Posts Tagged ‘tenure’
It’s Been a Minute: Links!

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

- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020
Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY
— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020
The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020
(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.
— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2020 at 3:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Amazon, America, artificial intelligence, austerity, Baltimore, Black Panther, Bolsonaro, books, CFPs, cinema, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, Cookie Monster, COVID-10, cyberpunk, Democrats, demographic cliff, disability, Disney, ecology, elections, fantasy, fascism, futurity, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Georgia, Guilford College, Harlan Ellison, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, intergenerational warfare, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Mars, millennials, Mitch Daniels, moms, MUPD, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Octavia Butler, pandemic, podcasts, police, politics, publishing, Purdue, race, racism, Republicans, roleplaying games, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, SFRA Review, shared governance, socialism, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, stimulus checks, student debt, syllabi, Ted Chiang, tenure, Texas, the Amazon, the Arctic, the economy, The Fifth Season, The Last Dangerous Visions, the Left, The Ministry for the Future, the university in ruins, Tolkien, true crime, UVM, vaccines, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing
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
What? THURSDAY Links? In This Economy?
* Sneak preview: the landmark Paradoxa “climate fictions” issue, edited by the great Ali Sperling!
* The 2020 Hugo Awards: The Political Hugo.
* A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming. Almost one-third of Florida children tested are positive for the coronavirus. Most air conditioning systems don’t protect against the coronavirus. In some cases, they can actually facilitate spread. How Arizona blew it. UnitedHealth posts most profitable quarter in its history. Disney World Fully Reopens to Crowds as Florida Surpasses 300K Coronavirus Cases. 51.3 million.
* First Coronavirus Vaccine Tested in Humans Shows Early Promise. The University of Oxford candidate, led by Sarah Gilbert, might be through human trials in September.
* More Than 40 Mayors Outline Their Vision for a Green Coronavirus Recovery.
* It’s the “bring their own chairs” part that makes it art. Budget ‘Bloodbath’ at University of Akron.
what if everything being cake when you cut it open has something to do with how some many things in this moment are being pared away and revealed to made of total shit
— inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended (@PatBlanchfield) July 15, 2020
* Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state.
* Giving the NYPD the power to declare journalists enemy combatants at whim seems bad actually. Biden winning by so much that maybe even Biden couldn’t blow it. The media is covering this election all wrong.
* Another Monument to White Supremacy That Should Come Down? The Electoral College.
* Doomsday Clock only ended in December, but DC is already trying to sequelize Watchmen again. And elsewhere on the Watchmen beat: The Simpsons Watchmen Parody Is As Weird As You’d Expect.
I'm all for a new Watchmen comic about Rorschach as long as his mask doesn't have that picture of my parents having sex on it anymore.
— Paranoid Andy Edwards (@eds209) July 15, 2020
* How did they write a graverobbing Gatsby prequel and then make it about Nick Carraway? Obviously the book is Jay Gatz.
* The most interesting thing you can just barely understand: How Gödel’s Proof Works.
Mutant puppies and military grade hardware: who funds the Paw Patrol?
— Tade Thompson (@tadethompson) July 15, 2020
thinking about USPS, tax day, that two-year period of complete Democratic control of government we had a while ago, and how many small and easy things they didn't fix on account of none of them being normal people with normal problems
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) July 16, 2020
there's literally no reaching people who think "repealing an obscure 2006 bill that intentionally bankrupted the post office" was too heavy a lift for a party that had merely 57 Senate votes in 2009
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) July 16, 2020
* What It’s Like to Be Single in Your 60s With $233,921 in Student Debt.
* All the blue checks got hacked and Twitter still wasn’t fun anymore. I did like talking the MCU with you all this morning, though. Backgrounder: Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts.
* America’s child care problem is an economic problem.
* The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
* ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born.
* And knives out for Joss Whedon. Just incredible to see his reputation transform like this.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 16, 2020 at 9:12 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, abolition, academia, adjunctification, air conditioning, Airbnb, Arizona, Aurora, Cake, child care, Children of Men, climate change, coronavirus, COVID-19, Disney World, Doomsday Clock, Electoral College, Florida, Green Recovery, health insurance, How the University Works, incompleteness, Joss Whedon, journalism, Kanye, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Gödel, Marvel, MCU, minimum wage, NYPD, pandemic, Paradoxa, PAW Patrol, pedagogy, prequels, public health, Rice University, Risk, Rorschach, science fiction, science fiction studies, student debt, tenure, the economy, The Great Gatsby, the rent is too damn high, The Simpsons, the suburbs, Twitter, University of Akron, unnecessary sequels, USPS, vaccines, Watchmen, white supremacy, xkcd
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
Lockdown Megapost Part One, Just the Bad News for Academia
* Decision Points Loom for College Leaders. Certainly Uncertain. Preventing the Collapse of Higher Education. Here’s what Fauci said about college students returning to campus in the fall. Colleges Are Deluding Themselves. The Case Against Reopening. Colleges Aren’t Reopening in the Fall. Empty Lecture Halls, No Fall Football, a Freshman-Only Campus. A Playbook for a Second-Choice Fall. This little piggy went online for the fall; this little piggy stayed in the dorm. The pandemic is the time to resurrect the public university. UW System leader eyes academic program cuts, layoffs at some campuses in COVID-19 plan. Missouri Western cuts 30 percent of the faculty, along with programs in history, political science, sociology, economics, music and more. Kean University slashes academic programs, faculty amid pandemic. Western Michigan University lays off 240 employees, enacts pay cuts for others. CUNY. OU. Northwestern. Madison. Duke. Marquette. Everyone. Colleges Worry They’ll Be Sued if They Reopen Campuses. Coronavirus Will End the Golden Age for College Towns. Game Over for the NCAA. University Leaders Are Failing.
* Will students show up for college in fall 2020? Colleges Could Lose 20% of Students. As Students Put Off College, Anxious Universities Tap Wait Lists. Another pandemic-related threat to universities: falling numbers of graduate students. How the Coronavirus Will — or Should — Transform Graduate Education.
the question is not whether universities should reopen in the fall or whether online teaching can be helpful. Rather there is s set of crucial issues about how this happens, and whether universities are
a) arranging to charge students full price for a lesser education. (Cont)— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
b) dissembling to students so as to get that money
c) seizing the crisis to pivot to online courses longterm despite overwhelming findings that people learn less and also don’t like it
d) using this pivot to cut teachers and staff(Cont)
— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
e) increase workload on surviving employees esp low-paid staff
f) render surviving employees (more) precarious
g) break a vital & growing labor movement among grad student workers
h) decrease teacher:student ratioEvery single one of these is happening & should be opposed.
— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
* A Case for Virtual Fall Term 2020 (and Probably Spring 2021).
* Disaster Capitalism Is Coming for Public Education.
* Don’t Frighten the Students: The Crisis of Academic Freedom in the Managed University. Consumption, COVID-19, and the Consequences of Language in Higher Education.
* The idea that college faculty and their allies have somehow failed to “make the case” for the value of their work is one of the hoariest clichés of higher ed commentary—our equivalent to the legendary “since the dawn of time”-style opening for undergraduate papers. A Google search for “the case for the humanities” turns up multiple books and articles. The tradition is so well established that new contributors can even engage in ironic meta-commentary on its conventions, as when a recent column argued that the best case for the humanities is precisely that there is no case. It is clear enough why academics would be drawn to a solution that draws on their particular skillsets of persuasion and argumentation, but the demand that we “make the case” is naïve and impotent.
* Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 in UCLA Classrooms.
* Distance Learning Is Taking an Emotional Toll on Students. Your Classes Are on Zoom and Your Teaching Staff Is Being Cut. What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom. Higher Education in the Age of Coronavirus. Chronicles of a higher Ed adjunct in the COVID-19 era.
* Denning: the social reproduction of the university depends on the maintenance of its graduate workers. Don’t let Yale infantilize you as “students” or people who don’t understand how institutions work. Universities Run on Disposable Scholars. Mass exodus. Now — Yes, Now — Is the Time for Contingent Faculty to Organize. CUNY Faculty On Verge of Wildcat Strike.
* Against cop shit 2: against rigor.
* Faculty Cuts Begin, With Warnings of More to Come. Colleges Lower the Boom on Retirement Plans. The first wave of pandemic cuts to colleges and universities. We’re Tracking Employees Laid Off or Furloughed by Colleges. Colleges Won’t Refund Tuition. Autumn May Force a Reckoning.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic blight, adjunctification, adjuncts, coronavirus, COVID-19, disaster capitalism, enrollments, graduate student movements, graduate student nightmares, How the University Works, management, Marquette, online education, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pandemic, podcasts, tenure, the university in ruins, Zoom
suNDaY ReAdiNG
* College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months. The Big ‘If.’ What If Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021? College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. Public Colleges Lose State Funding, Effective Immediately. I Teach at Rutgers and I Don’t Know If I’ll Have a Job This Fall. Rising expenses, falling revenues, budget cuts: Universities face looming financial crisis. ‘Pressure Is Turning Way Up’: College Presidents Plan Layoffs, Budget Cuts Due to Coronavirus, Says Survey. College Closures in the Wake of COVID-19: A Need for Forward-Looking Accountability. Pandemic Hits College Sports. Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online. The New Tenured Radicals. For the recovery, we need to spend like our lives depend on it.
* And at home: Faculty express concerns over university furloughs, financial decisions.
* NYU is not kidding around. Stanford Health Care to cut workers’ wages by 20%.
realizing on reflection that this is intended as an advertisement for high-cost private colleges, the only places that could possibly provide this level of test, trace, and quarantine https://t.co/ziT7PYRbrl
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020
anyway, I’m definitely sure our universities are definitely well-resourced and infrastructurally prepared enough to take on primary roles as stewards of public health this fall, no problems there!
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) April 26, 2020
* Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. Life After Ventilators Can Be Hell for Coronavirus Survivors. Even Palliative Care Doctors Have Never Experienced Anything Like This Before.
* Zoom as “The Gift of the Magi.”
* Here are the unambiguous rules for what to do in this pandemic.
* ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege. These epidemiologists say let’s think about reopening daycares and elementary schools. After Coronavirus, Nearly Half Of The Day Care Centers In The U.S. Could Be Gone. You’re Not Homeschooling — You’re ‘Crisis Schooling.’ To Access Online Services, New Jersey Students With Disabilities Must Promise Not To Sue.
* America gets back to work: My Family Was Denied a Stimulus Check Because My Husband Is an Immigrant. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? The end of bars and restaurants. Trump Donor Hired Trump-Tied Lobbyists, Then Raked in Coronavirus Relief Cash. GOP Governors Will Push Workers off Unemployment by Reopening Early. A Step-by-Step Plan to Reopen California. Can We Really Make a Safe Vaccine in 18 Months? ‘No Evidence’ Yet That Recovered COVID-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says. Just 14% of Americans support ending social distancing in order to reopen the economy, according to a new poll. The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests. Coronavirus is spreading fast in states that may reopen soon, study finds. We Cannot “Reopen” America. What Reopening Georgia Might Really Be About. Reopening Has Begun. No One Is Sure What Happens Next.
“If the state narrowly defines suitable work and doesn’t include the implications of the virus and what that means for a workplace, then that might put those workers who are drawing unemployment insurance in a precarious position, where they would have to either lose their unemployment insurance or go back to work in an unsafe environment,” Camardelle says.
Everytime I see this I realize anew that the plan is for every small restaurant in the country to fail, with the space eventually taken by a new dent-financed restaurant venture, a national chain, or just nothing. https://t.co/DOJTeDaway
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020
The longer the lockdown goes on, the more burden will be placed on the government to make it livable. "Opening the economy" is about forcing working people to put their health at risk to avoid that terrifying problem: https://t.co/yWanaHbNCD
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020
* The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. Understanding media bias.
Bret Stephens doesn't write "opinion columns"; he uses the leeway provided him by "opinion" to pass along the alternative facts that his ideological fixations would require to be to true to be valid.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020
* American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Small Business Rescue Earned Banks $10 Billion In Fees. With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November. Most people dying from Covid-19 are old. Don’t treat them just as statistics.
* Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan. Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections. Say It Loud, Say It Clear: Donald Trump Needs to Resign Over His Handling of the Coronavirus. And for the people in the back: The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It.
* All the Reasons This Will Be a Bleak Summer for N.Y.C. All Children.
* Tread *very* carefully, Joe — there are a lot of perverts in swing states.
* Pelosi’s Playing Hardball, Charlie Brown.
Three problems:
1) Biden doesn't support doing those things.
2) Biden isn't getting an LBJ-sized mandate.
3) Even when Dems got the biggest mandate realistically possible in 2008, they fucked it up absolutely thoroughly with Joe Biden leading the damn way.We're fucked. https://t.co/BuOevwn2gt
— Chris Wachal (@notChrisWachal) April 24, 2020
* A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. They didn’t even let him get interviewed for this!
It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.
* How the Supreme Court’s Progressive Minority Could Prevent a Stolen Election. Or the conservative majority could steal it! Who knows, really.
* We will not stand for the erasure of Wisconsin’s proud Confederate history. Or Michigan’s!
* Planet of the Humans pulled from Netflix.
* Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products. This would be an open and shut case if we actually had a government.
* Parks and Rec is back, baby!
* This fall on Netflix: Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer. Stay till the twist!
* Great, one more thing to worry about.
* And for your consideration: another Bible as D&D thread.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 26, 2020 at 3:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Amazon, America, Andrew Cuomo, bars, Bill de Blasio, Brown, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charlie Brown, China, class struggle, college closures, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis school, daycare, death, disability, documentary, Dolly Parton, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, epidemic, fall semester 2020, follow the rules, general election 2020, Georgia, Gift of the Magi, homeschool, How the University Works, hydrochloroquine, illness, immunity passports, Joe Biden, kids today, Kim Yo Jong, Lucille Ball, Marquette, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, Monopoly, mortality, Mr. Meseeks, Nancy Pelosi, Netflix, New Jersey, New York, North Korea, NYU, O'Henry, pandemic, parenting, Parks and Recreation, penguins, Planet of the Humans, politics, recession, research, restaurants, rich people, Rick and Morty, Second Great Depression?, senior citizens, sexism, sexual harassment, Stanford, Star Trek, stimulus, stress, Supreme Court, Tara Reade, tenure, the bible, the Confederacy, the courts, the economy, the elderly, the law, the summer, the university in ruins, unemployment, vaccines, Wisconsin, working class, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j
— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."
— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.
Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm
— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT
— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
Written by gerrycanavan
November 26, 2019 at 12:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23 and me, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, Africa, airplanes, airships, Alan Moore, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Appalachia, Australia, autism, backlash effect, bananas, Barack Obama, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, Big Calculator, Bowie, Brainiac, Brazil, centrism, CFPs, changelings, Charlie Stross, child abuse, childhood, climate change, college closures, colleges, comics, conspiracy theorists, cybertruck, David Bowie, David Graeber, death, decolonization, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, Disney, DNA, Dungeons and Dragons, earthquakes, ecology, economics, Egypt, Elon Musk, emotional labor, English majors, equality, EVE Online, Facebook, fandom, fans, fantasy, fascism, film, Florida, free speech, Frozen, Frozen II, futurity, games, gay rights, Greta Thunberg, grief, Harriet Tubman, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, hopepunk, hot takes, How Did This Get Played?, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice, Illinois, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana University, indigenous peoples, internationalism, isolation rooms, Joe Biden, Joker, Joker 2, Julia Roberts, justice, Keystone Pipeline, kids today, labor, lawyers, liberalism, lithium, Lord of the Rings, marriage equality, Marvel, mass shooters, medicine, Milwaukee River, MLA, mortality, Mr. Rogers, mugshots, Nate Silver, Native American issues, Nazis, Netflix, New York, nostalgia, OK Boomer, pensions, Pete Buttigieg, physics, pipelines, Pokémon, police brutality, police corruption, police state, postdocs, poverty, prison-industrial complex, punkpunk, pyramids, race, rape, rape culture, recession, rent loans, reparations, Republicans, rich people, rising sea levels, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, saving money, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Scott Warren, SFRA, Siberia, solar power, solarpunk, speculation, spoilers, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, strikes, student evaluations, stuttering, superheroes, swastikas, tenure, Terminator, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, The Mandalorian, The Price Is Right, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, TI-85s, time, Title IX, tokenism, Tolkien, Tony Evers, transgender issues, true crime, turning 40, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccinations, Watchmen, web comics, WeWork, whale watching, whale-hunting, whales, whistleblowers, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, woolly mammoths, Yoda, zeppelins
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
“deenergization” https://t.co/bynSavKFBx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot, and passed a paradise preservation act for the remaining unpaved areas of paradise, then legalized heavy logging and oil exploration in paradise
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
There's a point in every serious conversation about California's wildfire problem where you have to entertain the thought that literally every major policy decision of the twentieth century related to any aspect of the problem was wrong
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 27, 2019
The story of fire in California is:
10,000 years of native people using low-grade fire to manage forests
100 years of settlers repressing ALL fire as much as possible, causing forests to go haywire
50 years of wild, overbuilding settlement, climate change, and PG&E falling apart— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 28, 2019
“We’re not so different, you and I” https://t.co/iNqtZGzUkE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
"we've got it stopped…"
the final words of the 1958 cult classic THE BLOB, meant to be matter of fact, read rather ominous fifty years later
"yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"
— kai a. bosworth (@kaibosworth) October 27, 2019
"Science-fiction is the dying breath of old ways of living."
— Nick Axel (@alucidwake) October 27, 2019
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
Yeah that’s kind of the point https://t.co/Dl2ZAFyPDe
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 29, 2019
Oh you love the 90s huh. Name every short-sighted decision elites made that we are only now beginning to pay for.
— Ed Booooo-mila (@gin_and_tacos) October 26, 2019
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
I taught a class on cultural criticism in the digital age last year, & it was stunning the number of essays I assigned from shuttered sites or written by fired writers. I pitched it as a class abt contemporary discourse but slowly realized it was a class abt an historical period.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
I imagined that class five years ago imagining it'd be a class about life and energy but had to eventually teach it as a class about loss and decline. That all these disavowed words are so fucking funny and smart and humane makes it all that much worse.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
OK, I think I figured it out: pic.twitter.com/GtpEpjH54T
— eve peyser (@evepeyser) October 22, 2019
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
You beat Trump by getting people who don’t normally vote to vote, not by beating your head against the wall trying to convince rich white men to change their minds about hurting people
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 18, 2019
True of basically everywhere in the US honestly. https://t.co/3AHHChEcFS
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
I forget who said it, but respecting the powerful is called "civility" and should be held sacred, while respecting the powerless is called "political correctness" and should be the object of ridiculehttps://t.co/HmG4EYYUw7
— Seva (@SevaUT) October 25, 2019
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
OMG. This. pic.twitter.com/lPpud7dtSE
— Lou Anders needs to pick a book and stick with it (@LouAnders) October 20, 2019
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
Media and Social Class: A Guide https://t.co/eTztXfj1qB This is at least two years of grad school in literature for free. pic.twitter.com/j56AnoCJ0x
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2019
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
advance directive, colorize
backslash, commoditize
compact disc
fragile x
Lyme disease
de-stress
adjustable rate, identity
canola oil, therapy
neocon, pepper spray
WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY https://t.co/Pg1ADY7cpU— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2019
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, alt-right, America, apocalypse, assassination, autism, Baby Boomers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Black Panther, blackouts, Booker Prize, Brexit, California, CBP, CFPs, Chile, China, Chuck E. Cheese, civility, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coal, Coca-Cola, college sports, color, comics, culture, CUNY, cussing, data breaches, debt, deenergization, deportation, digital culture, disability, Disney, Do you hear the people sing?, Donald Trump, dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, Durham, eco-horror, ecology, Edward Snowden, Elizabeth Warren, Emmett Till, empire, English majors, Evil Dead, Exxon, fantasy, fifty-state strategy, film, Florida, Fox, Foxconn, fraternities, Fredric Jameson, Game of Thrones, games, general strike, Generation X, Generation Z, genocide, genre, Greta Thunberg, Handmaid's Tale, His Dark Materials, hitmen, Homestuck, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Iceland, immigration, impeachment, India, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John Roberts, Kashmir, Kentucky, kids today, Kirby, lead paint, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, lunch debt, maps, Margaret Atwood, Massachusetts, memorials, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, MOOCs, Mordor, my media empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Newsweek, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, oil, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, orcs, Pakistan, Pantone, parenting, Philip Pullman, politics, pollution, poverty, President Supervillain, prestige TV, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, radicalization, recession, remember the 90s?, resistance, revolution, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science fiction, scooters, screen time, sea level rise, Silicon Valley, small liberal arts colleges, socialism, Star Wars, student debt, Supernova Era, surveillance, Swarthmore, Tarantino, television, tenure, the 2010s, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Blob, the Internet, The Testaments, The Wandering Earth, they paved paradise, Three-Body Problem, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, typing, United Kingdom, University of Maryland, Untitled Goose Game, UWM, villains, voting, Wakanda, war on education, water, we're not so different, WeWork, wildfire, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, xkcd, YouTube
The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!
* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!
* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.
* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.
* 64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.
* In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.
* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?
Marquette University
This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.
This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.
How does this school stack up?
The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.
* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.
The book posits an Iron Law of Meritocracy, in which meritocratic systems will collapse in on themselves because eventually inequality of outcomes grow so vast, it's impossible to provide equality of opportunity. What you then get is something like aristocracy and oligarchy.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019
* Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.
* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.
* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.
* Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.
* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.
* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.
* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.
* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”
the idea that Omega Point aliens will someday be able to resurrect me on the basis of my public writing is 89% of the reason I’m still on Twitter https://t.co/l348wObaXp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
to be perfectly honest I have a little bit of a Roko’s Basilisk fear that I’ve *already* been resurrected on the basis of my social media posts in some techno-gnostic simulation scenario and that’s why absolutely everything is garbage
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
* Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.
* Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.
* It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.
* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.
* Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.
* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.
* Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.
* 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.
* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.
Basically our – very neoliberal – plan for everything these days is to dump the consequences for contradictions we refuse to resolve on the most vulnerable, the over-stretched, and the future itself, and monetize every miserable step of it all the way down.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019
* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.
* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.
* North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.
* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.
* How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.
* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.
* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.
* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).
* In the age of the psychonauts.
* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”
* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.
* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.
* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.
Okay, folks. Here's a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart. pic.twitter.com/fuqglnUEE6
— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019
* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!
* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.
* The Slinky was invented by accident.
* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.
* Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.
* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.
* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…
* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.
* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.
* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.
But, doctor, I am the Joker
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, accelerationism, adjunctification, adjuncts, Africa, Airbnb, algorithms, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, autism, automation, awards, capitalism, CBP, Charles Schultz, cheating, chicken sandwiches, children's crusade, chimpanzees, China, class struggle, climate change, comics, critical algorithm studies, dark side of the digital, deportation, Dicey Dungeons, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Episode 9, faith, fantasy, fast food, FEC, Fitbit, Florida, games, Google, grades, guns, happiness, health care, Hell, high school sports, homosexuality, horror, hurricanes, ice, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Ireland, James Mattis, James Tiptree Jr., labor, liberalism, Luddites, Marquette, Marxist-lesbianism, mass shootings, Mel Gibson, meritocracy, monkeys, morally odious monsters, myth, neoliberalism, neurocapitalism, NLRB, North Carolina, NYPD, Odysseus, Omega Point, Oregon Trail, Panera, Peanuts, politics, Popeye's, precocious puberty, pregnancy, psychedelics, puberty, Puerto Rico, rape, rape culture, religion, resistance, rising sea levels, Roko's Basilisk, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science, science fiction, slavery, slinkies, Snoopy, social media, sports, Star Wars, style guides, surveillance society, tenure, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, The Joker, the Left, the Singularity, the wisdom of markets, Theranos, toys, true facts, tuition, Twitter, unions, Waffle House, walking, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, zoos
Weekend Links!
* After Isle of Dogs, I’m filled with nothing but dread for The French Dispatch. Here’s what we know so far.
* Astronaut Accessed Estranged Spouse’s Bank Account from International Space Station. How can they say true crime is over when we have the first-ever crime in space!
* Once again, for the people in the back: The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. In Bolsonaro’s burning Brazilian Amazon, all our futures are being consumed. We’re Living Through A Climate Emergency Right Now — We Just Aren’t Paying Attention. The Limits of “Experiencing” the Climate Crisis. In a Devastated Town, Sanders Explains His Plan for a Climate Revolution.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* Kirkwood professor who stated he supported Antifa resigns.
* On December 22, 1973, an embattled President Richard Nixon met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces. It was a ceremonial meeting, not the sort where important decisions are supposed to get made. But one of the generals realized something was deeply off. Nixon was agitated. “He kept on referring to the fact that he [Nixon] may be the last hope, the eastern elite was out to get him,” the four-star general later said. It seemed the president was “trying to sound us out”—to see if, “in a crunch,” the generals would overthrow Congress and the judiciary, and keep the criminal president in power. Through a White House, darkly.
* The US is already occupying Greenland.
The US is already occupying Greenland. In 1951, they demolished the village of Pituffik & built the Thule Air Base in its place. Then a 1968 nuclear accident contaminated the Inughuit's hunting grounds with radioactive plutonium, leaving hairless fur seals and deformed muskoxen. pic.twitter.com/ELz8SOzM0v
— The Decolonial Atlas (@decolonialatlas) August 23, 2019
* A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?
* In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria.
* Kids left without either parent at home for 8 days after Mississippi ICE raid. And updating a story from yesterday: Federal Agencies Have Been Sending Employees Articles From White Nationalist And Conspiracy Websites For Months.
* Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States.
* How segregation makes your commute worse.
* State of the unions: what happened to America’s labor movement?
* Tarantino corner! ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Is a Science Fiction Film. Tarantino’s gruesome revenge fantasies are growing more puerile and misogynistic. Stop, you’re both right!
* There’s a Latinx void at the heart of video games.
* How David Koch Changed the World.
* Slouching towards autokill drones hovering over every street corner.
“In addition to the bucket and kitty litter, the teachers were also given a pop-up tent to put around the bucket, a first aid kit, and a Sharpie to mark the time if a teacher has to tie a tourniquet to stop gunshot bleeding.”
What the actual hell are we doing? https://t.co/6GyJrgiQKK
— Meaghan (@meaghang) August 22, 2019
* The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media.
* When Kids Are Straight Until Proven Otherwise.
* Occasionally, though, one can sense the fears emerging out of the anonymous voices. A therapist talks about patients who are “one bad night away from suicide” now facing new burdens of paperwork. A parent writes, “Medicaid enrollment limits tell my son his life is worthless and he might as well die because he is diabetic.” Another respondent worries that enrollment caps will “limit my ability to get my asthma treated and medications covered.”
* Marvel’s making some interesting moves on Disney+. I might actually watch WandaVision.
With She-Hulk, Moon Knight, and Ms Marvel, Disney is doing a lot on Disney+ that people really wanted AND that seems like it will avoid the dourness that consumed the Netflix shows.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2019
* And that’s how you quit a job.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 24, 2019 at 11:38 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, America, anti-imperialism, antifa, apocalypse, astronauts, Bernie Sanders, Bolsonaro, Brazil, chess, class struggle, climate change, commuting, compulsory heterosexuality, Counting Crows, coups, cultural anthropology, decolonization, democracy, Department of Justice, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, drones, games, gay rights, Green New Deal, Green Revolution, Greenland, guns, health insurance, honey, How the University Works, ice, imperialism, International Space Station, Isle of Dogs, Koch brothers, Marvel, mass shooting, Medicaid, military-industrial complex, Mississippi, Nixon, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, parenting, Parkinson's Disease, politics, protest, quitting, racism, segregation, space crime, Standing Rock, Tarantino, tenure, the Amazon, The French Dispatch, true crime, unions, Utah, WandaVision, Wes Anderson
Friday Links!
* Why the Fires in the Amazon Are So Bad. The Fires in the Amazon Were Set on Purpose. Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest. Thank goodness someone lost their job over this.
climate-change induced extinction will not resemble your vague imaginary of a rapture-like mass death, it will look like an acceleration of the extractive processes of capital and world war, breaking biogeochemical cycles, and cascading ecosystem failures.
— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019
the world that remains will not be dead as some claim, but it will be severely diminished, and permanently scarred by the damage of an accelerating capitalist industrial civilization exploding into the biosphere. it is by definition unimaginable.
— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019
* But wait! There’s an easy solution to this! Can Mars Be Made Habitable in Our Lifetime?
* Elsewhere in the that’ll-solve-it bin: What if We All Ate a Bit Less Meat?
* 2 Scholars Will Leave MIT’s Media Lab Over Its Director’s Financial Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
* Want to Be an English Professor? It Gets Harder Every Year.
* Mesa College English Professor Showed QAnon Video in Class, Students Say.
* Justice corner! The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks. ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on Orange Is The New Black. Customers Handed Over Their DNA. The Company Let the FBI Take a Look. Precrime didn’t even work in the movie!
* What’s going on with Milwaukee’s population?
* ‘Forever chemicals’ detected at low levels in Milwaukee tap water for the first time.
* Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.
* The Ultimate List of What Star Trek You Should Watch Before Picard.
* Hasbro’s new Monopoly for Millennials game is an insulting experience.
Hot take:
The crap-AI essay grading system for the SAT is good actuallybecause it judges students on the thing that will most impact their lives,
which is being able to convincingly lie to poorly-designed AI.
— Actual Doctor Galaxykate (@GalaxyKate) August 22, 2019
* Tenured law professors behaving badly.
* The arc of history is long, but Major U.S. Phone Companies Agree to Plan to Combat Endless Robocalls.
* A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2019 at 2:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic jobs, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Captain Picard, CBP, climate change, Department of Justice, deportation, DNA, eating meat, English, entrepreneurs, FBI, foreign languages, forever chemicals, games, ice, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, language, law professors, law school, learning, Mars, Mesa College, millennials, Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches, MIT, Monopoly, outer space, peeing, precrime, robocalls, SAT, spam, standardized testing, Star Trek, tenure, terraforming, the Amazon, UPenn, water, wildfires
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
We hear about liberal students & faculty. But oversight boards (trustees, regents) tend to be far more conservative & more inclined to treat the university as a business. Sometimes they are politically appointed, sometimes not, but rarely a diverse bunch. Here is #utulsa's pic.twitter.com/e6pxEXU1lO
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 14, 2019
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
It is truly amazing that we are only able to discuss how the country wound up run by a sunsetting racist authoritarian as long as there’s never any indication that a Democrat ever made a single mistake
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
In the last 24 hours we've seen a distinction emerge between candidates who believe their path to the presidency lies in accommodation to GOP rhetoric and those whose strategy is to run straight at the beast swinging a sword.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 13, 2019
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
(1) seen by (2) many (3) as apparently (4) increasing (5) the use of tactics (6) usually employed.
That's SIX caveats standing in the way of "Trump is an autocratic president." Six. https://t.co/QWmF785rKW
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 14, 2019
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
Eight seasons of buildup was worth it just for this moment! pic.twitter.com/3uEonceVVs
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) April 15, 2019
big weekend for our most popular incest-themed fantasy franchises
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 15, 2019
game of zzzzzz am I right
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
Wow Star Wars is having the best media day in history nothing could possibly go wrong, let's go check Twitter and. . . . pic.twitter.com/jwbu1r9MSy
— Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) April 12, 2019
Personally, I can't wait for
X: God Emperor Skywalker
XI: Heretics of Skywalker
XII: Chapterhouse Skywalker— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 14, 2019
(2) But the reintroduction of Palpatine and claim that it was always the plan to bring him back for IX makes me think there’s a decent chance they are going to throw a curveball and have Kylo *always* have been good after all, acting dark to get close enough to Palps to kill him.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(2 cont) This has been speculated since TFA came out and there’s def stuff in the films that can support it (“I will finish what you started,” the Han death scene, but also the Rashomon stuff around the destruction of Luke’s academy in TLJ). The best chance left for a true twist.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(and so on)
Of course the other problem is that episode nine has to be the end of something literally no person on the planet believes will ever be allowed to end.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 12, 2019
Disney will accomplish what George Lucas himself attempted but could not achieve: running STAR WARS into the ground and forcing fans to give up on it
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) April 13, 2019
what a doofus, it's episode ix https://t.co/q4yA3GQuID
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
April 15, 2019 at 11:03 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Airbnb, American Studies, anti-beardism, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antidepressants, apocalypse, austerity, authoritarianism, bargaining, beards, Beto O' Rourke, black holes, bodegas, books, Born in the USA, boycotts, Brown, CBP, CFPs, cities, class struggle, climate change, college sports, college textbooks, colonialism, comics, commitment to a bit, dark side of the digital, Democrats, deportation, disruption, Donald Trump, Duluth, Dunbar number, Dune, empire, endings, energy, Episode 9, fascism, Fox News, fraternities, Game of Thrones, games, George Lucas, Georgetown, germs, Google, Google Books, graduate student movements, graphic narrative, How the University Works, human extinction, ice, Ilhan Omar, immigration, incest, invented languages, IQ, Kylo Ren, Latin America, Mark Fisher, Marquette, Mars, martial rape, misogyny, Nancy Pelosi, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York Post, obituary, oil, outer space, Paradoxa, pedagogy, Pepsi, Philip K. Dick, plastic bags, plot twists, politics, pornography, post-antibiotic bacteria, psychopharmacology, Quidditch, racism, rape, rape culture, reparations, science fiction, scooters, sexism, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, sports, Springsteen, standup comedy, Star Wars, stochastic terrorism, superbugs, surveillance society, teaching, tenure, the courts, the law, The Owl in Daylight, The Rise of Skywalker, the university in ruins, trolls, trustees, Uber, unions, University of Tulsa, VALIS, VAPs, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, YouTube
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
The much-hyped MOOCS still have an astronomical dropout rate of about 96 per cent on average over five years – and this figure had not improved between 2013-14 and 2017-18.https://t.co/4U6F1jN1X6 #mooc #embarrassing #dropout #hype #online #HigherEducation @bureaucatliu @cnewf
— peter krapp (@pkrapp) March 4, 2019
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
a cool thing about the last few years is that the U.S. became the leading exporter of the intellectual machinery of western fascism and one of the leading domestic debates about it is whether undergrads are treating the people behind it politely enough
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) March 15, 2019
There is virtually no institution in American public life where you have greater freedom of speech than the university. And the depressing corollary: you will probably never again be as free to express yourself in public as you were when you were a student.
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 4, 2019
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
something something about how–because we cannot actually address the root causes of school shootings–we will instead ritualistically perform them https://t.co/llYZF6i8vf
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 21, 2019
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
so about fifty days in and it’s very clear that the story of the Dem Resistance Congress is going to be about the party’s decrepit leadership scuttling any positive movement on any subject and then demanding to be thanked for it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2019
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
you (stupid, hasnt read foucault): haha i hope i dont get thrown in prison for my tweets )
me (wise, has read foucault): twitter is the prison— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) March 6, 2019
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
a fun thing about the next Avengers movie is that all the characters are going to spend the entirety of it being very very very sad
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 14, 2019
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 22, 2019 at 12:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, academic publishing, activism, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, AI murder policy, air travel, airplanes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic culture, aliens, alt lit, America, Andy Daly, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, Antarctica, artificial intelligence, Aunt Becky, autism, automation, Barack Obama, BethAnn McLaughlin, Boeing, books, Captain Marvel, catastrophe, Catholicism, CBP, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college admissions, computers, creepypasta, data, David Foster Wallace, Daystrom Institute, dementia, Democrats, deportation, digital horror, dinosaurs, disability, Doki Doki Literature Club!, drugs, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, eco-fascism, ecology, education, Electoral College, empire, EPA, equality, ethnic cleansing, Europe, Facebook, fascism, Fermi paradox, film, floods, Foucault, Fox News, fraud, free speech, Full House, fun, Gabriel García Márquez, games, Garret Hardin, gay marriage, general election 2020, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, hateclicks, Hayao Miyazaki, heartbreak, HIV and AIDS, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, Infinite Jest, innovation, J.K. Rowling, jobs, Jurassic Park, juries, kids, kids today, killer death robots, labor, legacy media, literature, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Lyft, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, Max-8, MCU, medicine, Michael Jackson, Mitch McConnell, Momo, MOOCs, Mound builders, MPAA, my pedagogical empire, Nabokov, Native Americans, Nazis, Nebraska, Netflix, New Sincerity, New York, Nobel Prize, Normal Porn for Normal People, Norway, nuclearity, NYPD, Octavia Butler, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Open Access, Orientalism, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, plagiarism, playing, podcasts, police brutality, police corruption, politics, pon farr, potholes, poverty, prison-industrial complex, privilege, propaganda, public transportation, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, rabbits, race, racism, ratings, recycling, religion, Review, rich people, robots, Rutgers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, sea level rise, security, self-checkout, self-driving cars, slavery, sleep, small colleges, socialism, Spock, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Wars, strikes, Stuyvesant, suffering, suicide, surveillance society, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the courts, the Democrats, the law, the Sixties, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Tolkien, tragedy of the commons, travel, trigger warnings, true crime, Trumpism, TurnItIn, Twilight of the Elites, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of California, UT Austin, Vanderbilt, Vietnam, visas, voting, Voyager, Vulcans, Wal-Mart, Waldo, water, wealth, where are they?, white nationalism, white settlers, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, World Wildlife Fund, writing, YouTube, zombie ethics, Zora Neale Hurston
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”
* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”
You can dance around it all you like, but the simple fact is that we need to curb our emissions and guide the rest of the world in doing so in an amount of time radically shorter than conventional politics and market solutions alone will allow. https://t.co/5u82WDnACF
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 25, 2019
I have a 7 year old daughter & a 9 year old son. They are not going to meekly accept living in hell so that people can write essays laughing at them for The Atlantic. Millions and millions and millions of children won't accept it. Politicians have no idea what's coming for them.
— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) February 25, 2019
A very small group of rich people have condemned virtually every living thing on Earth to death—genocide on an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable scale—and not only will they get away with it, they’re actually rewarded for it. That’s what capitalism is.
— ☭ sicko modus ponens ☭ (@babadookspinoza) February 25, 2019
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.
One of my students is very cheeky. pic.twitter.com/2CfSRQ77mZ
— Roy Scranton (@RoyScranton) February 26, 2019
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
truly *perfect* that the question of "happiness" under capitalism vs marxism will be litigated (& represented!) by two male grifters of questionable charisma & almost infinite perversion in a space that charges a ticket if you bring a stroller. now that's traversing the fantasy!
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 28, 2019
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2019 at 4:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic labor, administrative blight, advertising, Afghanistan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, anti-capitalism, apocalypse, autism, Ayana Jamieson, Bernie Sanders, bibliographies, Black Mirror, Bolivia, California, capitalism, Catholic higher education, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, China, class struggle, climate change, clothes, clouds, comics, concrete, conferences, creative writing, debate, democracy, diabetes, disability, disability studies, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elon Musk, energy, fascism, games, Global Anglophone, Grant Morrison, grawlix, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrogen, I grow old, ice sheet collapse, immigration, India, insulin, insurance companies, Jordan Peterson, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Erie, letters of recommendation, literature, Mark Waid, Marquette, masculinity, mass shootings, meat, medicine, men, metrics, MFAs, Michael Jackson, migrants, Moya Bailey, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, oceans, Octavia Butler, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pakistan, Parable of the Sower, parenting, photography, plastic, police corruption, police state, politics, Polygraph, postcoloniality, potholes, promotion, Pulp Fiction, R.D. Mullen fellowship, racism, rape, rape culture, rehab, remedial courses, reproductive futurity, retirement, rights of nature, roads, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, SEC, settler colonialism, SFRA, SFRA Review, social credit, social networking, soup, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, stocks, stratocumulus clouds, strikes, superheroes, tenure, Tesla, Texas, the draft, the Huntington, the Wisconsin Idea, ticks, traumatic repetition compulsion, true crime, University of Central Florida, University of Wisconsin, voter suppression, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, whiteness, Wisconsin, Wright State, X-Men, Žižek
I Had To Do Some Laundry, So You Know What That Means: Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Feral Feminisms is pleased to announce that we are now accepting submissions for our first general issue. Submission deadline is 15 January 2019.
* What our science fiction says about us.
* From the Earth to the Moon. And hell why not it’s Wednesday just a few more.
* Following a Board of Trustees meeting this afternoon, Temple University President Richard Englert released a statement on behalf of the board, announcing that professor Marc Lamont Hill will not be punished or investigated for his Nov. 28 speech during an event organized with the United Nations. Now investigate the feckless administrators who made these baseless threats.
* Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges 2018.
* Following scientists in three fields, the paper’s authors found that it took about five years for a half of a science cohort to leave academic work in 2010 — compared to 35 years in the 1960s.
* Tired: China is building a social points system that will rank people from birth to death. Wired: Trump Is Trying to Use Credit Scores to Keep Immigrants Out of the U.S.
* Wow, here and I thought Scott Walker was a man of principle and integrity.
* Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off. I tweeted a tweet about the president and the modest virality of that tweet smells bad.
* Grant Morrison Opens Up About Feuding With Alan Moore and Why He Still Doesn’t Like Watchmen.
* Upright Citizen’s Brigade on the brink.
* The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what’s to come. Unparalleled warmth is changing the Arctic and affecting weather in US, Europe. In what is being called the first of its kind, Mayor Francis Suarez quietly signed a resolution last month to address climate gentrification in Miami. Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed. EPA announces plan to poison all the water.
CNN put out a video urging people not to believe climate change deniers.
One problem: two of the four clips they cite are people *on* CNN. pic.twitter.com/tbCT6O43p0
— jordan (@JordanUhl) December 11, 2018
Twenty years from now, kids listening to "Baby it's cold outside" are gonna find it really, really weird.
We're gonna have to explain that it has to be understood in the context of its time.
You see, it used to get cold outside.
— Zi Teng Wang (@Zi_W) December 10, 2018
* Children of Ted: Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.
* ICE arrested 170 potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children.
* They say bipartisanship is dead, but U.S. House unanimously approves sweeping self-driving car measure.
* The law, in its infinite equality watch: Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has dropped charges against 23-year-old Jazmine Headley related to her arrest at a social services office on Friday, he announced Tuesday. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, and trespassing after security guards called police over a dispute that apparently began because she was sitting on the floor while she waited with her 1-year-old son to renew a child-care benefit. Charge the cops who did this next.
* “Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See?” What terrible luck that the camera mysterious turned off during the relevant portion of the search! What are the chances!
* What Everyone Having Diarrhea On The Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity.
* A ProPublica investigation has found that the IRS has been so gutted that audits of the top 1% are rapidly converging on audits of the bottom 36%. This is of course totally irrational, but completely in line with the contempt the ruling class has for the poor.
* What It Means to Be a Marxist.
* The CRISPR babies and scientific ethics.
* The final stage of any sufficiently mammoth crime is abusing bankruptcy law to avoid responsibility.
* I remember having my mind blown by reading this observation in Daniel Dennett book twenty years ago: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have.
* Throw these Chromebooks in the snow. Leave childhood alone, let kids have a little bit of joy.
* We lost that war. But the fight goes on.
Here is John F. Kennedy in 1961 writing to reassure a child that fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapon testing won’t kill Santa. #NuclearWarOnChristmas pic.twitter.com/4w4KapArwr
— Nuclear War on Christmas (Martin Pfeiffer) 🏳️🌈 (@NuclearAnthro) December 1, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
December 12, 2018 at 6:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with absurdism, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Alan Moore, America, ants, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, baby it's cold outside, bankruptcy, CFPs, childhood, China, class struggle, climate change, climate gentrification, CNN, comedy, comics, consciousness, cosmology, coups, credit scores, CRISPR, Daniel Dennett, deportation, diarrhea, Donald Trump, eco-terrorism, EPA, feminism, general election 2020, Grant Morrison, gymnastics, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human nature, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, IRS, Joe Biden, John F. Kennedy, jokes, kids today, Mark Lamont Hill, Marxism, Miami, Milwaukee, Mitt Romney, nuclear war, nuclearity, Palestine, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, politics, rape, rape culture, rump cleavage, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, scientific ethics, Scott Walker, self-driving cars, snow days, social media, Temple University, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the Left, The Magnificent Seven, the Moon, the poor, the Unabomber, time travel, toxic masculinity, transporters, Twitter, UCB, Watchmen, Westerns, Wisconsin, you do not exist, zunguzungu