Posts Tagged ‘Tesla’
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”
* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* Actually existing media bias.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.
* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.
Saturday Night Links!
* The only writing I’ve seen on Rusty Brown so far is this rather sour review from Slate on Ware’s “miserablism.” While I do concede the book feels a little redundant to some of Ware’s earlier work, especially its first section, I still like the book rather more than the reviewer — and it’s good to remember it’s only Vol. 1. A lot of my fondness for the book has to do with the transcendent Joycean section on the Jordan “Jason” Lint character that the review discusses near the end, which I think truly ranks among the best stuff Ware has ever produced. UPDATE: This review from io9 gets the book and what it’s doing a little bit better, I think. More people, get on this so we can talk about it.
* A great little SF flash fiction I ran across a few months late.
* Moving fast: Ukraine envoy resigns amid scandal consuming Trump’s presidency. (Broken by a student newspaper!) White House restricted access to Trump’s calls with Putin and Saudi crown prince. Sources close to the vice president confirm none of this is his fault. Politics of Impeachment Now Favor Democrats. The 4 possible crimes in the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower scandal, explained. The Left Needs to Seize Impeachment From Centrist Elites. The case for a maximal impeachment.
* Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption.
* Migrant detention ruling: Judge blocks government effort to indefinitely detain migrant families.
* Manufactured Misery at the Tijuana Border Crossing.
* This month, in the journal Nature: Human Behaviour, Kunst and Dovidio examined fusion specifically involving Donald Trump. In a series of seven studies using various surveys, including Swann and Gomez’s “identity fusion scale,” the Yale and Oslo team found that Americans who fused with Trump—as opposed to simply agreeing with or supporting him—were more willing to engage in various extreme behaviors, such as personally fighting to protect the U.S. border from an “immigrant caravan,” persecuting Muslims, or violently challenging election results.
The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”
* Relatedly: Why Republicans Aren’t Turning on Trump.
* The Intercept on the Hofeller memos. More in cheating to win, and more.
* Shot: NRA Was ‘Foreign Asset’ To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals. Chaser: N.R.A.’s LaPierre Asks Trump to ‘Stop the Games‘ Over Gun Legislation in Discussion About Its Support.
* Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Bailout for Taxi Drivers.
* The Cuban roots of rock n roll.
* Climate change more than doubled the odds of Houston’s most recent deluge, study finds.
* Tesla tweets break the law, again.
* This DoorDash data breach feels like karmic retribution for my sins.
* And This Video Game Fulfills Your Fantasy of Being a Horrible Goose. It’s fun!
Tuesday Links!
* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.
* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:
Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”
* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:
October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction
October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)
October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference
* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.
* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).
* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?
* The Humanities at the End of the World.
* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.
* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.
* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.
* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.
* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.
* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.
* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* A Centre for Laziness Studies.
* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.
* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.
* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.
* The politics of the campaign mixtape.
* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.
* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”
* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.
* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?
* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.
* First, they came for my assault rifle.
* Nihilistic password security questions.
* The end of the Perkins loan.
* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.
* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.
* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.
* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.
* If it’s good enough for Zappos…
* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.
* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.
* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.
* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.
* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.
* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.
* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?
* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”
* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.
* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.
* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.
* Hydrofracking ruins everything.
* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”
* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.
* End zero-tolerance school discipline.
* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.
* The law, in its majestic finality…
* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.
* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.
* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?
* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.
* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.
* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.
* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.
* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”
* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.
* What’s the most American ______ ever made?
* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”
gerrycanavan.com Is Pleased to Offer This Sunday Reading Experience
* The schedule for the final third of my Cultural Preservation course. This has been one of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had; I’m hoping things go as well next spring when I do it all again.
* Starting out with two strikes with this guy and he hasn’t even found out where I work yet.
* The institution of the faculty wife is alive and well in academic culture. She’s an adjunct.
* Nietzsche was right: it turns out without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
* Elsewhere in the American nihilism files: NASA study concludes it’s not just you, we really are doomed.
* Meanwhile, we can’t even agree on the incredible, undeniable, world-historical usefulness of vaccines. One map sums up the damage caused by the anti-vaccination movement.
* Surely we’ll start the school day later, when every bit of science backs this up… Oh.
* Unreal: Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked. Could the Passengers Still Be Alive?
* Don’t be evil: Google’s anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content.
* There’s no escape from the corporate-NSA surveillance network.
* Five Cops Beat Innocent, Unarmed Father to Death Outside Cinema.
* No one could have predicted a completely unregulated peer-to-peer hotel network would lead to bad outcomes. Next up: Hey, Uber, your unregulated taxi was just some random creep’s unsafe car!
* For the true believers: A Brief History of the Quidditch World Cup.
* It’s not Mortal Kombat we should fear; it’s Candy Crush Saga and FarmVille.
* 50,000 Activists Demand Sexual Assault Reform At Dartmouth After Student Publishes A ‘Rape Guide.’
* On the spell-binding catastrophic collapse of the Juan Pablo season of The Bachelor.
* If we make the world a paradise where everyone is immortal, will we still be able to have all these awesome jails? Aeon Magazine reports.
* Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes.
* Kim Stanley Robinson is all over the ASU “Thoughtful Optimism” project.
* As of 2010-2011, the most recent year with available data, recent humanities and liberal arts majors had 9 percent unemployment. That’s right about on par with students in computer and math fields (9.1 percent), psychology and social work (8.8 percent), and the social sciences (10.3 percent). And it’s just a bit above the average across all majors of 7.9 percent. The larger problem, as always, is that there’s still not enough work for young people post-recession.
* Pussy Riot launches a prisoners rights center in Russia, demands freedom in Wisconsin.
* Promisingly specific: Projecting ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ in Theaters Requires Special Instructions.
* Game of the Weekend: 2048, an addictive simplification of Threes!, in your browser.