Why Maus Opened the Door to Comics as Literature in Schools.

In light of a Tennessee district banning MAUS, I'm sharing the greatest two pages ever written and drawn about the importance of children's literature and protecting children's access to books, starring Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak. From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997. pic.twitter.com/hC2jyHicPN

— andrewkarre (@andrewkarre) January 27, 2022

• Grant Morrison’s annotations for Superman and the Authority have been fascinating.

Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?

… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?

• Batman Swallowing His Own Cape: The Modern Caped Crusader’s Narrative Autocannibalism.
• Comixology was basically perfect for what it wanted to be, so of course Amazon trashed it.
• Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics.
• Mysteries of free speech: ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill: Florida Senate passes controversial LGBTQ school measure. Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns. Wisconsin Republicans advance bills that would let 18-year-olds carry concealed weapons at school. Wisconsin GOP votes to limit race theory at UW schools. Republican lawmakers plan legislation to break up MPS, expand vouchers to all students in a proposal to overhaul K-12 education. North Carolina superintendent abruptly removes MLK-themed novel from 10th grade class. Idaho librarians could face jail time for lending “harmful” books.
• This Is the End of Affirmative Action.
• What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example.
• The University Crisis: Does the pandemic mark a breaking point? College Endowments Saw Stellar Returns as the Market Soared. Academic Freedom and Tenure: University System of Georgia. What the heck is going on in Georgia higher ed? Tenure Without Teeth. Grotesque Inequity. Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions.
• The Overbuilt Campus.

I’ve been in college continually since 1998 (now in 36th grade) and I think it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been similarly present to comprehend just how much worse the student experience has gotten since the 90s https://t.co/ZkXX5XXnRf

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2022

👀 https://t.co/sXic17MUTM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2022

• Mold, radon in FSU building tied to eight cancer cases in faculty report.
• Cripping the Neoliberal University – We need a Politics of Care.
• The Academic Conference Will Never Be the Same.
• The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class.
• U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries. What Do Masks Do to Kids? It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading.
• New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump. ‘The Dark, Forgotten Carnival.’ Jan. 6 committee says Trump violated multiple laws in effort to overturn election. Criminal Charges Against Trump Just Became Way More Real. Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.
• Detroit overtaxed homeowners $600M. Years later, advocates still seeking reparations. Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole.’
• ‘Shadow pandemic’: Advocates worry lockdowns have fuelled surge in partner violence.
• The school shooting generation grows up.
• How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood.
• Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development?
• I’ve always wondered about this: Texas trampoline parks aren’t regulated or inspected. We found 494 injuries in DFW region.
• Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Climate Reality? In a First, Alaska’s Arctic Waters Appear Poised for Dangerous Algal Blooms. US military faces crisis in Hawaii after leak poisons water. This 1882 surveying error saved a patch of forest from logging. IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown. Carbon dioxide will have to be removed from air to achieve 1.5C, says report. How to Repair the Planet. Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it.

the problem in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/B3zDH15jI3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

I have been exploring the work of Nukina Shunichi, a 19th century Samurai turned scifi writer recommended to me by one of my undergrads.

Why don't we have this writer on more syllabuses? He's completely overturned my view of the development of SFF.https://t.co/eAVuFrlQyk

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022

• Climate Change Lurking Behind Every Corner: Review of Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious.
• From ‘Dune’ to climate change, UChicago scholar draws from unique experiences in new course.
• The Death of Philip K. Dick Brought to Life.
• The Octavia Butler Novel for Our Times. Not that one. Not that one either.
• Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress.
• I should teach this again: The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society.
• Defamiliarising Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction.
• Disney Censors Same-Sex Affection in Pixar Films, According to Letter From Employees.
• Enough people purchased a chemical on Amazon to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts. Amazon has continued to sell the product.
• Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete.
• PSA: Renting From Hertz May Get You Arrested. For real: If you’ve rented a car from Hertz, there could be a warrant out for your arrest.
• He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return.
• And on the pedestal these words appear: After Burning for Days, a Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks.
• Against the Contemporary American Essay.
• What is Love in African Fiction?

I think it’s bad for knowledge production that once a term reaches a certain level of obvious importance (like “Anthropocene”) it suddenly becomes “boring.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2022

• Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned: How a struggling bartender became the face of a resurgent left.
• Biden’s signature legislation expired. Recipients are wondering: WTF happened? The devastating effects of losing the child tax credit.
• Household debt jumped by $1 trillion in 2021, the most since 2007. Inflation rose 7.9% in February, as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years. Rents reach ‘insane’ levels across US with no end in sight. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee Is Helping Workers During COVID. As inflation heats up, 64% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

I think Democrats were more or less certain to get slammed in the midterms no matter what they did — the real problem is that this window was their only opportunity to get anything done for the next decade and (just like in 2009) they blew it

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2022

One US Senator “heard stories” about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit “for drugs” without any evidence or data to back it up.

He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying https://t.co/kOyuFp6ig4

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2022

• A Rhodes scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks.
• Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer. ‘This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out. How Ukraine could become a nuclear crisis. Russian bombs. Why It’s Important To Debate Foreign Policy Even In Times Of Conflict.
• You don’t exist. I’ve been saying it for years!

I’ve said it before but I think it’s at least plausible that contemporary history seems so bizarre because there’s only a handful of universes where humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cold War https://t.co/CMjcSFlbEE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 28, 2022

If you’d told me then that the late 90s were just about as good as things were going to get, man, I’d have had a lot of questions

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

• No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
• Star Wars: You know, for kids.
• ‘The history of fantasy is racialized’: Lord of the Rings series sparks debate over race.
• Villeneuve’s “Dune”: Blending Spectacle and Cultural Erasure.
• Star Trek 2023 Movie To Reunite Kelvin Crew, Production Set To Start By End Of Year. What Happened to Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Film? Every Detail About His Canceled Pitch. Star Trek: Picard’s narrow tightrope.
• Futurama is back, again, again.
• Five years on, Breath of the Wild’s open world is still unmatched.
• “It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max Feud.
• Back to the Future: The Musical.
• Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China. ‘Fight Club’ Author Chuck Palahniuk Says China’s Censored Ending Is Actually Truer to His Vision.
• The US has plans to patrol the space around the moon. The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say. We’re Not Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds. The quest to avert an asteroid apocalypse is going surprisingly well.

privatizing the Earth didn’t wipe out poverty did it https://t.co/xyWhdvxp1H

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2022

• Garbage Hunters: Deciphering North Korea Through Its Trash.
• ‘I just feel like Rhode Island has failed’: The family of a 12-year-old girl with autism is among those in limbo because of the lack of services for those in crisis.
• Dividing Up the Autism Spectrum Will Not End the Way You Think.
• The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Enough Truck Drivers.
• As intended: The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans.
• Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale. Cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit. Snowpiercer Asks Us to Imagine the End of the World — And the End of Capitalism. The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage Are Wrong.

I have a crypto curious person in my life who explained that it’s because no one knows what happens with crypto when the power goes out for a long time, which is a pretty big problem for something that is supposed to be prepper currency https://t.co/U3fe0kl4KK

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2022

• We need to talk about this Scarlet Witch action figure.
• Mapping the celebrity NFT complex. Web3 is the future, or a scam, or both.
• New Data Shows 61% Rise in U.S. Prison Deaths in 2020. Only One (1) Media Outlet Reported On It.
• The U.S. is limiting compassionate release in plea deals. Many say that’s cruel.
• Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions. Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.
• Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
• Marquette has changed its university seal. Indigenous Education at Marquette.
• The Dawn of Everything.
• Against longtermism.
• A Henry Darger Dispute: Who Inherits the Rights to a Loner’s Genius?
• In my 35 years as a reporter, I have never seen anything of Afghanistan’s magnitude.
• Rich people, y’all.
• Types of dissertations.
• Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies.
• Giant spiders expected to drop from sky across the East Coast this spring.
• Vegetarians have 14% lower cancer risk than meat-eaters, study finds.
• What I Learned From Recording My Thoughts for an Immortal A.I. I mean…
• And the arc of history is long, but…

which in turns suggests he grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series on TV https://t.co/qo7GK6pvdy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2022

pic.twitter.com/1iZmNEOIWM

— This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists (@unflicuneballe) January 22, 2022

most of the cast is simply too old https://t.co/qkcc9bTYKW

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2022

Brand New Semester, Same Old Pandemic

I’ve finally beaten my syllabi into shape for the semester:

ENGLISH 3241: “Crafting the Short Story” (my summer/J-term lit/creative writing hybrid, now in person!)

ENGLISH 4716/5716: “Classics of Science Fiction” (featuring Slaughterhouse-Five, The Female Man, Kindred, Ted Chiang, The Fifth Season, and a NCAA-style tournament to determine which 1980s SF movie we’re going to watch instead of reading Neuromancer)

Comments and suggestions welcome, as always!

A Hypercontemporary Literature Syllabus! And More!

The first week is already over and I realized I never got around to putting up my syllabi. I’m teaching two classes this semester, an all-Zoom revision of my Tolkien class and an all-Zoom survey of 21st Century Literature that I decided to focus on texts from more or less the last two years. (I also have an independent study on Gender and Sexuality in New Wave SF that’s been terrific; no formal syllabus for that one but we’re reading Le Guin, Russ, Delany, Tiptree, Lem, the Tarkovskys, all your faves.)

Thanks so much to everyone on Facebook and Twitter who flooded me with suggestions for the 21st Century course. In the end I was so overwhelmed by the possibilities I solicited suggestions directly from the students, which allowed me to craft a syllabus that was both inside and outside my usual wheelhouse, hopefully in ways that will be fun for both my students and myself. And we still get to be surely the first class in the world to study Ishiguro’s new book.

The syllabus doesn’t list the films they picked, but our class vote landed on Parasite and Soul for the last two weeks of class, an intriguing dialectic arraying the full possibilities of the human experience…

synch	M	1/25	FIRST DAY OF CLASS
synch	W	1/27	Among Us game and thinkpieces [D2L]
asynch	F	1/29	Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” [D2L]
synch	M	2/1	PLAY/MOVIE: Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me (including bonus material) [Amazon Prime]
synch	W	2/3	What the Constitution Means to Me discussion continues
asynch	F	2/5	POEM: Andrea Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” [D2L] and online reactions
synch	M	2/8	SHORT STORY: N.K. Jemisin, “Emergency Skin” [Amazon Kindle]
synch	W	2/10	SHORT STORY: Ted Chiang, “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” [online]
asynch	F	2/12	Jemisin and Chiang sandbox assignment
synch	M	2/15	COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part one
synch	W	2/17	COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part two
asynch	F	2/19	COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three sandbox assignment
synch	M	2/22	COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three discussion
synch	W	2/24	COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part four
asynch	F	2/26	Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L]optional: Haruki Murakami, “A Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L]
synch	M	3/1	Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” discussion
synch	W	3/3	Hades [Steam or Nintendo Switch]
asynch	F	3/5	Hades sandbox assignment
synch	M	3/8	Hades discussion continues
	W	3/10	UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASS
asynch	F	3/12	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 1-16 CLOSE READING DUE
synch	M	3/15	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 17-30
synch	W	3/17	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 31-45
asynch	F	3/19	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 46-60

synch	M	3/22	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 61-74
synch	W	3/24	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 75-90
asynch	F	3/26	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, whole book
synch	M	3/29	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responses
synch	W	3/31	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responses
	F	4/2	GOOD FRIDAY—NO CLASS
synch	M	4/5	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
synch	W	4/7	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
asynch	F	4/9	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
synch	M	4/12	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
synch	W	4/14	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
asynch	F	4/16	Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) MINISTRY RESPONSE DUE
synch	M	4/19	CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (first half)
synch	W	4/21	CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (second half)
asynch	F	4/23	MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD
synch	M	4/26	MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD
synch	W	4/28	MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD
asynch	F	4/30	MOVIE or TV SHOW TDB
synch	M	5/3	MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD
	W	5/5	UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASS
synch	F	5/7	LAST DAY OF CLASS INTIMATION DUE

It’s Been a Minute: Links!

• There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
• I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
• Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
• Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

• Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
• Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
• How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
• How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
• Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
• A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
• Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
• Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
• The Proletarian Fantastic.
• Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
• Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
• Generation C.
• National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.

Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020

Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020

• ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
• Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.

Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY

— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020

The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

• The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
• Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
• Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
• A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
• ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
• The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
• Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
• Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
• When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
• And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
• Fandom and the Future of Trek.
• In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
• If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
• Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
• implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war

Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.

— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020

• Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
• Joe Biden should do everything at once.
• Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
• In the Time of Monsters.
• The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
• How To Avoid Another Trump.
• Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
• For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

• How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
• What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
• It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
• Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
• 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
• Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
• We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
• The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.

my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020

• A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
• Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
• The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
• Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
• Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
• Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
• We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
• And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.

goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020

The Syllabus as Apology

My full Fall 2020 syllabi are done, so I thought I’d post them as an example of one way to talk about format and special circumstances this semester. The key language is below as a screenshot. My thanks for my colleagues for their help in thinking through this stuff, especially to Angela Sorby, who gave me the original “special circumstances” language that I modified below.

ENGLISH 4717/5717: Watchmen

ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America

Behold: MEGALINKS

* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.

* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!

* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.

* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.

* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.

* International Conference on ‘The Possible and Impossible Worlds of Science Fiction’ (11 – 12 September 2020, via Zoom).

* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976

* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.

This is a good rule that I’ve tried to informally follow for the past few years. “Student-athlete” is a term of art, created so the NCAA and its member institutions could dodge worker’s compensation claims. Sportswriters don’t have to use it. https://t.co/stZKzAjLIB

— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) August 10, 2020

University of Pittsburgh withholding graduate student access to email until agreeing to assume risk of catching COVID pic.twitter.com/fHbH60iDoT

— Rachel C (@RCoombsScience) August 6, 2020

My [67m] unpaid college athletes [20m, 21m, 19m, 21m, 21m, 18m, 19m, 22m, 20m, 21m, 22m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 18m, 21m, 21m, 20m, 19m, 20m, 18m, 21m, 20m, 22m, 23m, 20m, 19m, 21m, 19m, 23m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 19m, 21m, 20m] are unionizing

— Trevin Flickinger (@trevin_flick) August 10, 2020

* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.

* Survey finds that 40 percent of incoming freshmen at four-year colleges are likely or highly likely not to attend.

* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.

* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.

* Advice for teaching this fall.

* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.

* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.

* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.

* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.

* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.

* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.

* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.

* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.

NEW: @jacobbogage got USPS data showing at least 671 USPS mail sorting machines have been removed across the country since June. Represents a reduction in national mail sorting capacity of 21.4 million pieces of mail per hour. https://t.co/6lOGfByZBC pic.twitter.com/FGV1nto0kn

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) August 14, 2020

Photo taken in Wisconsin. This is happening right before our eyes. They are sabotaging USPS to sabotage vote by mail. This is massive voter suppression and part of their plan to steal the election. pic.twitter.com/QXLWGIHTrz

— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 15, 2020

It has been conceded by everyone of all parties that the majority of Americans who will attempt to vote in November will vote for Joe Biden, and our election is now some sort of mass game show where we will see if the majority of Americans complete the physical challenges or not

— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) August 10, 2020

This is all going to get worse before it gets even worse

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) August 15, 2020

* Love 2 vote in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin State Assembly gerrymander is arguably the most effective partisan gerrymander in the country. Nothing, and I mean nothing, not even if Biden wins by double of what he's polling at now, will break that Republican majority. https://t.co/p9iZTfh7Fp pic.twitter.com/QeyXnjDesC

— Chaz Nuttycombe (@ChazNuttycombe) August 2, 2020

This is the worst gerrymander the country, change my mind. pic.twitter.com/HVS7rYB4sO

— Kiran 🗳 (@MichiganKiran) August 10, 2020

 

* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.

* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.

* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.

* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.

* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.

* Solved that little problem.

* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.

* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.

* gaaaaaaaasp

* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.

* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.

* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.

* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?

* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”

* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.

* it me

* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.

* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.

* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.

* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.

… this is the “hägar the horrible” comic strip framed on biden’s desk. pic.twitter.com/fqNcuW8ceC

— fake nick ramsey @ 🏡 (@nick_ramsey) August 11, 2020

The next time someone runs for president who wasn’t personally selected by Joe Biden for the job could be as far away as 2036. So a single bad decision by Barack Obama in 2008 screwed up the next 20-30 years. https://t.co/JdTKPChPen

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020

it’s awesome how Joe Biden gets to set the direction of the leftmost party in the world’s imperial hyperpower for what could be the most important decade in human history and no one can really explain why he’s the nominee or even how he won exactly

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020

* some conditions may apply https://t.co/yJ8yxSsSZI

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020

* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.” 

* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.

* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.

* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.

* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.

* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.

* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.

* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.

* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?

* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.

* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.

* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/

tag yourself I’m pretty sure I’m Tanis and I don’t like it https://t.co/DIHNkx7S9M

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2020

* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.

* Poetry rebrands.

* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.

* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.

* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.

* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.

* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.

This is such a perfect example of modern innovation in action — wireless charging, which saves us like 0.001 seconds every time we plug in our phones, uses up to *50% more energy*.

Nearly imperceptible convenience, at massive social costhttps://t.co/epfFenCJku

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 5, 2020

* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.

* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.

* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.

* I honestly don’t know.

* Dibs on the screenplay.

Gotta feel for this kid. His 66 person American town is only accessible by road to the Canadian side where most people live, so now he's the only kid his age and because of what's happening in the unconnected rest of the country he's forced to stay on his side indefinitely. https://t.co/OqJjY0xJMA

— Evan Hadfield (@Evan_Hadfield) August 8, 2020

* this is a maritime news article from 2014 describing a ship carrying ammonium nitrate that had been docked/abandoned at the Beirut port since 2013, this is what exploded today. words fail to describe organized negligence at this scale.

* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.

* Zombie stories are going to have to change.

* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.

Funny how it's always "The Simpsons predicted the future" and never "We created ourselves a nightmare world beyond parody".

— Kung Fu Monster D (@Duerer95) August 4, 2020

zizek on sesame street talking to the puppets “no i cannot say, as you do, ‘i love you’ so casually, i believe this is obscene, love is deeply private, so particular it is really almost evil”

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) August 15, 2020

someone check the simulation heat sinks, reality generation is clearly being throttled by high temps pic.twitter.com/W3NlLzSGOx

— lvl 45 chaos chatterton potus (@thetomzone) August 6, 2020

All these tweets about "2020 please end already" remind me of an old communist joke:

Two friends meet in the middle of Bucharest:
– How are you doing these days?
– Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.

— Orel Beilinson (@BeilinsonOrel) August 11, 2020

 

* Imagine how badly you have to screw up as a CEO for anything to try and hold you accountable for anything.

* Alas, Uber!

Uber exists entirely through its wild abuse of existing laws and even then it loses money hand over fist https://t.co/peeHu0EvJy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020

* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.

* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.

* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.

* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.

* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.

* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.

* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.

* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.

* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.

* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!

* And of course the Fillmore bros came out of the woodwork.

Fall Syllabus #2: ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America!

And here’s the other course for this fall, “ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America.” Like the Watchmen class, it will be using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous instruction to muddle through this weird semester…

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title:  Utopia in America

Course Description: 2020 marks the 505th anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which inaugurated a genre of political and social speculation that continues to structure our imagination of what is possible. This course serves as an entry point for advanced study in the English discipline, using depictions of political utopias from antiquity to the present as a way to explore how both literature and literary criticism do their work. We will study utopia in canonical historical literature, in contemporary pop culture, and in the presidential election, as well as utopian critical theory from major thinkers like Fredric Jameson, China Miéville, Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin — but the major task before us will be exploring the role utopian, quasi-utopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have played in the work of major authors of the 20th century, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and Octavia E. Butler.

Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; discussion posts. Students will also construct their own utopian manifesto.

W	Aug 26	S	FIRST DAY OF CLASS Introduction to the Course What Is Utopia?
F	Aug 28	A	New Criticism How to Interpret Literature: “New Criticism” Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” [D2L]
M	Aug 31	S	Sir Thomas More, Utopia, “Concerning” and Book One
W	Sep 2	S	Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book Two
F	Sep 4	A	China Miéville, Introduction to Utopia (2017): “Close to the Shore” and “The Limits of Utopia”
M	Sep 7		LABOR DAY—NO CLASS
W	Sep 9	S	Structuralism How to Interpret Literature: “Structuralism” Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” [D2L]
F	Sep 11	A	Intertextuality N.K. Jemisin, reply to Le Guin [Web]
M	Sep 14	S	Marxism How to Interpret Literature: “Marxism” Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” [Web] Mark Bould, “The Futures Market: American Utopias” [D2L]
W	Sep 16	S	Utopia Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (first half; second half optional) [D2L] Black Mirror: “San Junipero” [Netflix]
F	Sep 18	A	Sandbox: Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication” [D2L]
M	Sep 21	S	Postcoloniality and Race Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Postcolonial and Race Studies” Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders” [D2L]
W	Sep 23	S	Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” [D2L] Toni Morrison, excerpt from Playing in the Dark [D2L]
F	Sep 25	A	Sandbox: #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus [Web]
M	Sep 28	S	Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapter 1
W	Sep 30	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 2-3
F	Oct 2	A	Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 4-6
M	Oct 5	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 7-9
W	Oct 7	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 10-12
F	Oct 9	A	Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 13-15
M	Oct 12	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 16-18
W	Oct 14	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, whole book Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America” [Web] Gregory Lawrence, “Marx in Macondo” [D2L]
F	Oct 16		FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
M	Oct 19	S	Feminism How to Interpret Literature: “Feminism” Karen Joy Fowler, “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” [D2L]
W	Oct 21	S	Sexuality How to Interpret Literature: “Queer Studies” Alice Sheldon as James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” [D2L]
F	Oct 23	A	Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild”
M	Oct 26	S	Environmental Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Environmental Criticism” Ramin Bahrani, “Plastic Bag” [YouTube]
W	Oct 28	S	Disability Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Disability Studies” Octavia E. Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds”
F	Oct 30	A	Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “The Book of Martha”
M	Nov 2	S	Historicism and Cultural Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Historicism and Cultural Studies” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, “Foreword” and “Pale Fire”
W	Nov 4	S	Pale Fire, “Foreword and “Pale Fire” continued
F	Nov 6	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 9	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto I
W	Nov 11	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto II
F	Nov 13	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 16	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto III
W	Nov 18	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto IV (including index)
F	Nov 20	A	Reader Response How to Interpret Literature: “Reader Response” Pale Fire, whole book and interpretations
M	Nov 23	S	FINAL PROJECT WORKSHOP
F	Dec 4 5:30 PM		FINAL PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX

 

Submitted for Your Approval: Syllabus for ENGLISH 4717/5717: WATCHMEN!

Since a lot of people have been interested in it, and I’m still trying to figure it all out, here’s the preliminary schedule for my Watchmen class this fall. This one will be an all-online class, as that’s the modality I’m in this semester; I’m using an S/S/A schedule where we do MW class sessions synchronously and F class sessions asynchronously. Most of the Friday classes are in the “sandbox” mode described here, some with suggested prompts and some completely open. The class has 30 people in it, so those synchronous sessions may need to break up to 15 and 15; I want to give it a try with the whole group for a week or two before I switch. Final assignment is a long paper or creative/curational project with at least some connection to Watchmen, comics, or American cultural studies, very, very broadly conceived…

Any and all suggestions welcome! I missed the first COVID semester due to my sabbatical so this is all still a bit new to me. I’m excited though: this class started in my mind as a lark and now I think it’s going to be one of the best syllabi I’ve ever planned.

101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title:  Watchmen
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Post-1900, American Literature

Course Description: This course surveys the history, reception, and artistic form of comics and graphic narrative in the United States, with primary exploration of a single comic miniseries that has had a massive influence on the comics industry and on the way we think about superheroes: Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-1987). This semester ENGLISH 4717 will function almost like a single-novel “Text in Context” course; after grounding ourselves in the pre-1980s history of American superhero comics over the first few weeks of the course, we will focusing almost exclusively on Watchmen and its long afterlife in prequel comics, sequel comics, parody comics, homages, critiques, film adaptations, and, most recently, the critically acclaimed HBO sequel series (2019-2020). What has made Watchmen so beloved, so controversial, and so very influential on the larger superhero-industrial-entertainment complex? Why has DC Comics returned to Watchmen again and again, even as one of its original creators has distanced himself further and further from the work? What have different creators done, or tried to do, with the complex but self-contained narrative framework originally constructed by Moore and Gibbons? With superheroes and superhero media more globally hegemonic than ever before, what might Watchmen still have to say to us today?

Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; weekly reading journal; discussion posts; several out-of-class film screenings; one long seminar paper or creative/curational project

W	Aug 26	S	FIRST DAY OF CLASS Introduction to the Course A Brief Prehistory of Comics
F	Aug 28	A	Sandbox: Jim Henley, “Gaudy Nights” [Web]
M	Aug 31	S	The Golden Age of Comics Action Comics #1 Selections from Wonder Woman
W	Sep 2	S	The Silver Age Superboy #1 [D2L] Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman” [D2L] excerpts from David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic- Book Scare and How It Changed America and Qiana Q. Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest [D2L]
F	Sep 4	A	Sandbox: The Marvel Explosion Fantastic Four #1, Tales of Suspense #39, X-Men #1, and Hulk #1
M	Sep 7		LABOR DAY—NO CLASS
W	Sep 9	S	The Bronze Age Saul Braun, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant” [D2L] Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, Amazing Spider-Man #121 and Iron Man #128 [D2L] Spencer Ackerman, “Iron Man vs. the Imperialists” [D2L] Gail Simone, “Women in Refrigerators” [web]
F	Sep 11	A	Sandbox: Marc Singer, “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race” [D2L]
M	Sep 14	S	The Dark Age Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #1-3
W	Sep 16	S	Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #4-6
F	Sep 18	A	Sandbox
M	Sep 21	S	Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #7-9 Anna C. Marshall, “Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment of Gender in Alan Moore’s Watchmen” [D2L]
W	Sep 23	S	Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #10-12 Matthew Wolf-Meyer, “Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” [D2L]
F	Sep 25	A	Sandbox: Watchmen sequel pitch session
M	Sep 28	S	Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009) Graham J. Murphy, “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen” [D2L] Jacob Brogan, “Stop/Watch: Repressing History, Adapting Watchmen” [D2L]
W	Sep 30	S	Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (excerpts) [D2L] Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijingaard, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt Alan Moore interviews (excerpts) [D2L]
F	Oct 2	A	Sandbox: Watchmen criticism survey
M	Oct 5	S	The Nostalgia Age? Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (first half)
W	Oct 7	S	Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (second half)
F	Oct 9	A	Sandbox: Watchmen vs. the MCU
M	Oct 12	S	Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (first half)
W	Oct 14	S	Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (second half)
F	Oct 16		FALL BREAK—NO CLASS PROJECT PROPOSAL DUE FRIDAY NIGHT 5 PM
M	Oct 19	S	Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Minutemen and Silk Spectre
W	Oct 21	S	Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Dr. Manhattan
F	Oct 23	A	Sandbox
M	Oct 26	S	Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book One
W	Oct 28	S	Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book Two
F	Oct 30	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 2	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 1
W	Nov 4	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 2-3 interview with Damon Lindelof [Web]
F	Nov 6	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 9	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 4-5 interview with Lila Byock [Web]
W	Nov 11	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 6 interview with Cord Jefferson [Web] thinkpieces by Emily Nussbaum, Jamelle Bouie, Jorge Cotte, Jaime Omar Yassin, and others [Web]
F	Nov 13	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 16	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 7-8
W	Nov 18	S	Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 9 Aaron Bady, “Dr. Manhattan Is a Cop: Watchmen and Frantz Fanon” [Web] Leslie Lee, “Whitewashing Watchmen” [Web] Alyssa Rosenberg, “If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen…” [Web]
F	Nov 20	A	Sandbox: Watchmen season two pitch session
M	Nov 23	S	Rorschach #1 (2020) LAST DAY OF CLASS
Th	Dec 3 12:30 PM		FINAL PAPER/PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX FINAL REFLECTION DUE IN THE D2L FORUMS

 

Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links

* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…

* For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans.  The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.

“ok what happens when someone dies” really seems to be the armor-piercing question for all these plans to reopen schools

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

The one that gets me is that students have ten minutes between classes regardless of modality or location. Starbucks is closed, library is closed, you’re not allowed to congregate in hallways — where do you go for your 10 AM virtual class between your 9 and 11 in-person classes? https://t.co/vSz7t88uHH

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

There’s also going to be a nonzero number of in-person classes where the instructor is the noncompliant party and I haven’t heard anyone explain what is supposed to happen in that situation https://t.co/MkwlX7GM8d

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 24, 2020

Btw your students know what's up. I've seen so many similar tiktoks over the last month pic.twitter.com/7JZzTl9xGq

— dakoda smith (@feelinggorgias) July 19, 2020

* On a Knife’s Edge.

* Rethinking MLA 2021.

* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.  

* Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.

* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.

* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.

* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.

* 8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.

* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.

* Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

* The Last Giraffes on Earth.

* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.

When men use slurs against us it’s *shoulder shrug* but when we defend ourselves it’s because we’re opportunistic. Fuck this https://t.co/nCyMiZdaNK

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 24, 2020

* Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.

* How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?

* There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.

* Once again: against homework.

My lecture on this starts in half an hour lol https://t.co/DmQRYAj95l https://t.co/SlIornNN5q

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) July 24, 2020

* The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.

I’m incredibly cynical and believe the Republican Party is full of world-historical monsters but seeing the entire apparatus of the right attach themselves to Q has really shaken me https://t.co/lSKM65lp3q

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 26, 2020

* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.

This is really bad. There has been a gigantic, sustained shock in areas of the labor market which are not directly exposed to the virus, but instead exposed to plain old economic conditions. https://t.co/zsNuxCiT5L

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 21, 2020

* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell

* Your Predominantly White Academic Organization (Yes, Even Yours) Is Exactly One Live-Tweeted Racist Event Away from Public Disgrace.

* U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

I think people prior to the Gen X/Millennial cohort genuinely have trouble processing what has happened to basically everything they were raised to think of as “careers” https://t.co/BVreP3Wk3S

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

You can’t even really get a job as a lawyer anymore. My younger cousins w/ nursing degrees don’t have stable gigs, but travel between multiple hospitals. Obviously being a professor is over. Aside from the medical cartel that is only just now starting to crack, jobs don’t exist.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.

* How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.

* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.

* A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

* The Racist History of Tipping.

* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.

* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.

they literally cannot stop threatening us with a good time pic.twitter.com/aryQLXpwvI

— accidentally left-wing (@accidental_left) July 22, 2020

* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

* Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.

* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.

* J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.

* The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.

* Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.

* What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.

* The fight against racism starts at home.

Stares at every white person who keeps asking “how to help” or how they can “do better” 🤨🤨 ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/D1puoZQ1Ng

— Tanya, Laird of Glencoe, Chaotic Black Deathbane (@cypheroftyr) July 25, 2020

* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.

* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.

* Don’t tease us Doc.

* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since

* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today

* cat in the furnace, check

* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked

* Two Americas.

Two Americas pic.twitter.com/hKdXwoiWUU

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 24, 2020

* always has been — always has been

* just an update for all you non-biologists out there that biology twitter is currently in meltdown because a journal editor said some worms are overrated

* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.

* I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you fucking deserve

* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.

* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?

* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?

* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.

* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”

* Yet another Watchmen sequel.

* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’

2020 Links for 2020

* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”

* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!

* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.

* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.

FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

* Public Domain Day 2020.

* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?

* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’

* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.

* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.

* The Subterranean Press edition of Unexpected Stories will be its first print edition, with a newly-commissioned introduction by Nisi Shawl, and an afterword by Butler’s longtime agent and literary executor, Merrilee Heifetz.

* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources​ in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.

* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.

Thinking about @adamkotsko’s TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.

* The problem with bringing back blogs is.

* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.

* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.

300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020

* Meet the Obamog(ho)uls.

* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.

* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.

* …one of the strongest cases for Bernie isn’t just what he’ll be able to achieve, it’s what he’ll refuse to do (cannot imagine him signing a grand bargain weakening Social Security, for instance).

* One Year in Washington.

* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.

* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.

* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.

* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.

* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.

* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.

* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.

* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.

* The MLA Started Publishing Job-Searching Advice More Than 50 Years Ago. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.

* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.

* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.

* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.

* Being black at UW.

they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020

* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.

* The rise of the permanent protest.

* This is probably dumb — though maybe 1919 had a lot of bonus fraud in it, would be cool to study — but I have immediately and permanently internalized its lessons nonetheless.

* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.

* When your abuser is a cop.

* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.

* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.

* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?

Star Wars’ insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will

— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020

* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.

* When AI runs the entertainment industry.

* When business people run the Olympics.

* DC and Marvel vs politics.

* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).

* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.

* Being Larry David.

* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.

OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s

— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020

* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.

* Asimov, groper.

* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!

* The decolonization of Miles Morales.

* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.

* ‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.

* @ me next time

* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.

* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.

* And Christopher Tolkien departs for the Grey Havens.

Friday Afternoon Links!

* Big story keeps getting bigger. ‘Total panic’ as ‘shell-shocked’ White House struggles to find impeachment footing. Madness at Fox News as Trump Faces Impeachment. As Republicans Face Impeachment Dilemma, Romney is a Lonely Voice of Concern. Impeach Barr too. Innocent Man Calls for Whistleblower to Be Executed. This Guy Truly Has No Idea What He’s Talking About. This Guy Too. Needle already moving. Impeachment Shouldn’t Be the Goal of Impeachment.

* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism.

* Pattern Recognition but real and completely depressing: The Pee Tape Is Real, but It’s Fake.

* Whoever wins, we lose: With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other.

* Wall Street vultures cutting ads for Warren now.

* Into every generation a Slayer is born: The harmless-looking girl… who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars: WWII heroine who joined the Dutch resistance aged 14, dies aged 92.

* For all its flaws, I liked Ad Astra more than a lot of my circle. Abigail Nussbaum gets at a lot of the reason why.

* Gollancz announces a £4,000 prize for sf writing by people of color.

* Grad programs still chronically lying about where their grads end up.

* White Borrowers? Almost Paid Off. Black Borrowers? Still Indebted.

* Greta Thunberg isn’t the only trailblazing young climate leader. Activists from the Amazon to Nigeria share their ideas for battling the climate crisis. Teen girls are leading the climate strikes and helping change the face of environmentalism. Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg. Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men? Greta Thunberg became a climate activist not in spite of her autism, but because of it. For people with Asperger’s, a role model emerges in Greta Thunberg. As an Autistic Femme, I Love Greta Thunberg’s “Resting Autism Face.” US politics is stuck. Can the climate movement shake it loose? I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth.

* Peace in our time: Sony and Marvel Strike a New Deal to Keep Spider-Man in the MCU.

* Will there ever be a cure for chronic pain?

* Cash/Consent: The war on sex work.

* Trees won’t save us either.

* Reunite.

* You’re It, Charlie Brown.

* The creator of the labradoodle says he made ‘Frankenstein’s monster.’

* Spotted on the web: Games and Culture syllabus 2019.

* Trailer for documentary very specifically tailored to my Northern New Jersey roots: Class Action Park.

* Academic freedom under siege.

* That was fast: McDonald’s rolls out meatless Beyond burgers in Canada.

* Quantum Supremacy FAQ.

* There’s a serious blood plasma shortage, please consider donating.

* Wisconsin, you should be ashamed of yourself.

* Marquette program helps students with autism adjust to college life.

* Big mood: Kufungisisa, the local term for depression, is literally translated into “thinking too much”.

* And news of Tom Brady’s omnipotence does throw me for a loop.

Saturday Morning Links!

* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.

* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.

* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”

* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.

* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.

* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?

* When your field is their hobby.

I’ve been talking about this with respect to science fiction studies too for a long time. Widely seen as a field with no history, that anyone can just invent ex nihilo whenever they randomly get interested in it. https://t.co/58glEA9CFv

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 9, 2019

* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.

* The inhumanity of academic freedom.

* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.

* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.

* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.

* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.

* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.

* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.

* “We all recommend this.”

* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.

* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.

Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.

* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.

* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.

Well sure we could stop burning the world, but then how would we create Jobs, the things we all hate that make us want to die

— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) August 11, 2019

A big reason conspiracy theories are so believable is that most of them start from the fundamental idea that there’s a lawless class of sociopaths running our society, which is demonstrably true

— Erik Hane (@erikhane) August 10, 2019

* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.

Climate TBD.https://t.co/XsNHwwr4ar pic.twitter.com/mWzfqIlbe2

— Rosemary Mosco (@RosemaryMosco) August 12, 2019

* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?

* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.

* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.

* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”

* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.

* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.

* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.

* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.

* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?

* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.

* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.

* Behold: the meta-major!

* Abolish the business major!

* Sexism in the Academy.

* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.

* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.

* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.

* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.

* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.

Excitement aside I think the facts really do point to a prison system so monstrously incompetent and corrupt it couldn’t keep Epstein alive even when they knew everyone was watching. https://t.co/p4I7Y8otl3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2019

People want to see this as a conspiracy but imo the real story here is just that our criminal justice system destroys people's mental health and the mitigants against that damage are laughable. https://t.co/v0yAgmGcUM

— 🇧🇧🇹🇹🇺🇸👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🐕🌉 (@eparillon) August 14, 2019

* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.

* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.

* Understanding the escape room.

* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.

* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.

* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.

* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.

* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.

* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.

* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.

* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.

* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.

* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.

* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.

* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.

* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.

* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.

* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’

* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.

* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.

* The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.

* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.

* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.

* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.

* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”

* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.

* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’

* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?

* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.

* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.

* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.

* Batman, year by year.

This is a hilarious idea for a history of Batman from his initial publication onward. "Year by year, what movie was it that the ten-year old Bruce Wayne likely saw?" https://t.co/gEl3QLYtqU

— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 9, 2019

* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.

* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.

* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.

* Have you seen me lately?

* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.

* And good grief, It’s Jaws, Charlie Brown.

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.

* Brexit vs. Roko’s basilisk.

* 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.

* How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.

* All Along the Ivory Tower.

* 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.”

imagine being a billionaire and funneling all your stolen money into a fantasy plan to colonize mars like a cartoon villain instead of just like, planting trees

— ghoulia👻 (@c00lia) July 24, 2019

Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019

The glacier "Ok" used to be a glacier but lost its status as such in 2014 when it had shrunk too much. This is a brand new memorial shield in its honour. #climatechange pic.twitter.com/0YlIewvDJe

— Olafur Margeirsson (@IcelandicEcon) July 19, 2019

“the face app reveals a desire for a future which will never arrive” -just a friendly Wednesday afternoon text exchange

— Sarah Osment (@sm_osment) July 17, 2019

* 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

Children were hungry, children were traumatized. They consistently cried and some wept in their interviews with me. One 6 yo girl, detained all alone, could only say "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared" over and over again. She couldn't even say her own name.

— Brandi Buchman (@BBuchman_CNS) July 12, 2019

Forget about history; it’s like we didn’t learn anything from every single Twilight Zone episode.

— (((Goldwasser))) (@PurestRobin) July 16, 2019

* 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.

Qualified immunity is so out of control that these cases barely register. But here's another one from the 9th Circuit: Cops got qualified immunity for stealing someone's money because it isn't "clearly established" that cops can't steal your money. https://t.co/YSFqBraiHO

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 25, 2019

* 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.

That two-tweet sequence really is remarkable. "Aha! This demonstrates that the president's entire project has always been about white supremacy! (a beat) I reiterate my call to him to work with me on the kind of immigration policy we can both agree on"

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 14, 2019

my 32-year-old self strongly relates to this pic.twitter.com/AM9py4b7t9

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 25, 2019

Pelosi Concerned Outspoken Progressive Flank Of Party Could Harm Democrats’ Reputation As Ineffectual Cowards https://t.co/bF91vZf4oy pic.twitter.com/Zna5ZvvFZH

— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 25, 2019

 

* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.

It's tempting to think "oh man how can they be this stupid," but the truth is Pelosi and Schumer want McConnell to use the debt ceiling against them. They want the excuse to go back to their base and say "sorry, we tried, but those damn Republicans won't let us do anything." https://t.co/BYEqppv2jo

— derek davison (@dwdavison) July 22, 2019

* 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.

somewhere or another William Gibson describes the role of the science fiction writer as predicting what happened two years ago https://t.co/uDuTBck6kg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 25, 2019

* 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.

* Teenage pricks.

* 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.

* Nothing gold can stay dead.

* 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.

* “A high school gave 336 students fake AP exams when the district didn’t have funding to pay for the real ones. Students didn’t find out until real scores were posted online.”

* “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.

In 1989, the cash-strapped Soviet Union paid Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate & a destroyer in exchange for $3 bln worth of Pepsi. This caused Pepsi to become the 6th largest military power in the world for a moment, before they sold the fleet for scrap recycling. pic.twitter.com/zlsPLEV7re

— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) July 1, 2019

* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.

* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.

* Kodak and the cold war.

* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.

* Meth-gators in Alabama!

* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!

giant alligator flick Crawl is bad but actually good bc a) rising sea levels have made its setting broadly relatable & b) it's a competent, unpretentious genre movie, a dying mode that might be extinct in 10 years

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) July 16, 2019

* 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.

* Hacking the insulin pump.

* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.

* How the retweet ruined the Internet.

* Archaeology of the 99%.

* The Millennial nuns.

* 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.

It won;t happen but I always thought, what with the Picard series getting press, that a good plot point for a future trek is a split between a defeated but hostile Borg Collective and a newly emergent Borg Cooperative.

— John Leavitt 🌹 (@LeavittAlone) July 21, 2019

* 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.

been saying it for years, and will keep saying it: anomized precarity and a privatized forever war have offered a more fertile breeding ground for fascism – and stronger obstacles to resisting it – than a mass mobilized world war followed by a global depression ever could

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 27, 2019

* He did.

* And the good news is: We can’t lose!

Summer Syllabus: “21st Century Comics”

It’s been hectic enough around here that I’ve neglected to post the syllabus for my comics class this summer, rebranded this time around as “21st Century Comics” due to some repeat students in the class. Check it out! Here’s the week-by-week reading schedule:

	DATE	READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS
M	5/20	Introduction to the Course Action Comics #1 (in class)
T	5/21	Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, chapters 1-4
W	5/22	The Silver Age Superboy #1 [D2L] Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman” [D2L] Fantastic Four #1, Tales of Suspense #39, X-Men #1, and Hulk #1 [D2L]
Th	5/23	The Bronze Age and the Dark Age The Amazing Spider-Man #121 and Iron Man #128 [D2L] Saul Braun, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant” [D2L] Spencer Ackerman, “Iron Man vs. the Imperialists” [D2L] Watchmen (film clips) (in class) Batman v. Superman, The Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc. (in class)
M	5/27	MEMORIAL DAY—NO CLASS
T	5/28	Warren Ellis and John Cassady, Planetary, Book One (first half)
W	5/29	Warren Ellis and John Cassady, Planetary, Book One (second half)
Th	5/30	Warren Ellis and John Cassady, Planetary, Book Two (whole book)
M	6/3	Mark Millar and Dave Johnson, Superman: Red Son (first third)
T	6/4	Mark Millar and Dave Johnson, Superman: Red Son (whole book)
W	6/5	G. Woodrow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, Ms. Marvel, vol. 1
Th	6/6	G. Woodrow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona, Ms. Marvel, vol. 2
Sat	6/8	TAKE-HOME MIDTERM EXAMS DUE BY 5 PM
M	6/10	Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (first half)
T	6/11	Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (second half)
W	6/12	Chris Ware, Building Stories (workshop)
Th	6/13	Chris Ware, Building Stories (discussion)
M	6/17	Ben Passmore, “Your Black Friend” Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 (first half)
T	6/18	Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 (second half)
W	6/19	Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2 (whole book)
Th	6/20	David Mazzhuchelli, Asterios Polyp (first third)
M	6/24	David Mazzhuchelli, Asterios Polyp (second third)
T	6/25	David Mazzhuchelli, Asterios Polyp (whole book)
W	6/26	Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, Daytripper (first half)
Th	6/27	Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, Daytripper (second half) Thierry Groensteen, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?”
Sat	6/22	TAKE-HOME FINAL EXAMS DUE BY 5 PM