Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
Friday Night Links!
UPDATE: oof.
* ICYMI: Grad School Vonnegut #14: Happy Birthday, Wanda June! This one is Aaron’s “Vonnegut and Africa” episode.
* CFP: Utopia and Tabletop Games. CFP: NeMLA 2021 Creative Session, “Speculative Figures and Speculative Futures: Our Uncanny Postapocalypse.”
* Two core pieces of Watchmen criticism from my Watchmen class this week: “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore” and “The Forgotten Story of Watchmen’s Unsung Hero.” The second one comes via my pal Jacob Brogan, who was kind enough to shoot some ideas about Watchmen, Higgins, and auteurship with me back and forth the other day.
When I ask Damon Lindelof, showrunner for the upcoming HBO series Watchmen, about John Higgins, his mind goes straight to the Beatles. “John Higgins remains one of the unsung heroes of Watchmen,” he says. “Certainly Moore and Gibbons were John and Paul, but Higgins was George and Ringo combined, and his striking colors reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.”
Higgins was indeed a hero of the graphic novel that Lindelof’s show riffs on, having been the man who did the coloring for the book. That makes him one of only three collaborators who created the Watchmen comic, along with writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and he is indeed underappreciated, even by the book’s supporters. But even that bold analogy isn’t enough: It’s more as if Beatles fans assumed the band consisted only of John and Paul and didn’t even know George and Ringo existed, much less that they created music of their own.
* Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate.
* Wisconsin’s daily COVID-19 case count breaks record again, tops 2,500. They had to rescale Marquette’s COVID Dashboard today. Outbreak Stresses Town-Gown Relations in Wisconsin. Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus—but not because of parties and bars. Laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey. Skippin’ and a-jumpin’.
Slippage between multiple concepts described as “lockdown” and “quarantine” really doesn’t capture what the students in these quarantined dorms are experiencing. They’re being asked not to leave relatively tiny dorm rooms; even bathroom time is scheduled. The yard went up *today* https://t.co/a2vbvYEdwq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
They’re the dog that caught the car, now, though — having lured these students here they can hardly disperse them to the winds now. So they find themselves with a duty of care they never should have volunteered for and cannot responsibly provide. https://t.co/Jlv1sPUjvZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Huge, if true: The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn.
* Federal judge temporarily blocks USPS operational changes amid concerns about mail slowdowns, election. The U.S. Commerce Department has announced it plans to block downloads of the Chinese-owned social apps WeChat and TikTok, beginning on Sunday. “The Trump administration argued against a challenge to its 2020 census plans by saying the Constitution requires a count but does not say it must be accurate.” Bill Barr’s Titanic Lack of Self-Awareness. Independently of Trump and this presidency, William Barr, his henchmen, and his Federalist Society supporters represent a powerful threat to the fundamental values of liberal democracy. The Department of Education as Right-Wing Troll.
What Trump calls "patriotic education" is racist education.
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) September 18, 2020
the call for an explicitly fascist national curriculum is just the logical extension of all the 'PC culture has gone too far' rhetoric of the past few years and every one of you who contributed to that discourse is culpable
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 18, 2020
* Only going to get worse: NYPD Crushes Tiny Anti-ICE Protest With Overwhelming Force And Bloody Arrests.
* The U.S. Is on the Path to Destruction.
when I hear it I think MY KIDS ARE GOING TO DIE YOUNG AND MISERABLE BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU MONSTERS DID https://t.co/SHMAiSafZQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Friends And Family Members Of QAnon Believers Are Going Through A “Surreal Goddamn Nightmare.” It Makes Perfect Sense That QAnon Took Off With Women This Summer. Meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news. The Toxic Slime Will End Us.
* Where Is Biden’s Ground Game?
knocking on doors doesn’t win elections, an unprecedented massive dropout of all your opponents on the eve of Super Tuesday wins elections https://t.co/q23qXjHB2K
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
For a club for pathetic sad sacks who love to lose, the idea of somberly turning the keys to the planet over to Donald Trump on a technicality for the second time must be intoxicating
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
Ok this is pretty huge: the NYT says that if polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, Trump will win. This means we should actually assume Biden is losing, not winning. The lead is a mirage based on assuming that the exact same thing we’ve already seen can happen will not happen. pic.twitter.com/OWJ0sGxbZD
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) September 18, 2020
also, when Trump won the first time he did it from a position of laughing-stock weakness, rather than being at the head of a cult-like fascist movement that will break any law or norm to win, and not having full control of the executive, the Senate, and the courts https://t.co/xKz2VA85BJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
every tweet on this website should be this tweet https://t.co/gZ4PjZJ7JH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
we are less than two months out from the final crisis, and democrats are too busy declaring themselves 99.5% likely to win to hear what Republicans are already saying about the vote
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Ugh, Tatiana Maslany is great casting for She-Hulk. I thought I was done with these!
* Academic freedom in action: U of T law school under fire for opting not to hire human-rights scholar after pressure from sitting judge. Search for new director of U of T law faculty’s International Human Rights Program leads to resignations, allegations of interference.
* BLM and the University of Chicago English department. I had some thoughts about this (blessedly left out of the article) the other day (and again the next morning).
* Big Ten announces football returning Oct. 23-24. No confidence at the University of Michigan.
So we're going to more-or-less intentionally infect a bunch of (disproportionately nonwhite) student athletes with COVID-19 by making them play sports for our entertainment, then use them to study the heart damage caused by COVID-19.
Tuskegee vibes https://t.co/K7TZ7Hkevl
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) September 16, 2020
* The Black Community in Indianapolis has been left reeling — as shocking and disturbing details released in the last 24 hours have emerged regarding a disgraced activist exposed for posing as a Black Woman. This one has exciting estate fraud on the side.
* Restaurants need a bailout. The Big Corporate Rescue and the America That’s Too Small to Save. Inequality Robs $2.5B from American Workers Each Year.
* Russia’s space agency chief declares Venus a “Russian planet.” Quick, someone wake up Rachel Maddow!
sometimes i remember that if a clown wants to trademark their makeup they have to paint it on an egg that is stored in a special clown egg warehouse and then i have to go lie down pic.twitter.com/5ltP6aQzL5
— jø mårius (@jo_hauge) September 16, 2020
the implication here is that the face breathes
which means it has lungs and blood pic.twitter.com/fymeQTIGrr— Heather Anne Campbell (@heathercampbell) December 14, 2017
* When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned during the pandemic, governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed? Meanwhile, in Wisconsin: Tony Evers firing DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman over unemployment claim backlog.
* Pedagogy corner! The Moment Is Primed for Asynchronous Learning.
* Dallas school district apologizes for assignment describing Kenosha shooter as ‘hero.’
Given the last tweet, I wanted to share this. It's a tinotype photograph ftom 1856, of three unidentfied women from Harvard's collection. Note their style, and think about how black women are too often styled during that era when portrayed on film. pic.twitter.com/jGH89cvL39
— Octavia Butler Predicted This MAGA Dystopia (@MsGo) September 16, 2020
* Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
* The Boys confronts real American Nazis better than most comic-book stories.
* Songs of Love and Hate: “Layla” and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas.’
* Patrick Blanchfield goes deep into the Call of Duty storyworld in my menchies.
* And it’s not all bad news: the sequel to one of the best Metroidvania games I’ve played in years is out on the Switch. And I’ve been loving Baba Is You, too! It’s a golden age for video games. AND NOTHING ELSE.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 18, 2020 at 6:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, Africa, America, anti-racism, apocalypse, asynchronous learning, autocracy, Baba Is You, bars, Bill Barr, Black Lives Matter, blackfishing, Call of Duty, Castlevania, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, clowns, COBOL, college football, college sports, comics, comics studies, coronavirus, COVID-19, Department of Education, disability, Donald Trump, drama, dyslexia, ecology, Electoral College, English departments, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fantasy, fascism, film, Fox News, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, Goodfellas, Grad School Vonnegut, Green New Deal, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda June, How the University Works, ice, income inequality, Indianapolis, Joe Biden, Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, lockdown, Marquette, Marvel, masks, mass shootings, MCU, Metroid, millennials, moral panics, MSNBC, my media empire, Nazis, NCAA, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Ori and the Blind Forest, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, plays, podcasts, police violence, politics, QAnon, quarantine, quit lit, race, Rachel Dolezal, racism, Republicans, restaurants, Russia, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, speed runs, Super Mario, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, The Boys, the Census, the courts, the law, the stock market, Thomas the Tank Engine, TikTok, trolling, Tuskegee, unemployment, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, USPS, Utopia, Van Morrison, Venus, Vonnegut, voting, Watchmen, whiteness, William Blake, Wisconsin, zunguzungu
Thursday Morning Links!
* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.
* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.
* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.
* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.
* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.
* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.
To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp
— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020
Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.
— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020
When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020
1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020
* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.
One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020
you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire
— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020
* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.
It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu
— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020
I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020
so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020
* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.
* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.
* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.
* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.
robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.
* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.
* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.
* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.
* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.
* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.
* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.
* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.
https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705
TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law
DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020
* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.
"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD
— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020
* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.
* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.
* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
* New York’s homeless students.
* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.
* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.
* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.
* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’
* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!
* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?
* When does a model own her own image?
* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.
* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.
Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020
someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020
* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”
* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.
* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.
* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.
* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.
* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.
* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.
Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing
It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?
Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL
Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU
— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019
* We stan.
* Time Travel as White Privilege.
* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.
* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.
* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?
* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.
* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, America, Ancillary Review of Books, animals, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Black Lives Matter, Bob Barr, California, capitalism, Caster Semenya, children, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, college, college football, college sports, Colorado, concentration camps, copyright, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darko Suvin, David Graeber, democracy, deportation, depression, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dune, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, education, epidemic, eugenics, Evo Morales, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, film, floods, food, Fort Hood, games, gender, Georgia, guns, heat ray, HHS, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Krug, Joe Biden, John Cage, Journal of Science Fiction, kids today, Legend of Zelda, liberalism, Louis DeJoy, Marquette, Michigan, movies, Muppets, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, necroliberalism, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Orlando, outer space, pandemic, paranoia, parents, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, photography, podcasts, politics, presidential election 2020, protest, QAnon, race, racism, reality TV, Rice, Robert's Rules of Order, science fiction, Scott Pilgrim, screen time, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, self-driving cars, serial killers, sperm donation, sports, teaching, Tenet, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, the Senate, the truth is out there, this is fine, time travel, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unemployment, universal basic income, Utopia, Venezuela, Venus, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Washington, West Coast, whistleblowers, White House, white privilege, white saviors, wildfires, Won't somebody think of the children?, wormholes, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, Zoom
Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday
* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…
* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”
* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).
* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!
* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.
* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”
* A Message from Future Generations.
* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.
* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”
* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.
* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.
* Which doesn’t count the die-in.
Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette’s English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB
— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020
Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.
— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020
* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.
Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I’m not going to try and hurt them.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 29, 2020
* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.
Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ
— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020
* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.
* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.
* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”
* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.
If you’ve ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W
— stefanielaine🌹 (@stefanielaine) September 1, 2020
* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.
Obama is, mostly quietly and behind the scenes, the single most powerful counter-revolutionary force in 21st-century US politics https://t.co/QjAnCDOKCS
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 28, 2020
* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America’s Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.
* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin’s record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.
I think people outside the state just can’t fathom that Wisconsin’s gerrymander is real. Republicans take 60%+ majorities in the legislature no matter how many people vote for them. In 2018 they took 64% of the Assembly on 46% of the vote. https://t.co/FExUcedl4Z
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2020
* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America’s future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and ‘Triggering the Libs,’ Former Classmates Say.
* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. “When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society.” Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven’t killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission.
* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD’s Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.
Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality — including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred — in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) August 28, 2020
not sure anything has quite gotten to me the way the drive to make rittenhouse a right-wing hero of self-defense has. it is, to me, the single most ominous development of the year.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020
Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) “order.”
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020
Looking at what's gone down in Kenosha these few days—the police shooting, the immediate crackdown, the militia shooting—is just staring off a dizzying edge into the abyss, knowing things are about to get so much worse & hoping like hell there's some way we don't take the plunge.
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 26, 2020
* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.
* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after ‘rapid spread’ of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed’s Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here’s What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I’m weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I’ve got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students’ positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don’t Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.
* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We’re Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.
* Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here’s what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.
* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University’s Debt—And Who’s Paying for It.
* Legionnaire’s Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.
* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.
* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.
* Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.
Liberals hate leftists for the same reason you'd hate someone at a theater who kept yelling "These are all actors, none of this is real." Liberals are trying to enjoy a fictional performance about their side being heroic protagonists, and leftists keep disrupting the illusion.
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 27, 2020
* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.
* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we’re not talking about a government shutdown, are we? ‘We shouldn’t have to beg’: Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.
* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but “pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower” actually made me wince in pain.
* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.
* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens’ anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.
* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here’s why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.
* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.
* The Literature of White Liberalism.
* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada’s COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.
* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.
* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.
* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.
* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series’ real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.
* Why Uber’s business model is doomed.
* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season.
* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.
To get a sense for how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 1, 2020
* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).
* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on ‘Black Panther’ Without Chadwick Boseman.
* All roads lead back to All My Children.
* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it’s about time.
* Stan Lee’s American pantheon.
* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.
* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.
* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.
* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you’re feeling positive enough to get through your day.
* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labor Organizing Threats.’
One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."
— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020
* Understanding Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.
* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).
* Development ceases on Amazon Prime’s CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.
"Money implies poverty." — an adage in The Culture, Iain M. Banks
— Michael (Noble Continuation) (@OmanReagan) April 9, 2020
* Ah dinnae ken this: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots.
I was today years old when I learned that a “buttload” is an actual measue of volume dating back to middle English, equal to two “hogsheads,” or about 126 gallons.
— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) August 20, 2020
* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season to introduce franchise’s first transgender, non-binary characters.
* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive ‘jumping’ earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.
* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!
* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.
* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2020 at 4:19 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #RaceFail, 1918, 2021, academia, academic jobs, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, All My Children, Amazon, America, anti-racism, anxiety, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Batman, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Panther, Black Student Council, black studies, books, Call of Duty, CFPs, Chadwick Boseman, Charles R. Saunders, China, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CWRU, David Graeber, Deadeye Dick, debt, Deep Space Nine, depression, Disney, District 9, divorce, domestic terrorism, domestic violence, doomscrolling, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, earthworms, ecology, epidemic, Eugene V. Debs, evictions, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fan culture, fantasy, fascism, Florida, football, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Gloomhaven, Go, government shutdowns, Grad School Vonnegut, Great Recession, grief, GWU, herd immunity, How the University Works, Hurricane Laura, hydrochloroquine, Iain M. Banks, Incredible Hulk, Jailbird, James Madison University, Jed Rubenfeld, Jessica A. Krug, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kenosha, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kyle Rittenhouse, Legionnaire's disease, liberalism, literature, Louisiana, manifestos, Mario, Marquette, Marquette English, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miami, Milwaukee, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NBA, NC State, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Jersey, New Mutants, NFL, Nintendo, NYPD, Octavia Butler, Pacific Edge, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, pirates, podcasts, police, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, QAnon, Quakers, quarantine, race, racism, Sci-Hub, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, Scots, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA Review, social media, Spanish flu, sports, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, strikes, Super Mario, surveillance society, teaching, teenagers, tenure, terrorism, The Culture, the kids aren't all right, Three-Body Problem, TikTok, Twitter, Uber, UNC, unemployment, unions, University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, Vonnegut, Wakanda Forever, Watchmen, whiteness, wildcat strikes, Willy Wonka, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, X-Men, xkcd, Yale, zombies
Monday Links!
I’m pretty deep into the procrastination cycle of shame so don’t miss these still-perfectly-fresh Sunday Morning Links.
* Protests and state of emergency declared in Kenosha after a black man is shot seven times in front of his children after breaking up a fight. Despite erroneous social media reports, Jacob Blake remains alive and will hopefully survive this attack.
* The Pandemic Recession Is Approaching a Dire Tipping Point. ‘Not just a low-wage recession’: White-collar workers feel coronavirus squeeze. Goldman Sachs Confirms Roughly 4 Million Employees to Remain Unemployed Into 2022.
It’s Sunday so you should know that if the minimum wage had increased at the rate of productivity since 1960, it would be $22.50. Instead, it’s just $7.25. Meanwhile tens of millions of Americans today head to a second or third job because they can’t afford life’s basic needs.
— Joe Sanberg (@JosephNSanberg) August 23, 2020
* Chinese government releases new guidelines for science fiction.
* How Can We Plan for the Future in California? An extremely dire description of the situation.
1. This year, there will be no way to make even a dent in the fires with our tools. There is no small chance that vast swaths of major cities there will burn. I know, because I've fought wildfires, and everyone on my crew agrees: this month is the beginning of the end.
— Daniel Boguslaw (@DRBoguslaw) August 22, 2020
And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
“We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020
* Zoom Is Down at the Worst Possible Time wheeeeeeeee
* The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into. Blame Game.
* William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt.
* Seven missing Doctor Who episodes identified, in negotiations to be returned to the UK.
* Progressives have gotten all they can out of the election season. After November, they will have to raise a ruckus to secure victory. The Biden Era Will Put the New Left to the Test.
On balance I think things are so messed up that Biden will probably win but if not I want to lay down my marker that I think “Granddad likes ice cream” was the wrong message for four straight days of the DNC convention
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
I think we’ll see the US break up within my lifetime. Just don’t know if I’ll live fifty years or five. https://t.co/oxmSYSKOYq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
* 27 GOP ex-lawmakers back Biden on first day of Republican National Convention. No Sitting President Was As Far Behind As Trump Going Into The Conventions. Can Biden’s Center Hold?
* Un-Adopted: YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their parenting journey. Except the last.
* Job insecurity, low pay, working from home: we’re all millennials now.
* Neopets: A True Crime Story.
* 2020’s got my head so turned around Chuck Schumer made me laugh.
* And finally, some is making sense: Could We Force the Universe to Crash?
Written by gerrycanavan
August 24, 2020 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, adoption, America, Are we living in a simulation?, asteroids, California, capitalism, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, college, coronavirus, COVID-19, disability, Doctor Who, epidemic, Faulkner, general election 2020, How the University Works, Jacob Blake, Joe Biden, Kenosha, millennials, minimum wage, neopets, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, police brutality, police violence, politics, race, racism, Republican National Convention, science fiction, Second Great Depression?, teaching, true crime, unemployment, wildfires, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
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.
* 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.
* 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
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
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
* 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
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!
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2020 at 1:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, actually existing media bias, Alex Morse, America, ants, Are we living in a simulation?, Arizona State University, Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, Beirut, birthers, Black Lives Matter, Black Student Council, blackface, Bond, Candyland, capitalism, Captain Planet, CEOs, CFPs, child care, China, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, clothes, college, college football, comics, cop shit, coronavirus, corpocracy, COVID-19, cruises, decolonize everything, democracy, depression, derecho, diabetes, dibs on the screenplay, Disney, Disney World, dogs, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, ecology, energy, epidemic, essential workers, eviction, explosions, Extinction Rebellion, Facebook, family, fantasy, fascism, FiveThirtyEight, Flannery O'Connor, Florida, flu season, fMRIs, fraud, futurity, games, general election 2020, genocide, gerrymandering, Grad School Vonnegut, grading, grift, Hagar the Horrible, Hamilton, Hitler, hoaxes, homelessness, hospitals, How the University Works, hurricanes, ice sheet collapse, immunology, indigenous futurism, Iowa, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, Kamala Harris, kids today, labor, lame duck session, LAPD, layoffs, Lebanon, Legionnaire's disease, lithium, Louisiana, Lower Decks, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marquette English, masks, McDonald's, mental health, Millard Fillmore, Mt. Rushmore, my media empire, Nate Silver, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, Notre Dame, NRA, nuclearity, nursing homes, NYPD, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, pandemic, Paradoxa, parody, pedagogy, podcasts, poetry, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, Ponzi schemes, post-truth, power, protest, QAnon, race, racial slurs, racism, radiators, remote learning, Rent, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, sex, sitcoms, Slaughterhouse Five, social media, Star Trek, strikes, suicide, syllabi, teachers, teaching, Ted Chiang, terraforming, the Anthropocene, the Census, the economy, The Last Airbender, the Left, The Legend of Korra, The Legend of Zelda, The Matrix, the Midwest, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the suburbs, TikTok, tourism, true crime, Twilight Struggle, Twitter, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, unions, useful idiots, USPS, USSR, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, Wachowskis, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, Who's the Boss?, wildfire, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, zombies, Žižek
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
Happy July, everyone! Unfortunately, I'm convinced that this month will be one of the worst months that American higher education has experienced in a long time. Thread alert. (1/)
— Robert Kelchen (@rkelchen) July 1, 2020
At root, the political economy of colleges and universities in the United States has been rebuilt in a matter of several decades around an understanding of higher education as a service sold to student consumers rather than a public good.
— Aaron Jakes (@aaronjakes) July 3, 2020
Three truths about the upcoming semester:
1. Any F2F class is going to be awkward, weird, and uncomfortable. Stop pretending it won't be.
2. We will all be online at some point whether one wants to admit it or not.
3. There will be illnesses and deaths that were preventable.— HyFlex Course in Radical Left Indoctrination (@TheTattooedProf) July 14, 2020
I imagine I’d have mixed feelings if it were my workplace knowing that none of us are getting paid and that if the coronavirus that is being inflicted upon us by our millionaire bosses permanently damages our lungs we lose our scholarships https://t.co/taGTpA4ZMk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
Liberals were right about George W Bush and they’re right about Donald Trump. The Republican Party is a political party incapable of governing the nation without ushering in death, devastation, and national humiliation. Just the facts.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 11, 2020
This is a poem about America. pic.twitter.com/QsaCb3GwVS
— Amanda Guinzburg (@Guinz) July 8, 2020
I would say that the coronavirus period in the US has been characterized by the pathological refusal to prioritize anything over anything else, in accordance with the larger neoliberal tendency to pretend all social outcomes are exclusively the product of autonomous market action https://t.co/bvmSPlt67S
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020
Prince literally said two thousand zero zero party OOP it’s out of time and we didn’t listen
— Wʏɴᴛᴇʀ Mɪᴛᴄʜᴇʟʟ (Rᴏʜʀʙᴀᴜɢʜ) (@wyntermitchell) July 13, 2020
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.
* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”
* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
Wisconsin GOP wins power in 2010, gerrymander the legislature such that they can win a supermajority of seats without a majority of votes, pack the state courts, and raise new barriers and obstacles to voting. When Democrats win nonetheless, they strip power from the offices. https://t.co/yaIC43V7zi
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 9, 2020
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
I've skimmed the Democrats' brand new climate plan and it stinks! https://t.co/jbVdecOUEO
— Mike Pearl (@MikeLeePearl) June 30, 2020
* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
A reminder that after he returned from destroying the ring, Frodo temporarily served as Deputy Mayor of the Shire, and his sole act was to defund the police pic.twitter.com/jmEVWzOvmP
— Samuel Miller McDonald (@sjmmcd) June 27, 2020
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
— Daphne K. Lee (@daphnekylee) June 28, 2020
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
J.K. Rowling, again, is arguably the most successful person of her generation in her field, revered internationally, and a billionaire, and she has nonetheless made herself a miserable pariah through this pathetic, deluded obsession with other people’s genitals. makes you think https://t.co/5eXlQtbyqU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2020
1. abolish the suburbs
2. attack and dethrone god
3. taco trucks on every corner
4. hamburgers eat people https://t.co/gRhNWXXFcA— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2020
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64
— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.
* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64
— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
July 15, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1999, academia, Action Park, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air travel, America, American Airlines, amusement parks, animal studies, apocalypse, Arizona, astronomers, Beirut, Big Bird, Biosphere 2, Black Panther 2, blackface, cars, Cedric Burrows, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Clone High, coffee, collapse, college closures, Colson Whitehead, comic boos, community, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dan Hassler-Forest, Dead Astronauts, decline, decolonize everything, denial, deportation, disability, domestic violence, Donald Trump, dystopia, epidemic, equity, expertise, Extrapolation, Far Side, film, folklore, found poetry, fracking, franchise fiction, franchises, fraud, free speech, game studies, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, Ghislaine Maxwell, Golden Compass, Golden Girls, Hamilton, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, Hell, His Dark Materials, hoaxes, How the University Works, ice, illiberalism, immigration, Ishmael Reed, J.K. Rowling, Janelle Monae, Jeff Vandermeer, Jim Henson, kids today, Kung Fu Nuns of Kathmandu, Latin America, liberalism, Locus Award, Marquette, Mars, McDonald's, medical humanities, medicine, millennials, movies, Mt. Rushmore, Muppets, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, nerds, New York, North Carolina, Obama, Octavia Butler, one-party rule, online classes, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, Philip Pullman, podcasts, police, politics, poverty, Prince, quarantine, race, racial slurs, racism, rape, rape culture, Reddit, religion, Republicans, resistance, revenge bedtime procrastination, revolution, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scrabble, Second Great Depression?, Serena Williams, sexual assault, Shakespeare, Silicon Valley, sleep, socialism, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, stimulus package, Storm, suicide, teaching, tech industry, tennis, tenure, the Anthropocene, The Book of Martha, the courts, the deaf, the economy, the humanities, the law, theme parks, Thomas Jefferson, trans* issues, true crime, Twin Peaks, unemployment, unschooling, Utopia, Vonnegut, Washington Racial Slurs, waste, white supremacy, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, zombies
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
Look, let's be real. The ultimate reason the economy "must" "reopen" is so that we everyone can once more be individually blamed for their own unemployment, desperation, etc in this coming depression. It is fundamentally dangerous to our system to have masses of people 1/2
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
simultaneously unable to work or make basic ends meet in a way that would suggest blame lies elsewhere than on them (whether in the virus, our leaders' failures, quarantine orders, market chicanery, etc), that is collectively experienced, and that might give them ideas. 2/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
this pandemic sharpens a divide that already existed, between those of us whose labor is "inessential" but who have the privilege of, basically, hibernating indefinitely, and those whose labor is "essential," but whose lives are treated as disposable
— Eric Weiskott (@ericweiskott) April 5, 2020
Everything we're doing – IE tokenistic "aid" (which just funnels money back to creditors and landlords) – is just the barest minimum not for survival, but to ensure that we can blame people for their own starvation and misery once things are "normal" again. That's it. 3/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
The wildcat strikes that are happening across the country now are important not just for their immediate goal of saving lives but in the long term they are the only thing we have to face down the monstrosity of austerity that this pandemic will leave it its wake.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) April 10, 2020
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wild billinair he parbly ben the las wyld billinair on Longisland any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint looking to see none agen. https://t.co/Q2xpiRAM1f
— Gregory Hays (@aristofontes) April 3, 2020
2020 is going really well. My timeline is mostly debating:
1. Would you kill a million Americans to save the economy?
2. Is it possible to save the economy by killing a million Americans?— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) April 16, 2020
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
Hearing on Facebook that Zizek is uploading new chapters to his COVID book like DLC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
Milwaukee resident Jennifer Taff requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago, never got it. She has a father dying from lung disease and then waited hours in line to vote at Washington High School. Photo from Patricia McKnight.
More: https://t.co/i7weo2xdfv pic.twitter.com/ceHb2i8zpC
— JR Radcliffe (@JRRadcliffe) April 7, 2020
The City of Milwaukee is experiencing a surge of cases on the south side, Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik says.
— Mary Spicuzza (@MSpicuzzaMJS) April 17, 2020
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
The United States is a failed state: Five theses. pic.twitter.com/VbtrsZajIH
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 6, 2020
By including Kentucky, we are telling Iowa and Dakotas things about themselves in a tone that only Upper Midwesterners can hear. https://t.co/aQvfAdWTSZ
— Maggie Koerth (@maggiekb1) April 16, 2020
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
This is going to be one of the iconic images of the pandemic, from photographer @todseelie:
Homeless Americans sleeping in taped squares in a parking lot, while the Las Vegas strip, full of empty hotel rooms, shimmers behind them. https://t.co/Sy2Qq5rcpK pic.twitter.com/QRZHckPZrt
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) April 15, 2020
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
EXACTLY https://t.co/tC1Djqb5FV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
Opening up the economy prematurely will kill off every small and marginal business in the country even if you don’t immediately have to go into shutdown again three weeks later (which you would). People are too freaked and won’t spend at their own levels, esp. in wide gatherings.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
oh so no more restaurants then https://t.co/DOJTeDaway
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
Money is a social fiction, which you see in the way they can simply summon more out of the aether when they need it. But the amount of debt spending we’re all about to do is going to be hard to honor afterwards when we know perfectly well we could just say it all never happened.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 9, 2020
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
since the world is filled with rhinos and you can’t catch them all, you need social forms that are generous, resilient, and devoted to harm reduction, elimination, and amelioration, rather than the incredibly brittle and cruel modes of social organization we use now
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
the coronavirus memes are extremely good pic.twitter.com/3dkZMAeFIk
— love one another (@girlziplocked) April 13, 2020
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
Another rare but instantly iconic shot of the Muppets being puppeteered. Apparently Sesame Street is filming at their homes. pic.twitter.com/Fj8to2P1Wu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
I thought I’d predicted a PICARD-style deconstruction of the original jouissance of SAVED BY THE BELL, revealing the characters destroyed by time, but perhaps that one was just for me https://t.co/9a2vSCn7ZT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
One way of thinking the Anthropocene is that it is when geological time starts to move more quickly than historical time.
— chica marx (@mckenziewark) April 17, 2020
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 17, 2020 at 4:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, admissions, Adrian Tchaikovsky, AI, air pollution, alienation, aliens, Amazon, America, America in ruins, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, backwards universes, baseball, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, black swans, books, Boomers, call for papers, Cape Cod Statement, cats, Charles Yu, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, class struggle, climate change, COBOL, collapse, college, comics, Corey Robin, coronavirus, cost of thriving, COVID-19, cruises, cyberpunk, Deep Space 9, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, devolution, Donald Trump, Doogie Howser, elections, epidemic, extrasolar planets, failed states, Fox News, Fraggle Rock, futurity, general election 2020, grading, gray rhinos, guns, Hamilton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hugos, Joe Biden, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Las Vegas, lawsuits, LEGO, Los Angeles, medicine, megadrought, memes, Miami, middle class, Mike Pence, Milwaukee, money, movie theaters, Muppets, Navajo Nation, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, politics, Port Huron Statement, professional wrestling, protest, race, racism, Reddit, release the butthole cut, remdesivir, Republicans, resistance, restaurants, revolution, Saved by the Bell, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, stimulus, Stonehenge, strikes, Students for a Democratic Society, Tawain, teaching, the Anthropocene, The Apprentice, the economy, the humanities, the Midwest, The Ministry for the Future, the Moon, the sublime, the university in ruins, travel, UBI, unemployment, Utopia, vaccines, veepstakes, Vegas, voting, Weird Al, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, WWE, Žižek
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.
That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, America, apocalypse, art, Big Oil, Big Soda, Britney Spears, Chicago, children's books, China Miéville, class struggle, college, college sports, condoms, coronovirus, crisis, cruise ships, Dan Albergotti, democracy, Democrats, depression, divorce, DNC, domestic violence, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Elon Musk, Extrapolation, federalism, Felix Guattari, film, financial exigency, Frosthaven, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, hippos, homelessness, How the University Works, Joe Biden, journalism, kids today, language, Last Supper, loneliness, mad science, magnets, maps, Mario, medicine, Milwaukee, my scholarly empire, NCAA, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, originalism, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, Picard, plastic, poetry, police, politics, postdocs, prison-industrial complex, recession, remote learning, Republicans, revolution, Rick and Morty, Samuel R. Delany, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, strikes, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The World's End, TNG, toilet paper, unemployment, Utopia, voting, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, xkcd, YA literature, Zoom
Friday Night Links!
* Don’t miss the descriptions for the upcoming English courses at Marquette (including my new courses on “Utopia in America” and Moore and Gibbons’s “Watchmen”).
* Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear. Coronavirus Reappears in Discharged Patients, Raising Questions in Containment Fight. Coronavirus and the election. The pandemic must be revenue neutral. This week’s stock market meltdown, explained. You’re only as healthy as the least-insured person in society. Okay, now I’m worried.
* Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders. Democrats float Sherrod Brown as ‘white knight’ 2020 nominee, Michelle Obama as vice president. I’m sure he has our best interests at heart. The obvious folly of a white knight convention candidate. Get excited.
* Truly disgusting smear job on Andrew Walz, the only candidate who can beat Trump.
* Graduate Student Strikes Are Spreading in California. Not over yet at UCSC.
* The Lies Graduate Programs Tell Themselves.
* Heathrow airport expansion ruled unlawful on climate change grounds.
* Since chronic restriction of sleep to 6 h or less per night produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation, it appears that even relatively moderate sleep restriction can seriously impair waking neurobehavioral functions in healthy adults. Sleepiness ratings suggest that subjects were largely unaware of these increasing cognitive deficits, which may explain why the impact of chronic sleep restriction on waking cognitive functions is often assumed to be benign.
* Fast-and-loose culture of esports is upending once staid world of chess.
* I have questions. A lot of questions.
* A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it.
* Video-game therapy may help treat ADHD, study finds.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2020 at 4:48 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, actually existing media bias, ADD, ADHD, Alan Moore, America, apocalypse, beards, Bernie Sanders, capitalism, chess, class struggle, climate change, comics, coronavirus, David Gibbons, Democratic National Convention, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, dogs, epidemic, esports, Fredric Jameson, games, graduate student life, graduate student movements, health insurance, How the University Works, Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid Guy, labor, London, Marquette, Michelle Obama, my pedagogical empire, pandemic, pedagogy, police, police corruption, politics, Sherrod Brown, sleep, sleep debt, sleep deprivation, teaching, time travel, Twitter, UC Santa Cruz, Utopia, Watchmen, work, writing, X-Men
Upcoming English Courses at Marquette! “Utopia in America” and “Watchmen”
Descriptions for the upcoming courses for Fall 2020 are up at the English department website. Here are mine:
ENGLISH 3000: CRITICAL PRACTICES AND PROCESSES IN LITERARY STUDIES
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, Donna Haraway, Margaret Atwood, and Ursula K. Le Guin — 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, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Philip K. Dick.
Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; discussion posts; three papers. Students will also construct their own utopian manifesto.
ENGLISH 4717/5717: COMICS AND GRAPHIC NARRATIVE
101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Watchmen
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, several shorter papers, or creative/curational project
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2020 at 4:31 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Alan Moore, America, comics, David Gibbons, Fredric Jameson, Marquette, my pedagogical empire, pedagogy, teaching, Utopia, Watchmen
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
perhaps the real message of The Lord of the Rings was that only people who are well-rested, enjoy plenty of leisure time and have a healthy work/life balance are capable of accomplishing what needs to be done
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) February 22, 2020
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”
* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
why must i "earn" a graduate degree? is it not enough to lie in bed reading octavia butler short stories, unhinged?
— ren / josh / crow (@ymirjotunn) February 18, 2020
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
Because of "Watchmen." Decades of historians have been trying to let the world know about this massacre, and it took an alternate history comic book drama to break the wall of racism. IDK whether to laugh or cry, but let no one say fiction has no power in the real world. https://t.co/l7ixJN5JlQ
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 20, 2020
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* Actually existing media bias.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
he’s most famous for his racist policing, endorsed Bush in 2004, was a Republican until his 60s and the 2010, AND was the mayor of a famously corrupt city who used his personal wealth to purchase favorable political outcomes! the NDAs barely crack the top five https://t.co/4KMFiK6bSR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2020
The central argument for a Bloomberg campaign is that we could have all the fascism and ethnic cleansing of a Trump presidency without being embarrassed about it when we summer in Paris.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2020
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.
* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
2HAM2TON
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: TOKYO DRIFT
H4MILTON
HAM FIVE
HAM & TON 6
TON 7
THE HAM OF THE ILTON
HAMILTON PRESENTS: JEFFERSON AND BURR https://t.co/hXQtjYzNeA— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2020
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
A whatchamacallit in different languages:
7. Thingamajig (English)
6. Chingadera (Spanish)
5. Himstergims (Danish)
4. Naninani (Japanese)
3. Zamazingo (Turkish)
2. Dingsbums (German)
1. Huppeldepup (Dutch)— Adam Sharp (@AdamCSharp) February 17, 2020
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.
just realized wes anderson essentially makes whitesploitation movies and i'm into it
— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) April 16, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2020 at 4:04 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, Adderall, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, apartheid, apps, art, artificial wombs, autism, basketball, Bernie Sanders, Biden, billionaires, blindness, Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, carbon, CBP, CFPs, Chevron, Choose Your Own Adventure, class struggle, climate change, college closures, comics, coronavirus, cults, CVs, David Foster Wallace, Democratic primary 2020, denaturalization, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, e-sports, eating meat, ecology, English departments, English majors, environmental racism, Europe, falling short of expectations, farts, film, fire, Florida, food, free speech, futurity, games, Gamestop, Generation Z, Get Out, graduate student life, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, Grubhub, Hamilton, health insurance, Heaven's Gate, history, How the University Works, ice, Infinite Jest, insects, irony, Joanna Russ, Kickstarter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Konami code, labor, landmines, Last and First Men, libel, Locus, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, manuscripts, maps, mass shootings, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Mr. Peanut, music, my media empire, Nelson Mandela, New York, New York Times, Nintendo, North Korea, Octavia Butler, Olaf Stapledon, opioids, orcs, organ transplants, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parasite, peace in our time, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, pharmacies, photography, podcasts, politics, polls, pollution, Ponzi schemes, PornHub, post-liberalism, postdocs, Proletarocene, Punic War, QAnon, race, Republicans, Rome, Rotten Tomatoes, Sarah Lawrence, scams, schizophrenia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, SFRA, South Africa, spicy memory, Star Wars, strikes, Target, taxes, teaching, television, Tesla, the Constitution, the courts, The French Dispatch, The Good Place, The High Republic, the humanities, the Internet, the law, the Left, The Scream, theme parks, therapy, they paved paradise, tigers, Toba catastrophe, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Tulsa massacre, twins, Uber, UC Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, Utopia, waste, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, whitesploitation, Wikipedia, Wisconsin, words, work, workers, YouTube
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Another project of mine I’d love for you to be a part of (and to spread far and wide): CFP: Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom.
* CFP: Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency (A Nearly Carbon-Free Virtual Symposium). GoFundMe for the Marquette Graduate Conference on Death and Dying.
* History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage. Britt Rusert on The Radical Lives of Abolitionists.
* The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought.
* Rethinking “Introduction to Art History” at Yale.
it’s an amazing con that the right can bash our classes for being useless and then turn around five minutes later and bash them for being too important to mess with https://t.co/KGDzza45L7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2020
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department. Hanging Out — and Hanging On — at the MLA. Why I’m optimistic about the future of the humanities.
* Their end goal is not total cancellation of student-loan debt. It’s widespread acceptance of the idea that education in the 21st century is a basic need, and that it’s immoral to force people to go into debt to attain it.
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin Reread.
* Today in the hell world: Concentration camp memorials seeing rise in far-right visitors.
— Midwest Unrest (@MW_Unrest) January 25, 2020
* That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful.” Holding a City Hostage is Peaceful Now?
* Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group.
* Huge, if true: Crime Shows Are A ‘PR Machine’ For Law Enforcement.
* Liberal environmentalism y’all.
This what all them environmentalist talking points is calling for on the low pic.twitter.com/YygVM1mTDk
— w. e. b DAT NOIZE (@RantzFanon) January 23, 2020
eco-fascism is gonna become a bigger problem soon and it'll be the liberals paving the way for it, just as usual https://t.co/djQ3QMG50d
— hsna (@BlazeQuark) January 25, 2020
* An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey. Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data.
* But mostly I thought Twitter would be a nightmare because I could immediately forecast the divide between two groups of people: those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First.
* The absurdity of the neoliberal university. “Do I do research or pay rent?” Grad students in Santa Cruz start a wildcat strike.
* Why Attendance Policies Hurt Disabled and Chronically Ill Students.
* 25 Years of Fan Casting X-Men Movies.
* I’m pretty sure midnight was 35 minutes ago.
* Quentin Tarantino: I am in combat with blockbuster franchises. Wasn’t he going to make a Star Trek movie a few days ago?
* Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy.
Y’ALL I asked Amy to put up some “please pardon our progress” signs on the empty cases and I am UNDONE pic.twitter.com/y198SXo3D7
— Madeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay) January 22, 2020
* Celebrating Nancy Drew’s 90th Birthday the Only Way I Know How.
* Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?
* I am honestly and truly giving up.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sara Nelson for President.
just a totally different conception of what labor can do than pretty much the entire rest of labor leadership in this country. god bless her https://t.co/XSC3mo7hob
— marge 🕯 bernie (@mags_mclaugh) January 27, 2020
* Michael Light, Ellen Dinsmore and Michael Massoglia examined a database of federal criminal felony offenses that includes case type, defendant characteristics, court location, and judge-specific data. They find non-U.S. citizens living in New York and Washington D.C were eight percent more likely to be imprisoned than U.S. citizens after 9/11. The increased likelihood of incarceration for non-citizens in New York and D.C. was evident for a full four years after September 11, 2001. Courts in the Context of Crisis.
* Puberty blockers can be ‘life-saving’ drugs for trans teens, study shows.
Researchers reached that conclusion by analyzing data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey, involving 20,619 people between the ages of 18 and 36 years old.
hey just like America https://t.co/KCj0q72YOi
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2020
there’s a location in the storyworld called “utopia,” and when PICARD opens everyone who lived there is dead and it’s been on fire ever since https://t.co/uZsD0VMxY3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2020
* A few people have been tossing around my old Star Trek essay “We Have Never Been Star Trek” because the Picard launch too.
* A Utah Woman Was Charged for Going Topless in Her Own Home. Her Legal Case Is Not Going Great.
* Angry white men have declared war on the planet (again).
* Werner Herzog hears Paul F. Tompkins’ “Yelp Review for Trader Joe’s on Hyperion.”
Because you might need it today, here's Joey Ramone on prom night. pic.twitter.com/jpVPihYwrS
— Richard Kadrey (@Richard_Kadrey) January 28, 2020
* What could go wrong? Nuclear waste recycled into diamond batteries with “near-infinite power.”
Written by gerrycanavan
January 28, 2020 at 11:32 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 9/11, a poor dancer blames his pants, abolitionism, abortion, academia, academic departments, Afro-pessimism, America, art, art history, attendance, blockbusters, Captain Planet, CFPs, China, climate change, conference, coronavirus, crime fiction, crime shows, dark side of the digital, death, depression, detective fiction, disability, Doomsday Clock, dying, ecology, English departments, environmentalism, film, franchises, free speech, grad student movements, guns, health insurance, history, Hitler youth, How the University Works, Kobe Bryant, labor, language, loneliness, maps, Marquette, millennials, misogyny, MLA, movies, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, Nancy Drew, Nazis, neo-Nazis, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, optimism, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, police state, police violence, postcolonialism, propaganda, puberty, Quentin Tarantino, radicalism, rape culture, Richmond, Sara Nelson, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, social media, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, Tarantino, teaching, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Ramones, the university in runs, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, UC Santa Cruz, unions, University of Minnesota, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utah, Utopia, Virginia, virtual conferences, Werner Herzog, white men, white nationalism, white people, women, X-Men, Yale
Wednesday Night Links!
* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.
* Shoot this post into my veins.
Shoot this post into my veins. pic.twitter.com/YNsOgnRAM3
— Detective Pikajew (@clapifyoulikeme) January 22, 2020
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.
* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!
* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.
* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.
* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.
* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!
* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.
* When rich people can’t get along.
* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.
* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.
* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.
* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.
* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.
* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).
* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.
* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.
* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!
* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’
* The things you learn on Twitter.
Makes sense. Google used Enron emails to train its autocomplete. The dead ghosts of corporate malfeasance speak through us all now: https://t.co/fSzqQ5HCYO
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 21, 2020
* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.
* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.
* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’
Written by gerrycanavan
January 22, 2020 at 4:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, accessibility, administrative blight, affordability, Amazon, artificial intelligence, Australia, autocomplete, Bernie Sanders, Brazil, canon, canonicity, carbon, CBP, CFPs, child labor, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, coal, comics, Cops, Davos, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emails, endorsements, English, English departments, Enron, eviction, fascism, games, Glenn Greenwald, Google, Greta Thunberg, Hillary Clinton, hostages, Houston, How the University Works, ice, immigration, impeachment, internet of beefs, Iran, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, John Kerry, journalism, laptops, LEGO, memes, Microsoft, millionaires, Mitt Romney, Monopoly, Mr. Peanut, N.K. Jemisin, nature, New York, New Yorker, Oakland, October Surprise, pedagogy, philosophy, Picard, plastic, politics, rich people, robots, Ronald Reagan, rule of law, Saudi Arabia, science, science fiction, sex, single payer, social credit, social media, Star Trek, status, teaching, the courts, the law, the rent is too damn high, the truth is out there, treason, Twitter, UFOs, Untitled Goose Game, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wendy's, wildfires, Žižek
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
* 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.
* 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
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).
* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 16, 2020 at 2:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Airbnb, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, America, artificial intelligence, Australia, Baby Boomers, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Binti, blogs, boondoggles, capitalism, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Ware, Christopher Tolkien, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, climate fiction, coffee, college football, college sports, comics, Curb Your Enthusiasm, DC, deportation, depression, domestic violence, Donald Trump, ecology, ed tech, empire, English departments, Episode 9, eugenics, F-Stop, fascism, film, Finland, fraud, futurity, games, Generation Z, graphic novels, HBO, health care, Hollywood, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, Iceland, immigration, intergenerational struggle, Iran, Isaac Asimov, Jack Kirby, Larry David, Lord Byron, Lord of the Rings, malls, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, MCU, medicine, memory, Middle-Earth, Miles Morales, millennials, misogyny, MIT, MLA, money, my media empire, my scholarly empire, negativity, Nnedi Okorafor, nostalgia, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organized crime, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, Picard, poetry, police, politics, Portal, post-truth, protest, public domain, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, relationships, retirement, Rusty Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Scrabble, sexism, sexual harassment, single pager, Slaughterhouse Five, small liberal arts colleges, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, superheroes, syllabi, Taiwan, Tarantino, teaching, television, the 2010s, the 2020s, the Arctic, the Catholic Church, the humanities, the long now, the Olympics, The Rise of Skywalker, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, The Wonder Years, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, truth, Twitter, UFOs, ultracrepidarians, Unexpected Stories, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vermont, Vonnegut, walking simulators, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Watchmen, Westworld, wildfires, William Wordsworth, World Science Fiction Studies, zunguzungu