Posts Tagged ‘the truth is out there’
Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?
This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:
- ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
- American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
- A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
- I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
- You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
- Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
- I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
- The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
- Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
- CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
- Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.
nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020
- A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
- Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
- Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
- Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
- 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.
Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du
— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020
have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t
— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020
Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020
- Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
- Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
- Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
- Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
- “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
- How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
- How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
- Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
- Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
- We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
- Glücky!
- RIP, Duke TIP.
The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020
- Miracles and wonders.
- The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
- Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
- Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
- Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
- He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
- DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
- Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
- idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
- AOC, streamer.
- Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
- Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
- Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
- Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
- Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
- Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
- What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
- “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
- The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
- The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
- The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
- Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
- How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
- Revisiting Nabokov.
- Always look on the bright side of life.
- How will 2020 end?
- And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
- Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!
the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists
— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020
— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
October 30, 2020 at 4:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, AAUP, abolish the Senate, academia, academic jobs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Am I the Asshole?, America, Among Us, animation, art, autism, Baltimore, Berkeley, birds, California, capitalism, car seats, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, conspiracy theory, contraception, Cornell, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, creative writing, deaccessioning, Diplomacy, disaster nationalism, diversity, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, Duke TIP, dystopia, ecology, Ecuador, English departments, exoplanets, fan fiction, fascism, franchies, franchise fiction, futurity, games, grading, Harvard, HBO, hybridity, indigenous futurism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR, labor, libertarians, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Louise Glück, Marquette, medicine, Mormonism, museums, N.K. Jemisin, Nabokov, NCAA, neoliberalism, neurodiversity, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, nostalgia, organizing, Pale FIre, pandemic, paranoia, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, prosperity theology, public universities, QAnon, race, racism, rewind the globe, rich people, schools, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Sierra, socialism, student movements, television, the Amazon, The Fifth Season, the flu, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, trolls, truth and reconciliation, UFOs, unions, Utopia, white supremacy, wildfires, Wilmington, Wisconsin, young adult literature, Zoom
Thursday Morning Links!
* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.
* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.
* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.
* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.
* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.
* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.
To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp
— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020
Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.
— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020
When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020
1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020
* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.
One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020
you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire
— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020
* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.
It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu
— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020
I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020
so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020
* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.
* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.
* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.
* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.
robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.
* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.
* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.
* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.
* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.
* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.
* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.
* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.
https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705
TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law
DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020
* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.
"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD
— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020
* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.
* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.
* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
* New York’s homeless students.
* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.
* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.
* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.
* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’
* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!
* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?
* When does a model own her own image?
* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.
* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.
Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020
someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020
* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”
* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.
* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.
* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.
* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.
* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.
* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.
Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing
It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?
Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL
Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU
— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019
* We stan.
* Time Travel as White Privilege.
* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.
* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.
* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?
* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.
* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, America, Ancillary Review of Books, animals, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Black Lives Matter, Bob Barr, California, capitalism, Caster Semenya, children, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, college, college football, college sports, Colorado, concentration camps, copyright, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darko Suvin, David Graeber, democracy, deportation, depression, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dune, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, education, epidemic, eugenics, Evo Morales, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, film, floods, food, Fort Hood, games, gender, Georgia, guns, heat ray, HHS, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Krug, Joe Biden, John Cage, Journal of Science Fiction, kids today, Legend of Zelda, liberalism, Louis DeJoy, Marquette, Michigan, movies, Muppets, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, necroliberalism, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Orlando, outer space, pandemic, paranoia, parents, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, photography, podcasts, politics, presidential election 2020, protest, QAnon, race, racism, reality TV, Rice, Robert's Rules of Order, science fiction, Scott Pilgrim, screen time, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, self-driving cars, serial killers, sperm donation, sports, teaching, Tenet, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, the Senate, the truth is out there, this is fine, time travel, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unemployment, universal basic income, Utopia, Venezuela, Venus, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Washington, West Coast, whistleblowers, White House, white privilege, white saviors, wildfires, Won't somebody think of the children?, wormholes, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, Zoom
Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links
* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…
* For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans. The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.
“ok what happens when someone dies” really seems to be the armor-piercing question for all these plans to reopen schools
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020
The one that gets me is that students have ten minutes between classes regardless of modality or location. Starbucks is closed, library is closed, you’re not allowed to congregate in hallways — where do you go for your 10 AM virtual class between your 9 and 11 in-person classes? https://t.co/vSz7t88uHH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020
There’s also going to be a nonzero number of in-person classes where the instructor is the noncompliant party and I haven’t heard anyone explain what is supposed to happen in that situation https://t.co/MkwlX7GM8d
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 24, 2020
Btw your students know what's up. I've seen so many similar tiktoks over the last month pic.twitter.com/7JZzTl9xGq
— dakoda smith (@feelinggorgias) July 19, 2020
* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.
* Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.
* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.
* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.
* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.
* 8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.
* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.
* Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.
* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.
When men use slurs against us it’s *shoulder shrug* but when we defend ourselves it’s because we’re opportunistic. Fuck this https://t.co/nCyMiZdaNK
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 24, 2020
* Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.
* How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?
* There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.
* Once again: against homework.
My lecture on this starts in half an hour lol https://t.co/DmQRYAj95l https://t.co/SlIornNN5q
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) July 24, 2020
* The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.
I’m incredibly cynical and believe the Republican Party is full of world-historical monsters but seeing the entire apparatus of the right attach themselves to Q has really shaken me https://t.co/lSKM65lp3q
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 26, 2020
* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.
This is really bad. There has been a gigantic, sustained shock in areas of the labor market which are not directly exposed to the virus, but instead exposed to plain old economic conditions. https://t.co/zsNuxCiT5L
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 21, 2020
* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell
* U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.
I think people prior to the Gen X/Millennial cohort genuinely have trouble processing what has happened to basically everything they were raised to think of as “careers” https://t.co/BVreP3Wk3S
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020
You can’t even really get a job as a lawyer anymore. My younger cousins w/ nursing degrees don’t have stable gigs, but travel between multiple hospitals. Obviously being a professor is over. Aside from the medical cartel that is only just now starting to crack, jobs don’t exist.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020
* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.
* How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.
* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.
* The Racist History of Tipping.
* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.
* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.
they literally cannot stop threatening us with a good time pic.twitter.com/aryQLXpwvI
— accidentally left-wing (@accidental_left) July 22, 2020
* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
* Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.
* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.
* J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.
* The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.
* Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.
* What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.
* The fight against racism starts at home.
Stares at every white person who keeps asking “how to help” or how they can “do better” 🤨🤨 ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/D1puoZQ1Ng
— Tanya, Laird of Glencoe, Chaotic Black Deathbane (@cypheroftyr) July 25, 2020
* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.
* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.
* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since
* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today
* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked
Two Americas pic.twitter.com/hKdXwoiWUU
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 24, 2020
* always has been — always has been
* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.
* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.
* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?
* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?
* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.
* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”
* Yet another Watchmen sequel.
* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’
Written by gerrycanavan
July 27, 2020 at 7:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolitionism, academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, air conditioning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, always has been, America, Animal Crossing, anti-capitalism, Avatar, biraciality, Bong Joon-ho, Breath of the Wild, capitalism, child care, Children of Men, Cixin Liu, class, class struggle, climate change, college, college football, college sports, conferences, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crisis on Infinite Earths, cyberpunk, disability, Donald Trump, dystopia, epidemic, eviction, fantasy, film, general election 2020, general election 2024, Generation X, giraffes, Grimes squares, Harry Potter, Highlights, history, How the University Works, hygiene theater, hyperobjects, J.K. Rowling, Jillian Weise, John Lewis, journalism, kids, Korra, Last Airbender, lead, lead poisoning, Legend of Zelda, Lincoln Tunnel, literature, Lord of the Rings, Luigi, maps, Mario, Mario Brothers, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, medicine, Michigan, millennials, MLA, NCAA, New York, Octavia Butler, Ohio State, pandemic, Paradoxa, Parasite, parenting, Penn State, PG-13, philosophy, poetry, politics, pornography, QAnon, race, racism, Republicans, Rick and Morty, Rutgers, schools, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Selma, slurs, socialism, Star Trek, suffering, syllabi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, takin' 'bout my generation, the Anthropocene, the courts, the Doctor, the economy, the kids are all right, The Last of Us, the law, the Left, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, tipping, Tolkien, Tom Cotton, translation, UFOs, vaccines, Voyager, Washington Racial Slurs, Watchmen, white people, whiteness, Wisconsin, worms, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zelda
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Wednesday Night Links!
* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.
* Shoot this post into my veins.
Shoot this post into my veins. pic.twitter.com/YNsOgnRAM3
— Detective Pikajew (@clapifyoulikeme) January 22, 2020
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.
* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!
* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.
* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.
* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.
* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!
* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.
* When rich people can’t get along.
* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.
* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.
* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.
* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.
* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.
* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).
* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.
* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.
* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!
* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’
* The things you learn on Twitter.
Makes sense. Google used Enron emails to train its autocomplete. The dead ghosts of corporate malfeasance speak through us all now: https://t.co/fSzqQ5HCYO
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 21, 2020
* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.
* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.
* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’
Written by gerrycanavan
January 22, 2020 at 4:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, accessibility, administrative blight, affordability, Amazon, artificial intelligence, Australia, autocomplete, Bernie Sanders, Brazil, canon, canonicity, carbon, CBP, CFPs, child labor, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, coal, comics, Cops, Davos, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emails, endorsements, English, English departments, Enron, eviction, fascism, games, Glenn Greenwald, Google, Greta Thunberg, Hillary Clinton, hostages, Houston, How the University Works, ice, immigration, impeachment, internet of beefs, Iran, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, John Kerry, journalism, laptops, LEGO, memes, Microsoft, millionaires, Mitt Romney, Monopoly, Mr. Peanut, N.K. Jemisin, nature, New York, New Yorker, Oakland, October Surprise, pedagogy, philosophy, Picard, plastic, politics, rich people, robots, Ronald Reagan, rule of law, Saudi Arabia, science, science fiction, sex, single payer, social credit, social media, Star Trek, status, teaching, the courts, the law, the rent is too damn high, the truth is out there, treason, Twitter, UFOs, Untitled Goose Game, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wendy's, wildfires, Žižek
2020 Links for 2020
* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”
* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!
* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.
* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.
FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’
* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.
* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.
* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.
* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.
Thinking about @adamkotsko’s TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.
* The problem with bringing back blogs is.
* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.
* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.
300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020
* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.
* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.
* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.
* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.
* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.
* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.
* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.
* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.
* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.
* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.
* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.
* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.
* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.
* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.
they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020
* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.
* The rise of the permanent protest.
* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.
* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.
* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.
* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?
Star Wars’ insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will
— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020
* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.
* When AI runs the entertainment industry.
* When business people run the Olympics.
* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).
* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.
* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.
OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s
— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020
* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.
* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!
* The decolonization of Miles Morales.
* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.
* ‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.
* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.
* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 16, 2020 at 2:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Airbnb, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, America, artificial intelligence, Australia, Baby Boomers, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Binti, blogs, boondoggles, capitalism, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Ware, Christopher Tolkien, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, climate fiction, coffee, college football, college sports, comics, Curb Your Enthusiasm, DC, deportation, depression, domestic violence, Donald Trump, ecology, ed tech, empire, English departments, Episode 9, eugenics, F-Stop, fascism, film, Finland, fraud, futurity, games, Generation Z, graphic novels, HBO, health care, Hollywood, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, Iceland, immigration, intergenerational struggle, Iran, Isaac Asimov, Jack Kirby, Larry David, Lord Byron, Lord of the Rings, malls, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, MCU, medicine, memory, Middle-Earth, Miles Morales, millennials, misogyny, MIT, MLA, money, my media empire, my scholarly empire, negativity, Nnedi Okorafor, nostalgia, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organized crime, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, Picard, poetry, police, politics, Portal, post-truth, protest, public domain, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, relationships, retirement, Rusty Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Scrabble, sexism, sexual harassment, single pager, Slaughterhouse Five, small liberal arts colleges, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, superheroes, syllabi, Taiwan, Tarantino, teaching, television, the 2010s, the 2020s, the Arctic, the Catholic Church, the humanities, the long now, the Olympics, The Rise of Skywalker, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, The Wonder Years, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, truth, Twitter, UFOs, ultracrepidarians, Unexpected Stories, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vermont, Vonnegut, walking simulators, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Watchmen, Westworld, wildfires, William Wordsworth, World Science Fiction Studies, zunguzungu
*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
Thursday Night Links!
* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.
* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.
* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?
* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.
* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.
* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.
* Here come the esports majors.
* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.
* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.
* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.
* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.
* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.
* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!
* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.
* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.
McConnell added that it would require 67 votes to change Senate rules to prevent a trial from taking place – so the rule change won’t happen. But he can move to dismiss after the trial begins. “How long I’m on it is another matter,” he said of a trial
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2019
The Senate voting along party lines to refuse to hold the trial at all — which is what they would have to do for this to work — is probably the best case scenario for the Democrats short of conviction (which is a fantasy). https://t.co/n3yJ5bXcut
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 28, 2019
* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.
Mitch McConnell's wife is Secretary of Transportation.
Mitt Romney's niece is RNC Chair.
Antonin Scalia's son is up for Secretary of Labor.
etc. https://t.co/TS5ut3ydEb— Jonathan Dresner (@jondresner) September 29, 2019
This looks like a meeting of the human villains from every Muppets movie. pic.twitter.com/IO64xvFmia
— Devin Field (@thatdevinfield) October 2, 2019
Every worry people have about the way mass media leads people to eliminationist and genocidal thought is present in every form of rightwing media, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News. The foundation is laid.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2019
* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.
* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.
* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”
* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.
* How they teach slavery, then and now.
Here is a page from "Our Virginia: Past and Present" by Joy Masoff (2010). Notice the reference to free blacks expressing loyalty to the Confederacy and of course the black Confederate claim:
"Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks…" pic.twitter.com/outkKpaIS7
— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) October 1, 2019
* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.
* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.
* I suppose this is canon (again).
* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.
* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.
* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.
* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?
* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.
* Absolutely psychotic nation.
* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.
* get you a man who can do all three
get you a man who can do all three pic.twitter.com/yYOLHQPZNn
— Dickie Greenleaf (@ohgoddickie) September 28, 2019
* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.
* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.
* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!
* This one is a real america.jpg too.
* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.
* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.
* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, active shooter drills, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, aliens, Amber Guyger, America, apocalypse, Asimov, austerity, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bojack Horseman, breakfast cereals, Bret Stephens, broken windows theory, Buffy, Buffy studies, canon, carbon, CBP, CFPs, childhood, class struggle, climate change, college sports, Columbia, comics, death, deportation, discovery, Disney, Donald Trump, Ecohorror, ecology, Edward Snowden, eliminationism, Elizabeth Warren, emergency, Encyclopedia Galactica, English departments, Enron, equality, esports, Estonia, failure, Fermi paradox, film, Foundation, Fox News, free college, futurity, games, Garrett Hardin, gay rights, geography fan fiction, Google, growth, guns, HBO, His Dark Materials, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ICFA, immigration, impeachment, imperialism, John Kelly, kids today, KKK, labor, lacrosse, leakers, lesbian separatism, Mara Jade, Marquette, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, media, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, mortality, NCAA, nepotism, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, Philip Pullman, philosophy, plantations, poetry, police-industrial complex, politics, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, proceduralism, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rich kids, scams, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, selfies, Sesame Street, slavery, Sony, Spider-Man, sports, Sports Illustrated, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, Tarantino, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the economy, the Gothic, The Muppets, the Pyrocene, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, therapy, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, Tom Holland, tragedy of the commons, trans* issues, transphobia, Twitter, vaping, violence, violences, Virginia, WeWork, whistleblowers, white supremacy, work, X-Men
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV
— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019
* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.
Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ
— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019
Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019
Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019
What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019
* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019
* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
* The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7
— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019
* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.
Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
* How we invest in our cities is broken.
* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.
Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 737 Max, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, Africa, air travel, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, Area 51, artificial intelligence, asteroids, autism, Boeing, Buffalo, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, China, class struggle, climate change, climate grief, climate strike, clowns, college footballs, college sports, comics, communism, consciousness, conspiracy theories, copyright, Cory Doctorow, cultural preservation, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ecology, Electoral College, electric cars, Elizabeth Warren, English departments, essays, evolutionary psychology, fast food, film, first contact, flat Earthers, Florida, Florida Keys, Foxconn, free college, free speech, Frozen II, games, games studies, gender, Generation Z, genius, gig economy, graffiti, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Groundhog Day, guns, Harvard, High Line, How the University Works, Hunter Biden, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Impossible Burger, indigenous futurism, industrial agriculture, Islamophobia, Israel, James Tiptree Jr., Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Russ, Joe Biden, John Milton, Johns Hopkins, kids today, King of Kong, Koch brothers, language, legacy admissions, logos, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michael Vick, military-industrial complex, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT Media Lab, modern art, MOOCs, Muppets, names, necropolitics, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New York, NLRB, nuclear power, opioids, organ theft, Orwell, over-educated literary theory PhDs, OxyContin, Palestine, pencils, Peter Pan, physics, plagiarism, plantations, podcasts, politics, popular vote, Posadism, Princess Bride, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, recycling, reproducibility crisis, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, San Francisco, Sandy Hook, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, scams, school-to-prison pipeline, science, science fiction, Scrabble, sea level rise, Sesame Street, Shakespeare, Shampoodler, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, socialism, space elevator, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, strikes, student debt, student movements, Superfund sites, the afterlife, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Bahamas, the Capitalocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the kids are all right, The Little Mermaid, The Lost Girls, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, TikTok, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, trees, TurnItIn, Two Americas, UFOs, Ukraine, UNC, unions, University of Buffalo, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war on education, wellness, Wes Anderson, WeWork, white people, Wisconsin, X-Men
Friday Links! SpoOooOOOOOoOOOOooOOooky
* Remarkable reversal: James Tiptree’s name will be removed from the Tiptree Award after all.
* Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.
* Aggression sensors. Classroom barricades. How architects are transforming schools for the era of mass shootings. The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools.
* Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* Green and white nationalism.
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – fond of using an arboreal emoji on Twitter, until journalists smelled them out – demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ Quoting both Mosley and Heidegger, the alt-right publisher Greg Johnson asserts that saving the ecosystem requires saving the white race. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, a religious homestead movement named after a series of novels, combine racial myths with environmental mysticism.
Most of these are tiny, fringe movements. But there are signs that green and white nationalism is scaling up. In the recent European elections, France’s National Rally claimed that ‘borders are the environment’s greatest ally.’ Marine Le Pen declared that someone ‘who is rooted in their home is an ecologist’, whereas those who are ‘nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland’. Across the Atlantic, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed to be against illegal immigration because it ‘produces a huge amount of litter’, while the far-right pundit Ann Coulter has suggested that Americans must ‘choose between a green America and a brown America’. In India, public tree planting and reverence for sacred groves reinforce the government’s majoritarian claim that only Hindus are the nation’s true stewards.
* Someone who is good at the economy please help me.
Someone who is good at the economy please help me pic.twitter.com/qWAgWa74bP
— Sam Sacks (@SamSacks) September 11, 2019
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: A program on civic virtue at UNC-Chapel Hill is raising concerns about secrecy and funding.
* John Bolton and the Fox News Century.
* Science corner! A bold new perspective suggests space-time isn’t a fundamental entity but emerges from quantum entanglement, says physicist Sean Carroll.
* ‘I Lost Everything’: The Obscene Cost of Being a Woman with a Chronic Health Problem.
* Actually existing media bias: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.
Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.
* The richest man in the world has some news for his workers at Whole Foods.
* Bizarre comet from another star system just spotted. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
* In my home timeline, Tiger Woods was on You Can’t Do That on Television for a season.
* In 1949, LIFE magazine broke it down.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 13, 2019 at 9:46 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, Achille Mbembe, actually existing media bias, aliens, Amazon, America, Andrew Yang, books, catastrophe, class struggle, climate change, disaster, Donald Trump, eco-fascism, ectopic pregnancy, Fox News, green fascism, guns, immigration, James Tiptree Jr., Jeff Bezos, John Bolton, Liberty University, libraries, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, Mandela Effect, mass shootings, medical debt, meritocracy, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Oumuamu, politics, pregnancy, science, science fiction, taste, the Bahamas, the economy, the truth is out there, Tiger Woods, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Uber, UNC, war on education, white nationalism, Whole Foods
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
Some of y’all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK
— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c
— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019
you, an intellectual: we can’t afford a better society
me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they’re currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019
I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 4, 2019
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it
— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
in this regard, Yang’s “higher ground” remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we’re going to hear more and more of. don’t mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019
(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu
— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 31, 2019
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA
— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 5, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 8chan, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, ADA, Africa, Alaska, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, animals, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, autism, bears, Berkeley, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, capitalism, CBP, Charles Manson, Chicago, climate change, collapse, debt, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, deserts, dinosaurs, disability, Domino's, ecofascism, ecology, El Paso, Elon Musk, English majors, Extrapolation, fascism, fonts, Frankenstein, fraud, games, gaming, gerrymandering, grading, Greenland, Guam, guns, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, immigration, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, Larry Niven, literature, Marianne Williams, Marine Todd, mass shootings, Mexico, MFAs, military-industrial complex, Museum of Science Fiction, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Netflix, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, open borders, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, phone farms, progress, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rich people, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Simpsons, slavery, social media, socialism, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Tesla, the Amazon, The Boys, The Fast and The Furious, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rock, the truth is out there, toxic masculinity, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Utopia, video games, Walter Benjamin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wealth, white men, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, Wisconsin veto, writing, X-Men
Monday Morning Links!
* Principles of inclusive teaching.
* Marquette to Add Nine Faculty in Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies.
* Alaska defunds scholarships for thousands of university students ahead of fall semester.
* Bolsonaro vs. the future of the human race.
* Immigration Officials Snatch 9-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Heading To School, Hold Her For 2 Days. “I was scared. I was completely by myself,” says sobbing fourth-grader.
* “U.S. citizens may be increasingly swept up in federal immigration custody amid new rule change.” Seems like a good reason not to do it!
* What I’ve Learned About Unemployment And Being Poor After Applying For 215 Jobs.
* How mindfulness privatizes a social problem.
* And although they’ve been writing together for years—including on a number of Bad Robot productions that never saw the light of day—the duo has never written anything that’s actually been produced in Hollywood, which seems just absolutely wild given how much money, prestige, etc. is at stake here. Amazon’s new Lord Of The Rings showrunners have never made a TV show before. Yikes.
* A common problem in long-lived modern-dance troupes is “older-dancer syndrome.”
The 4 types of adult
1. Alcoholic parent
2. IBS sufferer
3. Disney season pass holder
4. Facebook racist— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) July 28, 2019
right wing culture warriors never mention that modern US comics and movies were constitutively shaped by literal codes of conduct that said 'no queerness' and 'cops have to be the heroes'
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) July 29, 2019
Bar
Home
Office
Airport
Temple
Church
College
Mosque
Concert
Hospital
Nightclub
Newsroom
Pre-school
Synagogue
Yoga studio
High school
City building
Military base
Bowling alley
Street corner
Movie theater
Political event
Middle school
Elementary school
Gilroy garlic festival— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) July 29, 2019
* Journalist Misses His Deadline on Manson Article. By 20 Years.
Q: Any advice for other reporters who want to pick up the story where you left off?
A: Just move on. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
* This college dropout was bedridden for 11 years. Then he invented a surgery and cured himself. Amazing story.
* 1950s science fiction. Laughter is the best medicine. Sagametrics. AI. False humility. Mortal life is a test. Morally speaking, can you eat humans? The intrinsic value of learning. The ultimate insult. Science!
* A Quest for the Holy Grail: On D. W. Pasulka’s “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology.”
Written by gerrycanavan
July 29, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adults, Alaska, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Charles Manson, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, Cobra, Cobra Commander, comics, Comics Code, dance, deportation, ecology, G.I. Joe, guns, Hasbro, How the University Works, ice, immigration, inclusion, journalism, kids today, labor, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, mass shootings, medicine, mindfulness, movies, neoliberalism, pedagogy, politics, protest, race and ethnic studies, religion, resistance, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science is magic, teaching, the rainforest, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, Tolkien, toys, true crime, UFOs, unemployment, Vermont, words, work
Friday Morning Links GUARANTEED* Not to Send You Into a Tailspin of Misery and Despair!
* In effect, more than a third of all cinema tickets bought in North America are for a Disney movie.
* UAA students, staff respond to impending, unprecedented budget cuts.
* ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump. New disclosures about lewd Trump video reveal his mastery of the GOP.
* Really, are the liberals okay?
I knew it would happen and said it would in November 2016 but even so it is wild to watch the Democrats become consumed entirely by disgust for their left flank while Trump and Trumpism take over the country.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 12, 2019
* A “cheerful white woman” who voted for Trump loses her birth certificate, can’t get a passport, gets stuck in expensive and frightening citizenship limbo. Concludes “I don’t think anyone should be treated like that, period.” Plans to vote for Trump again. What a journey.
* ICE Told Agents ‘Happy Hunting!’ as They Prepped for Raid.
* Mother Whose Toddler Died After Leaving ICE Custody Tells Harrowing Story To Congress.
* On the brink of being homeless in a sanctuary city.
* Immigrants in U.S. Illegally Are Hiding Out, Staying Home From Work Amid Looming ICE Raids. Immigration law firm worker says silent raids in SoCal have already begun.
* When news broke that thousands of current and former Border Patrol agents were members of a secret Facebook group filled with racist, vulgar, and sexist content, Carla Provost, chief of the agency, was quick to respond. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” Provost said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.” About that…
* Cop lies. Cop lies. Cop lies.
* Pleading guilty just to go home.
* Today in the richest country in human history.
* In the time of Stranger Things, this seems like a gimme: Paper Girls Ordered to Series By Amazon Studios.
* And speaking of which: The Real Monsters in Stranger Things Are Adults. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game — hard to think of a classic SFF text where this isn’t the case. Why Stranger Things‘ nostalgia isn’t quite as magical in season 3.
* Indeed, the only thing the domestic outrage over the Iraq War seemed to accomplish has been a massive effort waged by the government and the corporate elite to engineer a public that doesn’t complain and doesn’t care when their government meddles or invades another country.
* Martian time-slip: How Should Space Settlers Keep Track of Time?
* What old age is really like.
* The Once and Future MetaFilter.
* In a dark time, Americans stood up: Thousands of people have taken a Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 to ‘see them aliens.’
* Do you think there’s a meaning of life?
* “Fatal Accident With Metal Straw Highlights a Risk.”
* Conservationists have coined a new term—“The Fifth Season”—for the month or two of wildfires that now descends on much of the West each late summer. Red sun; yellow skies; oddly chill, acrid air. A nightmare inversion of summer. In addition to the Jemisin reference, this is also a running joke on the podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern, where the magical land of Foon has an extra season where the whole world just burst into constant flame for a few months.
sure, it seems bad that major America cities are slammed by increasingly insurmountable climate disasters year after year, but the truth is this is only the start of it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 12, 2019
* And now I’m anxious about this! Thanks for nothing.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 12, 2019 at 10:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Alaska, aliens, allergies, Amazon, America, animals, anxiety, apocalypse, Area 51, California, capitalism, cats, CBP, class struggle, climate change, comics, concentration camps, Democrats, deportation, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, Facebook, fantasy, film, Foon, general election 2020, graduate student nightmares, health care, Hello from the Magic Tavern, Hollywood, homelessness, housing, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, impeachment, liberals, Martian time-slip, meaning of life, mentorship, MetaFilter, Monopoly, N.K. Jemisin, Nancy Pelosi, nostalgia, old age, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paper Girls, police corruption, police violence, politics, poverty, protest, QAnon, Republicans, resistance, sanctuary cities, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, social media, Stranger Things, straws, the courts, The Fifth Season, the law, the rent is too damn high, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, University of Alaska, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white people, wildfire
July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!
* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!
* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.
* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.
* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.
* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.
* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.
* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.
* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
Fascinating Lore: Nintendo Revealed That The Reason Mario Always Comes Back To Life After He Dies Is Because Both Heaven And Hell Reject His Soul https://t.co/RR0KBQQnxK pic.twitter.com/6ItMP9lE8M
— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 20, 2019
* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.
* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.
* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.
* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.
feeling a bit like we shouldn't have built a mass media-news-entertainment complex with openly fascist aesthetics and then elected as president one of its creatures https://t.co/Mua9Qfkwqq
— Max Read (@max_read) July 1, 2019
* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.
* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.
* How to Chair an Academic Committee.
* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.
* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’
* Another free speech mystery.
* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.
* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.
* The Surreal End of an American College.
* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.
* Outcomes-based graduate school.
* Nice work if you can get it!
* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.
* When you really mess up the lit review.
* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.
* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.
* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.
* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.
* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.
You should read this whole New Yorker piece about the conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas, but if you can't read the whole thing, at least read this paragraph: https://t.co/xWwHYvIMjb pic.twitter.com/Iujo3Pi2av
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 22, 2019
Homestead is hot and barren, with a completely enclosed fence. I saw children being marched from one building to another in single file lines. No laughing, no playing. These are children who are prisoners. pic.twitter.com/7WB4G8sI5n
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 26, 2019
Just left the first CBP facility. The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined.
15 women in their 50s- 60s sleeping in a small concrete cell, no running water. Weeks without showers. All of them separated from their families.
This is a human rights crisis.
— Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (@RepDean) July 1, 2019
"only four showers were available for 756 immigrants, more than half of the immigrants were being held outside, and immigrants inside were being kept in cells maxed out at more than five times their capacity." https://t.co/r3cHT3Xb3f
— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) July 2, 2019
One thing I had never heard, was that in the early days of the Nazi concentration camps, years before the death camps and Final Solution, the Nazi government actually prosecuted guards for abusing and mistreating detainees. Hitler came in and pardoned them all to send a message.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 2, 2019
* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.
This Oregon story is a slow-burn “worst news in the country” right now, rivaling both the Iran strike and the camps. The GOP openly making common cause with paramilitary groups and the Dems completely backing down is a very bad sign for the 2020s and beyond.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2019
* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.
* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.
* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.
Primary debate pic.twitter.com/soyz8tiUft
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) July 1, 2019
* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.
This is about as clear an encapsulation of the effects of gerrymandering as you’ll find: pic.twitter.com/mrrTIfvNvK
— Aaron Wiener (@aaronwiener) July 1, 2019
by contrast, what if American politics is fundamentally defined by white supremacy, partisan politics are ultimately epiphenomenal to that, and it's the job of people like Yascha to mystify that arrangement into nearly moralizing pap https://t.co/HXLrHKtSYC
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 23, 2019
* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.
* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.
* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.
* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.
* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.
This is why I’ve said that if geoengineering doesn’t work, there’s a real sense in which science fiction as a genre destroyed the world. It gave people a vision of Promethean possibility that was only ever, in China Mieville’s memorable phrase, capitalism’s bullshit about itself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019
SF is also the only thing that can save us, so you can see how conflicted I am
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019
♫ ♪ always look on the bright side of life ♪ ♫ https://t.co/xb0Ex965R7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2019
* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.
* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.
* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.
* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.
* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.
* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.
* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.
* “I babysit for the one percent.”
lmao at everyone who thought the rich would save a fancy building over saving the homeless or whatever
they won't even save the building https://t.co/0F6oIhLXVD
— donoteat, 'the molson normie' (@donoteat1) June 15, 2019
* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.
* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.
* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.
* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.
This Uber article is brutal. "Uber's most important innovation has been to produce staggering levels of private wealth without creating any sustainable benefits for consumers, workers, the cities they serve, or anyone else" https://t.co/BVnh8MxSGe pic.twitter.com/RsYYGgWPGJ
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) June 6, 2019
* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.
* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.
* How to Speak Silicon Valley.
* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.
i'm still convinced that the most underappreciated important story in tech over the last 15 years was the amount of actual human labor that was going into systems sold as "automated" https://t.co/nLx8nuks7H
— Max Read (@max_read) June 19, 2019
* We either buy insulin or we die.
* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.
* The FoxConn scam, one year later.
* Would you like to know more?
* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.
* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.
* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.
* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.
* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.
* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.
Her serial rapist is HER UNCLE. Started raping her when she was 12. After 4 pregnancies, 3 live births, 1 miscarriage, 1 child deceased from a disease common in cases of incest, & 2 living kids, Alabama is forcing her to allow her rapist visitation w/the kids. Unconscionable https://t.co/KjbBu3JiqV
— BlackFeministThoughtiana (@divafeminist) June 15, 2019
* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.
* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.
* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.
* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.
* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.
* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!
* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.
* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.
* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.
* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.
* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.
* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.
* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY
* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.
* Whoa.
* 63 Up.
* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.
* They finally found the monolith.
* sold
* just another classic canavan viral tweet
Seems like a minor concern! https://t.co/sicDlX1p5H pic.twitter.com/e2PtlsL7f9
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) July 2, 2019
* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.
* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.
* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing
* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.
* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?
* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’
* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.
* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?
* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.
* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.
* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.
* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.
* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.
* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.
* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.
* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!
* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?
* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.
* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 2, 2019 at 4:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #CancelColbert, 2001, 2008, 2020 Democratic primary, 63 Up, 7 Up, abortion, academia, accreditation, adjunctification, administrative blight, Adrian Tchaikovsky, air travel, Airbnb, Alabama, Alanis Morissette, Alaska, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, babysitting, Bangladesh, Bernie Standards, Beto O' Rourke, blindness, bosses, braille, Brazil, Canada, cancer, capitalism, carbon, cartoons, CBP, CFPs, childbirth, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, civility, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college closures, comedy, comics, comics studies, commercial real estate, concentration camps, corpocracy, CSU, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, Dalai Lama, Dark Phoenix, deepfakes, democracy, demographics, deportation, depression, diabetes, disability, disruption, dogs, dolphins, Donald Trump, dystopia, eat fresh, ecology, education, elephants, Elizabeth Warren, evolution, Facebook, fascism, feminism, feminist science fiction, fire, football, Fourth of July, Foxconn, free speech, friendliness, fully automated luxury communism, futureshock, Gaia hypothesis, gambling, games, gay rights, genre, geoengineering, gerrymandering, grade inflation, graduate school, Greek life, Harvard, He-Man, historically black colleges, hope, How the University Works, ice, Iceman, immigration, insulin, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Ireland, Jameson, Joe Biden, Kennedy School, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, life expectancy, Malcolm Harris, marijuana, Mario, Marquette, Marvel, Masters of the Universe, Medea hypothesis, medicine, mental health, meritocracy, Mexico, MH370, military-industrial complex, militias, millennials, Milwaukee, mindfulness, money, music, musicals, Naomi Wolf, neoliberalism, Netflix, neuroscience, New York 2140, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, North Korea, Notre Dame, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oberlin, Octavia Butler, oh no, optimism, Oregon, parenting, Philadelphia, phones, plastic, police corruption, police violence, politics, pollution, pornography, pregnancy, propaganda, protest, PTSD, race, racism, rap, rape, rape culture, Ravelry, real estate, recycling, redlining, reparations, Republicans, resistance, rich people, Robert Kirkman, SATs, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science, science fiction, segregation, Silicon Valley, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, social media, sororities, standardized testing, student debt, studies, Subway, success, suicide, Super Mario, Super Mario Maker 2, surveillance society, Ta-Nehisi Coates, taxes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tetris, Texas, Thai food, the Beatles, The Dead Don't Die, the economy, The Matrix, the Moon, the rent is too damn high, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the void, The Walking Dead, The Wandering Earth, they say time is the fire in which we burn, this is fine, Tony awards, Toy Story, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, unions, Universal Music Group, University of Alaska, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vonnegut, war, war on drugs, war on education, war tax, whales, white supremacy, whiteness, Will Smith, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, Yesterday, zombies
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
Universities are some of the best institutions we have, run by people who despise everything they stand for.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2019
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
Democrats: Republicans are under the sway of a death cult whose precepts make no sense and which is led by an utter buffoon
also Democrats: we should nominate Joe Biden for president
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2019
you couldn’t talk about a sports team with this kind of childlike naivete, but every adult in the country does it about the Founders https://t.co/GWgglA3VZu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2019
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
Left: The Onion, 2015
Right: The New York Times, 2019 pic.twitter.com/R2Cw9EIOzv— mcc (@mcclure111) May 9, 2019
I think it was @PatBlanchfield who taught me to read all of American politics through the lens of Boomer incontinence. https://t.co/zu9boSLIBu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2019
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
We are now emitting every ten years as much carbon as was produced in the first two centuries of industrialization. https://t.co/KFIeJOMkxG
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) May 23, 2019
New Greta Thunberg mural in Bristol pic.twitter.com/EP8GnQ4GU2
— Joe Ware (@wareisjoe) May 30, 2019
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
Every VC funded online publication became a woke clickbait mill for a simple reason: the metrics told them this was the best performing type of content. pic.twitter.com/tqMEEtVI9n
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 9, 2019
What is of interest is how what began as a cynical metrics and cost-driven expedient became a a set of genuine ideological commitments through an online radicalization process driven by cycles of trolling and performative victimhood
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 9, 2019
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
This is what happens when all we're encouraged to focus on is the brief dopamine rush of "unspoiled" plot twists: the conveyor-belt model of media consumption. https://t.co/4NUZn68VrT
— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) May 17, 2019
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 4, 2019 at 2:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2050, 5G, academic publishing, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, air travel, aliens, alternate history, Amazon, America, apocalypse, aristocracy, Avengers, balloons, Belgium, Bernie Sanders, birds, Boening, Britney Spears, California, Canada, cancer, capitalism, carbon, catastrophe, CBP, CFPs, China, cities, civilization, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, crisis, CRISPR, critical university studies, cruelty, David Foster Wallace, David Wallace-Wells, debate, deep time, deportation, depression, DHS, diabetes, disaster, Donald Trump, Dril, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Endgame, environmental racism, Exhalation, extinction, fascism, feminism, flooding, folk heroes, fossil fuels, Fox News, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2020, genes, genetic engineering, genetics, George Romero, George Soros, golf, graduate student movements, Grand Canyon, Greta Thunberg, Guantánamo, guns, hagfish slime, helium, Hell, history, homelessness, horror, Houston, How the University Works, Hungary, ice, immigration, impeachment, insects, insulin, Jeanette Winterson, Jeff Bezos, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, koalas, labor, liberals, literature, Louisiana, Lyft, magic, Marquette, Mars, mass shootings, MCU, meritocracy, Mexico, millennials, Milwaukee, Mitch McConnell, Mortal Kombat, NASA, NCAA, necessity defense, neoliberalism, nice work if you can get it, Nintendo, nostalgia, nuclearity, outer space, paradise, Paradoxa, parenting, party city, pedagogy, photography, police, police corruption, politics, pollution, post-Earth capitalism, poverty, privacy, protest, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, Robin Hood, San Francisco, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-defense, Sesame Street, shaving, socialism, South Carolina, spoiler alert, Standing Rock, Stanford University Press, Star Trek, stem cells, student debt, student loans, suicide, Susan Sontag, Ted Chiang, Thanos, the Anthropocene, The Bell Curve, the Constitution, the cosmos, the courts, the Democrats, the Founders, the humanities, The Joker, the law, the Midwest, the Moon, the truth is out there, The Wandering Earth, the wisdom of markets, trash, true crime, Trumpism, Uber, UCLA, UFOs, unions, Utopia, vegans, violence, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, weather, wildfire, work, YouTube