Posts Tagged ‘they say time is the fire in which we burn’
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
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W
— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019
the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.
This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk
— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019
that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019
“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2019 at 10:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Afrofuturism, algorithms, America, apocalypse, assassinations, Barack Obama, books, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, CFPs, Charlton Heston, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, China Miéville, class struggle, David Bowie, Deadspin, death, Democrats, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, environmentalism, Equal Rights Amendment, Fahrenheit 451, franchise fiction, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, gig economy, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, Halloween, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, income inequality, journalism, Juul, kids today, loneliness, Mars, Marx, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, moral nuance, mortality, my life as a nerd, neoliberalism, New York, nuclearity, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, photography, police state, police violence, politics, precarity, prequels, presidential libraries, privacy, race, racism, Ray Bradbury, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, seasons, solar punk, Supreme Court, technical debt, the Anthropocene, The Doors of Eden, the Internet, The Matrix, the tuition is too damn high, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, University of Chicago, Utopia, vaping, Virginia, Vonnegut, WeWork, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing
Friday Night Links!
* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!
* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.
* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.
* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.
* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.
* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.
* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.
* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.
* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.
* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.
* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.
* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.
* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.
Hell yeah, this rules. pic.twitter.com/XVwHdgJSnU
— Ranjodh 👻Specter-that-haunts-europe👻 Dhaliwal (@ranjodhd) October 15, 2019
* Meanwhile: some grim accounting.
Working on scraping the Academic Jobs Wiki to see if it can yield more accurate recent job numbers. Here's what I've got so far. Note that all subfields are declining in jobs besides Ethnic Studies. pic.twitter.com/j7O04yMBGl
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) October 13, 2019
* Weaponizing student evaluations, part I, II, III.
* Ecological Politics for the Working Class. Jane Fonda is arrested leading environmental protest at the Capitol. Capitalism and addiction. The new age of megafires. Crisis in the Amazon. The inequality of climate change. Global finance is funding 4C temperature rise. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. In 2025, the economic craze for millennials is going to be cheap housing in flood zones. Climate change and the end of the Olympics. Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. The New Green Scare. ‘They should be allowed to cry’: Ecological disaster taking toll on scientists’ mental health.
* I think a lot of academics have been plagiarized by mainstream outlets at one time or another — I certainly have — but this story is truly next-level.
* Aaron Bady interviews Jedediah Purdy at The Nation. David M. Perry interviews llhan Omar, also at The Nation.
* Chicago teachers are on strike today. A high school teacher explains to us why the strike is the union’s best tool to fight for better conditions in the city’s schools and an end to austerity.
* The class war is also an intergenerational war.
* In the future, “Frequent Flyer Miles” may refer to a tax penalty, or even a criminal misdemeanor.
* Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?
* Biden just isn’t very good at this. Neither is Beto. And Bloomberg won’t be either! Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Take Aim At Corporate Interests Gutting Journalism. I’m with Nobody.
* Trump’s Worst Betrayal Yet. Ethnic cleanser very excited about ethnic cleansing.
my god it’s just like a renaissance painting pic.twitter.com/nm1TrPFN7a
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 17, 2019
* This G7 thing is just wild. Truly not even pretending anymore. Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies. The 30-minute phone call that could end Trump’s presidency. Only once has Gallup seen more support for removing a president. Nixon was gone four days later. The Senate is likelier to remove Trump after impeachment than you think. Donald Trump Isn’t Julius Caesar. He’s Republic-Killer Tiberius Gracchus.
* Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter Feed Is a Boomer Conspiracy-Theory Sh*tshow.
* Once Trump is gone, the U.S. must completely reform the presidency. The Sick Video Played at a Pro-Trump Conference Is a Glimpse of the Dark Energy in American Politics. A lot of policy debates these days turn on Republicans threatening to kill a lot of people. Life Under the First Thousand Days of Donald Trump.
So we must build geography right into the analysis. Once we start looking at electoral college-weighted, county-level correlates of the Trump swing—Trump’s vote share less Romney’s vote share—a very different pattern emerges. The three strongest predictors of the Trump swing are college graduation rate, population growth rate, and growth in deaths due to drug overdoses in 2003-2017.
* A professor spoke about whiteness at Georgia Southern University. Students burned her book.
* California becomes first US state to ban animal fur products.
* Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants.
* Seven Supreme Court cases that will destroy America in 2020.
* California accidentally destroys freelancing.
* Try to escape the gig economy with this artist collective’s new video game.
* The X-Men’s New Age Is Here, and It’s Horny as Hell. Adding in a free love element when it seems like they’re all definitely being drugged or mind controlled might not be the best story decision, but let’s see where it goes…
* Science confirms Storm is main character of X-Men.
* Tesla is Enron, exhibit XXIV.
* But wait! A new competitor has entered the fray! WeWork shuts 2,300 office phone booths over health scare.
* Pickens County Schools pulls controversial transgender policy. This moral panic, ginned up out of absolutely nothing, just infuriates me. I’m not sure you can find even a single example of an inclusive bathroom policy harming anyone, while the ordinary operation of every high school in the country leads to rampant sexual abuse.
* A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago.
* The big business — and questionable effectiveness — of mass shooter trainings. “Questionable” seems… generous.
* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were left with nothing.
* The Midwest Is One of the Worst Places for African Americans to Live.
* Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon. Amazon Workers May Be Are Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* Truly horrible story out of Fort Worth. Fort Worth Officer Charged With Murder In Killing Of Atatiana Jefferson In Her Home. Policing just needs to be rethought completely in this country, on every level.
“I wanted to paint the last thing that #AtatianaJefferson was doing before she was killed by the cops. Her life mattered.” – Artist @4NIKKOLAS pic.twitter.com/kAYIi3QePS
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) October 14, 2019
* UK to deport academic to Democratic Republic of Congo – which she has never visited. And here at home: The New War on Naturalized Citizens.
* Tough week for fans of the use/mention distinction.
* New federal data: suicide rate of children age 10 to 14 “nearly tripled” between 2007 and 2017.
* The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.
* The Joy of Being a Horrible Goose in a Time of Moral Crisis. Honks vs. Quacks: A Long Chat With the Developers of ‘Untitled Goose Game.’
* No, I simply refuse to admire Shep Smith, not even a little bit.
* Now NBC killed its Weinstein story.
* I think you could write a very interesting cultural history of contemporary America about the way it loses its mind every time the First Lady role seems like it might get disrupted. Today’s chapter: Rosario Dawson.
* A whole new twist on institutions abusing Title IX.
* A month away from 40, BA, MFA, PhD, professor for seven years, and I still regularly have dreams where it turns out I missed some requirement and have to go back to high school.
* God, you know, I just can’t stop thinking about this.
* A two-year-old’s reaction to seeing the Hulk go bananas for the first time.
* Miracles and wonders: A Drug Was Made For Just One Child, Raising Hopes About Future Of Tailored Medicine.
* Joker today, Joker tomorrow, Joker forever.
* I refuse to consider the possibility that Watchmen will be remotely good. I don’t care how many critics say otherwise! The Never-Ending Challenge of Adapting ‘Watchmen.’
* It’s back! How many European cities can you name?
* Ancient ‘lost city’ of the Khmer Empire uncovered in Cambodia.
* Paris zoo unveils the “blob”, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes. Take off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
* Spotted on Facebook, and it checks out.
* Gaming out season two of Picard.
* “One thing I like to do at Target is pretend their novelty coffee mugs are gravestone epitaphs.”
* And this Studio Ghibli news is (for a particular sliver of the population) a genuinely shocking development and a huge coup for HBO Max. I know for me it flipped from “lol no” to “well, I guess I’ll be subscribing to that” in an instant…
Written by gerrycanavan
October 18, 2019 at 2:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academic jobs, active shooter drills, addition, adjunctification, adjuncts, air travel, airplanes, alignment charts, alt-ac, Amazon, America, Andrew Cuomo, anime, apocalypse, Apple, Atatiana Jefferson, Baby Boomers, Bernadine Evaristo, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Black Lives Matter, book burnings, Booker Prize, books, California, Calvin and Hobbes, Cambodia, capitalism, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, Chicago, China, Chinese science fiction, cities, citizenship, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coastal flooding, Columbia, comics, conferences, Congo, conspiracy theories, Cory Booker, crying, cultural studies, David M. Perry, death, deportation, Donald Trump, Dril, drugs, eating meat, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, English departments, Enron, ethnic cleansing, Europe, Extinction Rebellion, Facebook, fascism, first ladies, Fort Worth, Fox News, freelancing, frequent flyer miles, fur, G7, games, geography, Georgia, gig economy, graft, guns, Handmaid's Tale, Harold Bloom, Harvey Weinstein, Hayao Miyazaki, HBO, high school, horror, How the University Works, I'm with Nobody, ice sheet collapse, Ilhan Omar, immigration, impeachment, indigenous futurism, intergenerational warfare, James Tiptree Jr., Jane Fonda, Japan, Jodi Dean, Joe Biden, Joker, Ken Liu, kids today, Kurds, leave me the birds and the bees, literature, lost cities, Macs, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, medicine, MFA, military-industrial complex, miracles and wonders, mortality, my media empire, NBC, Neil deGrasse Tyson, nightmares, Nobel Prize, Nobody, Octavia Butler, opioids, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paris, Picard, plagiarism, plant intelligence, plants, please, police violence, politics, polls, President Supervillain, prison, prison-industrial complex, Providence, Q, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Renaissance painting, Rhode Island, Rikers Island, Rome, Ronan Farrow, Rosario Dawson, Rudy Giuliani, science fiction, science is magic, sea level rise, sex work, Shepard Smith, stalking, Star Trek, Storm, streaming, strikes, student debt, studente evaluations, Studio Ghibli, suicide, Supernova Era, Supreme Court, taxes, Tesla, Texas, the Amazon, the courts, the Hulk, the law, the Midwest, The Nation, the Olympics, the Pyrocene, the Senate, The Testaments, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, thinking, Tiptree award, Title IX, transgender issues, true crime, Turkey, Twitter, UNC Greensboro, unions, Untitled Goose Game, use/mention distinction, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Watchmen, weird science, WeWork, wildfires, writing, X-Men, zoos, zunguzungu
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
Wednesday Links!
* How the US built the world’s largest immigrant detention system. A list of companies that contract with ICE.
* Checking in on Duke and UNC under siege.
* 2019 Genius Grant awardees, including Lynda F’ing Barry.
* Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group. The Whitesplaining of History Is Over.
* The kids are all right: Students protest demonstration policy, deliver letter to Zilber.
Inspiring photos of @MarquetteU's undergrads protesting investments in fossil fuels and Puerto Rican debt. @PresLovell should have divested from Baupost a long time ago! #solidarity from #MUnion pic.twitter.com/hv5SVL0j4w
— Tom 🌹 (@TomHansberger) September 24, 2019
* Wisconsin students make up smallest share of UW-Madison freshman class in at least 25 years. The Great Decline.
* And on the China and college beat: US universities see decline in students from China. China’s Higher-Ed Ambitions Are at Odds With Its Tightening Grip on Academic Freedom.
* Impacts ‘accelerating’ as leaders gather for UN talks. Earth’s Oceans Are Getting Hotter And Higher, And It’s Accelerating. ‘Unprecedented Conditions’ Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The African Congo Is Quietly Being Deforested As The Amazon Rainforest Burns. Scientists Set Out to Drift With Arctic Ice for a Year to Study Climate Change. On white supremacy and green living. The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History. This is daytime. Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End. “You’re So Accustomed to the Erasure and the Normalization of Catastrophism.”
Turns out the hippies were right about almost everything and no one will ever admit it even if it means the f'ing species dying out.
— David Roberts (@drvox) September 24, 2019
young people telling septuagenarians how much they despise them for what they did to the planet is good, actually
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2019
* Can a burger help solve climate change?
* The Bible may have a naming discrepancy, and a Duke researcher plans to correct it.
* I might have done this one already, but what the hell: Le Guin’s work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living.
* A real “hold my beer” moment for neoliberalism: A doctor and medical ethicist, who happens to be Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, argues life after 75 is not worth living.
* Chris Ware, whose Rusty Brown is finally out, about which I am very excited, celebrates Peanuts.
* Epic Disasters: Revisiting Marvel & DC’s 1980s Famine Relief Comics.
* What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
* Normal society that is definitely normal and good.
* Die a villain, or live long enough to rebound as a hero.
* Will Google’s quantum computing breakthrough change everything?
* The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century. Surprisingly solid #1 and #2 picks.
* And I’d like to see Ol Donny Trump wriggle out of this jam! Impeachment step by step.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 25, 2019 at 2:16 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Ad Astra, America, apocalypse, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, catastrophe, CBP, Charles Schultz, China, Chris Ware, class struggle, climate change, comics, continents, deforestation, demographics, deportation, Donald Trump, Duke, ecology, English majors, environmentalism, film, games, gender, genius grants, Google, Greta Thunberg, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, impeachment, Impossible Burger, Islamophobia, John Cage, kids today, longevity, Marquette, Mattel, mortality, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Peanuts, plate tectonics, politics, protest, quantum computing, race, racism, religion, Rusty Brown, science fiction, sea level rise, Snoopy, student movements, the Arctic, the bible, the Congo, the Earth, the Great Decline, The Joker, the oceans, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time travel, toys, UNC, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, white supremacy, Wikipedia, Wisconsin
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.
* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.
* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).
* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.
* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.
“what was called normalcy was a hyperviolent multi-generational ponzi scheme rendered inoperable by accelerating ecological crisis” https://t.co/IPUGLl9ArZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 14, 2019
* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.
* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.
* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.
* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?
Fantastic Four #1 established a lot of canon, but perhaps none so firmly as Reed Richards' inability to read a room. pic.twitter.com/FvZ0i8XgFp
— (((Jay Edidin))) (@NotLasers) September 15, 2019
* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.
* When a woman ran for president in 1872.
* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.
* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.
* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.
* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.
* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.
* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 16, 2019 at 8:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #The Resistance, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air pollution, Alaska, alcoholism, America, apocalypse, art, automation, Brazil, CFPs, chess, climate barbarism, climate change, climate fascism, corruption, democracy, depression, diets, Donald Trump, English majors, Fantastic Four, film, Fredric Jameson, general election 2020, grief, health insurance, ice sheet collapse, IRS, John Mulaney, liberation, Lord of the Rings, mass extinction, memory, mental health, Mike Pence, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mortality, mourning, movie trailers, MTV, music, neoliberalism, normalcy, obituary, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, post office, recession, robots, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, socialism, standup comedy, the 1980s, the 2000s, the Amazon, the archives, The Cars, the Midwest, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, UC Irvine, unions, voting, weird science, wellness
Wednesday Night Links!
* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!
Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019
* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.
* The coming death of just about every rock legend.
* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.
* The job so nice they posted it twice: Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.
* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.
* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: “The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.” But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.
* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.
* “The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.”
* Liberalism can’t defend itself.
* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.
* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.
* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.
It turns out that handing over research universities to a handful of billionaire sociopaths was a bad idea https://t.co/HCTJasWOfO
— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019
The MIT fiasco should underscore how fundamentally toxic the entire philanthropy- & billionaire-reliant funding model is for education & research, period. Should be easy to picture the countless email threads just like the Ito/Epstein chats with Saudi princes, opioid dealers, etc
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019
I know “the ivory tower of leftist academia” is a thing people murmur incessantly, but anyone in a university community knows they’re hidebound institutions that hoover money and prop oligarchies on every level, and if the Epstein MIT news gets us talking more about that: Good
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019
* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.
* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.
* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.
I laughed so hard at this pic.twitter.com/wCb8XiUnUZ
— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019
* Another free speech exception.
“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”
Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.
An autocratic president and a hedge fund operating under cover of a university mission isn't what distinguishes Liberty U from other big privates. https://t.co/mczFLujfiP
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019
* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.
* ‘UVA has ruined us’: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”
* Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.
* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.
* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.
* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.
again, the *purpose* of these exercises is to traumatize children. this is *the purpose.* it is a social pedagogy. and there is a strong chance that anyone who tells you otherwise is literally invested in or otherwise monetizing that trauma https://t.co/hRN2xl2JZL
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019
* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.
* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.
* UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.
* Climate change is here. Climate change isn’t an intangible future risk. It’s here now, and it’s killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.
* Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.
* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!
* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia: Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.
* Agribusiness against the Amazon.
* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.
* Today in the wisdom of markets.
* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.
* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”
* And speaking of white fragility.
That people expect to have pleasant fun trips to former slave plantations tells you everything you need to know about this country's failure to deal with the legacy of slavery.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019
* Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.
* TWO MONTHS BEFORE my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companion’s arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.
* The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained.
* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.
* In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.
* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.
* Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Harris’s “Criminal Justice” Plan Is Not Progressive.
* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Biden’s Candidacy.
* Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.
* Imagine if we had a democracy.
* Trump’s already cancelling elections.
* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.
* The case for changing the voting age to zero.
* The Fall of the Meritocracy.
* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.
* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.
* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is
* extremely normal very normal
"A 7- or 8-year-old boy was separated from his father, without any explanation… The child was under the delusion
that his father had been killed +
believed that he would also be killed. This child ultimately
required emergency psychiatric care."— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019
* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.
* Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.
* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.
* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.
* How We Shut Down the Nation’s Largest Child Detention Center.
* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!
* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldn’t exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.
* The struggle to save Day-Glo.
* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?
* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.
* A history of Tetris randomizers.
* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.
* 44 African Architectural Styles.
* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.
* A people’s history of labor history.
* They solved the Geedis mystery.
* The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man From 1988 – “Dominion.”
* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.
* Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.
* Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.
* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.
Lego from the 1997 container loss, a monster in my pocket, bungs and balloon wands, cereal packet toys from the 50s and 60s, pegs and pen tops, Vanish bottle caps from a spill in 2015. All found on Cornish beaches. #oceanplastic #anthropocene #plasticheritage pic.twitter.com/AWZGBT6Ktd
— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) September 9, 2019
* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.
* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2019 at 3:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, administrative blight, admissions, Africa, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amnesia, Animal Man, animals, another world is possible, apocalypse, Apollo Program, apps, architecture, art, authoritarianism, Black Panther, books, California, care work, cars, cartoons, CBP, Center for American Progress, cheating, cheese, Chicago, cities, civilization, Clarence Thomas, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, concentration camps, Corey Robin, corruption, cultural preservation, David Bowie, Day-Glo, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Emily Dickinson, emissions, English majors, enrollment, eugenics, Excuseman, fandom, fans, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, France, free speech, futurity, Gamergate, games, gay rights, Geedis, general election 2020, gerrymandering, gig economy, Grant Morrison, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, homelessness, Hong Kong, How the University Works, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Imagineers, indigenous issues, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, Joe Biden, Johns Hopkins, Kamala Harris, kids today, labor, LEGO, Les Miserables, liberalism, Liberty University, literature, Lyft, maps, Margaret Atwood, Mark Z. Danielewski, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, medical bankruptcy, meritocracy, meth, millennials, Minecraft, MIT, MIT Media Lab, music, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, normality, North Carolina, nostalgia, NRA, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedestrians, plagiarism, plantations, poetry, politics, PreCheck, prison-industrial complex, PTSD, race, racial slurs, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, rich people, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, state's rights, sterilization, straight people, student debt, students, taxes, tear gas, TERFs, Tetris, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Bahamas, the courts, The Familiar, The Handmaid's Tale, the hyperloop, the law, the Moon, The Muppets, the Pyrocene, The Testaments, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, toys, trans* issues, trauma, TSA, Twitter, Uber, universal basic income, University of Wisconsin, US News, UVA, voting, Wakanda, Walter Mosley, war on education, wealth, weddings, white fragility, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, yoga, young adult literature, zoos
Thursday Links!
* Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.
* Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis.
* Scenes from dystopia: MUPD updates active shooter training for students.
* Steven Salaita: My Life as a Cautionary Tale.
* Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah.
* Bodies Aren’t Binary, So Why Are Sports?
* Why Aren’t More Women Working? They’re Caring for Parents.
* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.
* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.
* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.
* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.
* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?
* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.
* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.
Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.
Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’
* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.
* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.
* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.
* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.
* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 29, 2019 at 9:22 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolitionism, academia, activism, America, apocalypse, apps, Brazil, Captain America, class struggle, climate change, crunch time, darts, DEA, debt, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, dinosaurs, Donald Trump, drugs, eldercare, Elizabeth Warren, free speech, fully automated luxury communism, games, gender, gig economy, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, guns, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, Kenya, kids today, labor, Los Angeles, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel Comics, mass shootings, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, networking, New York, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police corruption, politics, post-industrial cities, prison abolition, race, racism, rainforest, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, segregation, socialism, Steven Salaita, taxes, Telltale Games, the Amazon, the kids are all right, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trans issues sports, true crime, war on drugs, white nationalism, white people, white supremacy
July 3 Links! Accept No Substitutes!
* CFP for ICFA 2020: Expanding the Archive.
* Forgot to link this yesterday: If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department.
* Cory Doctorow: What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages?
I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exercises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.
* ‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out.
* Medievalism goes to war with itself.
* Milwaukee County absolutely determined to destroy itself.
* In the world’s northernmost town, temperatures have risen by 4C, devastating homes, wildlife and even the cemetery. Will the rest of the planet heed its warning? Welcome to the fastest-heating place on Earth.
* Amazon destruction accelerates 60% to one and a half soccer fields every minute. Bolsonaro is the greatest crisis on the planet right now and everyone has agreed to just let it happen.
* ‘Families belong together’: Hundreds gather in Milwaukee to protest migrant detention centers.
* Watchdog Slams ‘Overcrowding’ At DHS Detention Centers.
* Another ICE detainee has died in custody.
* Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.
* ‘Unprecedented in Our History’: One State Is on the Verge of Slashing Higher-Ed Funding, Leaving Public Colleges in a Panic. Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments.
* Will Donald Trump’s Fourth of July Parade Break the Law?
* Must have absolutely broken their hearts: FBI claims it lost file on neo-Nazi website Stormfront ‘after a reasonable search.’
* The Single Most Reliable Recession Indicator of the Past 50 Years Has Officially Started Blaring.
* The madness of factchecking. The hits against Sanders this week are especially incredible even by factchecking’s already low standards.
* Teenager Accused of Rape Deserves Leniency Because He’s From a ‘Good Family,’ Judge Says.
This is completely infuriating. This boy filmed himself raping her, called it rape in a text to friends, and the judge *still* decided it wasn't rape. https://t.co/WlLudz2t85
— Laila Lalami (@LailaLalami) July 3, 2019
It’s an underdiscussed problem in America that some huge percentage of its judges are bug-nuts irrational and irresponsible, just wholly abusing their position to make up rules on the fly.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019
* The Democrats Aren’t a Left-Wing Party — They Just Play One on TV. And a truly evergreen tweet.
The Democratic Party is essentially an elaborate set of psychological defense mechanisms for the American bourgeoisie
— Roger Bellin (@rogerbellin) July 13, 2016
At some point people will have to begin acknowledging that the role of Democrats is to keep the rabble from impeding the lucrative and murderous actions of the elite. This self-pleasing pretense that our leaders are forced to do nothing is pathetic.
— Susan of Texas (@SusanofTexas) July 2, 2019
* We had our time. The world belongs to the humanzees now.
* Why did octopuses become smart?
* They say time is the fire in which we burn.
* At least Discovery season three starts filming in two weeks, which means I should be good and disappointed by the end of the year.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 3, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, austerity, Bernie Sanders, Bolsonaro, Brazil, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, citizenship, civility, class struggle, climate change, cognitive biases, concentration camps, Cory Doctorow, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, directing, Donald Trump, ecology, factchecks, fake news, fascism, FBI, film, Fourth of July, Hell, Hollywood, humanzees, ice, ICFA, immigration, kids today, manners, masturbation, medieval studies, medievalism, millennials, Milwaukee, Nazis, neoliberalism, octopuses, our brains don't work, parks, politics, post-truth, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, recession, resistance, Satan, science fiction, science fiction studies, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormfront, Sympathy for the Devil, the courts, the cruelty of hope, the Democrats, the law, the rainforest, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trauma, truth, University of Alaska, vaccination, white supremacy, worst financial crisis since the last one
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
Monday Night Links!
* CFP: ASAP11, “Ecologies of the Present.”
* A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report: Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people.
* Great Twitter thread on screenwriting from my old friend Tony Tost.
* And a great thread pitching a black Batman story.
batman becomes a number one target for the cops, a target for organized crime, something of a folk hero for black gotham, and highly controversial—even hated and disdained—among white gothamites.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 1, 2019
* Thieves stole architectural gems from USC in a heist that remained hidden for years.
* Bennett, who a week earlier had been placed on indefinite administrative leave, was now barred from the university, the message said. Sandwiched between those assertions was a sordid allegation: Bennett’s “recent admittance to police of meth use and access to firearms.”
* Vox talks to Malcolm Harris about the kids today.
* When a utility files for bankruptcy.
* Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated.
* When Democrats actually propose popular progressive policies.
* Crimes against humanity without apology: Finding all migrant children separated from their families may be impossible, feds say. The utter shamelessness of these people.
* Executive time: How Trump’s schedule compares to past presidents.
* Trump wants another fake physical.
* African-American women were written out of the history of the woman suffrage movement. As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, it’s time for a new look at the past.
* In one Milwaukee school, on one day, what a difference a small class size made.
* Financial literacy is a kind of formation of its own. Such programs form us to believe that we can make up for one $40,000 decision with forty thousand other decisions that save a single dollar each. In retrospect, it seems fitting that Duke Divinity School required each of us to sit through a brief seminar on financial literacy prior to graduation. The school needed one last moment to shape us as individuals in control of our destiny through wise choices, hard work, and willpower. … Student debt thus exposes a farther-reaching cruelty in a system that treats people, in the end, as autonomous consumers. Until we recognize the deeper problem, we will be hindered from taking collective action to build better lives together. We spend so much time blaming one another and ourselves that we don’t have time to look at bigger, collective solutions like tuition-free higher education or the cancellation of student loan debt. We don’t ask what kind of society we want to see and what kind of collective political action it might take to win it. Our eyes haven’t been trained to see society and its institutions as something we can change. Our imaginations haven’t been formed to desire something better fitted for human flourishing.
In 600 years people will refer to this time period as the post-POST-medieval age and they will make whatever the 27th century equivalent of movies is about us featuring women in Victorian dresses driving ‘57 chevys texting on their iPhones and everyone will be all “HAHA THE PAST”
— Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) February 3, 2019
* Y: The Last Man TV Adaptation Will Premiere in 2020. As we were chatting about on Twitter, it’s amazing how long this took, so long that they’re probably quite a bit out-of-step with the times now.
* When you’re looking on the bright side.
* Lots of white people having nervous breakdowns lately.
(quietly) the basic formula of most American action narratives is a white man vindicating the social order and finding personal regeneration by inflicting violence on abjected Others who threaten his prerogatives over white women, Taken was The Searchers meets Death Wish meets 24
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 4, 2019
* Billionaires! They’re just like us our parents!
* How long could my murderer pretend to be me online?
* Can you trip so hard you never stop tripping?
* Another truly bananas story from the world of young adult publishing.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 4, 2019 at 5:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Anthropocene, apocalypse, ASAP, bad trips, Batman, billionaires, burnout, California, capitalism, CFPs, charter schools, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, cochlear implants, comics, conferences, Damnation, Dan Mallory, deafness, death, Democrats, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, fascism, glaciers, guns, history, history departments, How the University Works, Liam Neeson, LSD, Malcolm Harris, medievalism, meth, millennials, Milwaukee, mortality, murderers, pedagogy, politics, public utilities, race, racism, screenwriting, student debt, Taken, taxes, teaching, the Himalayas, the kids today, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tom Gauld, Tony Tost, true crime, USC, vaccines, Virginia, war on education, weather, whiteness, wildfires, women's suffrage, writing, Y: The Last Man, YA literature
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
In the process of his SF reading @pefrase throws off the deep key to all post-70s cop shows: “All Cops Are Bastards, Except Us.” That is: they must concede obvious corruption of the system, but posit a fantasy space of exception, of nobility and decency, inside it. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2018
Echoing Mark Bould’s own Pilgrim speech from two years ago, Freedman notes the irony of science fiction studies becoming “respectable” at the moment the humanities and the academy writ large find themselves under cataclysmic, existential attack. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 4, 2018
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
#RevisedCourseEvaluationQuestions
Your professor appeared to conceive of the seminar as
1) a psychoanalytic session
2) a Reddit thread
3) an opportunity to talk about themselves
4) a lawsuit waiting to happen— Jan Mieszkowski (@janmpdx) June 25, 2018
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
– waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
– promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
– living five adults to a two room apartment
– being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
I can’t tweet everything I know. Some of it is off-the-record. Some of it is uncorroborated. Some of it is embargoed until we publish.
But I can tweet this: this thing where the government took children from their parents atthe border? It’s more horrific than we have imagined.
— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) July 6, 2018
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
In that spirit, an out-of-the-box solution for desperate times: Trump should name Knicks owner James Dolan to replace Anthony Kennedy as a justice on the Supreme Court, forcing him to sell his ownership of the Knicks. Outlandish? Perhaps. But worse than what we have now? 4/17
— danielbenaim (@danielbenaim) July 5, 2018
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know. pic.twitter.com/NvVnImoJ7N
— Ahmed BEst (@ahmedbest) July 3, 2018
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
Yesterday was Africa’s hottest reliably measured temperature in recorded history: 124.3°F (51.3°C) in Algeria
Africa has 16% of the world's population—and produces just 3.8% of all greenhouse gases.
Climate change is fundamentally a story of injustice.https://t.co/UuNTd0aDGt
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 6, 2018
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it's appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie. @uwmaaup stands with @BrigField, @clfs_uw, and @Ebonyteach! pic.twitter.com/g8T9fm1V3R
— UWM AAUP (@uwmaaup) July 4, 2018
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
optimism watch: I think things are going to get so terrible in the next few years, and so quickly, that we will have full blown socialism in the US by the time my kids are grown. We just have to survive and destroy Trumpism.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2018
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
.@Google killed its Reader in 2013 because RSS as a format gives readers agency, doesn't track browsing to sell ads, and lets the user chose what they want to read. As opposed to algorithmic personalisation which siloes us into increasingly homogenous demographics for advertisers https://t.co/YAThAP6bdO
— Luc Lewitanski (@LucLewitanski) July 2, 2018
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 7, 2018 at 11:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, #MeToo, 1968, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adoption, advertising, Ahmed Best, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic trading, America, anatomy, animals, Anthony Kennedy, art, asylum, attention economy, Back to the Future, basketball, Batman, Ben Robertson, blackmail, border patrol, Brexit, Brooklyn 99, Bruce Springsteen, California, Carl Freedman, cartooning, Central America, CEOs, CFPs, Chicago, childhood, CIA, civil rights movement, civility, class struggle, climate change, collaborators, comedy, comics, concerts, conference, conferences, copyright, corporate real estate, corruption, country clubs, course evaluations, debt, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Detroit, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Duchamp, Dunbar number, Dungeons and Dragons, economics, Elon Musk, email, embezzlement, EPA, ethnic cleansing, European Union, exotic animals, Facebook, facial recognition, fandom, farmers, fatphobia, felony murder, films, Flint, flood insurance, flooding, franchise fiction, futurity, G. Willow Wilson, gambling, gangs, gay history, general election 2020, geoengineering, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, grading, GRE, happiness, Harlan Ellison, Hawaii, health care, hermits, history, Hitler, HIV/AIDS, Howard Stern, ice, ICFA, immigration, improv, inaugurations, Infinity War, Japan, Jar Jar Binks, John McAdams, Juggalos, kids today, Korea, literacy, loans, Luke Skywalker, Mark Bould, Marquette, Marvel, MCU, medieval studies, medievalism, mere genre, Merrick Garland, Mike Bloomberg, millennials, mobs, monkeys, MS-13, Ms. Marvel, murder, my scholarly empire, NASA, nature, Nazis, NBA, neoliberalism, norms, NSA, obituary, Octavia E. Butler, online harassment, our brains don't work, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, peace, pedagogy, pessimism, Peter Frase, photography, Pixar, places, places to invade next, police, political cartoons, politics, prank calls, protest, Putin, race, racism, rape culture, Rate My Professor, reactionaries, reading, readymades, Reality Winner, refugees, resistance, revolution, rich people, robots, Roe v. Wade, Rosa Parks, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, San Francisco, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, Scott Pruitt, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA18, SFRA19, Silicon Valley, soccer, socialism, solar system, Soviet Union, space junk, Spider-Man, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Ditko, stock market, Stone Age, stoppage time, student debt, student movements, Stuttering John, suicide, superheroes, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Thailand, Thanos, the 1970s, the courts, the humanities, The Incredibles, The Incredibles 3, the Knicks, the law, the Left, the past, the Wisconsin Idea, the wisdom of markets, they say time is the fire in which we burn, tigers, Tim Geithner, true crime, Trumpism, truth and reconciliation commissions, Twitter, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USSR, Venezuela, video games, vision, water, wealth, whales, white nationalism, white supremacy, William Shatner, William T. Vollman, Wisconsin, World Cup, writing
Impeach Trump Now (and Other Links)
* I haven’t done a post like this in a while, so of course you have to catch up with the horrors of America collapsing around our ears. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Charlottesville. Russia. Russia. Russia. The NSC memo was only last week! Republicans, Remove This Madman From Power.
Every minute this terrible man is in office is a shame from which this nation will never recover.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
* As White Supremacists Wreak Havoc, a University Becomes a Crisis Center.
* The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All.
* Slouching towards death squads.
* Defense fund for the protestors in Durham who pulled down the Old Soldier last night. A history. Gov. Roy Cooper calls for Confederate statues to come down in North Carolina. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery. These monuments should come down.”
Citizens unilaterally pulling down Confederate monuments their governments won’t is the most thrilling thing to happen in years.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
Pull down Confederate monuments from coast to coast!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 15, 2017
* After Obama’s 2008 Win, Indiana GOP Added Early Voting in White Suburb, Cut It in Indianapolis.
* Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
* Stop Calling Millennials the Facebook Generation. They’re The Student Loan Generation.
* 8 Times The World Narrowly Avoided A Potential Nuclear Disaster. This is how easy it would be for Trump to start a nuclear war. Averting Annihilation. Notes on Late Exterminism, the Trump Stage of Civilization. The Annihilator. Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War. Analysts are trying to work out what happens to the markets they cover in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence. The national security establishment versus the “madmen.” And from the archives.
The underlying logic is quite uncomplicated: unless America is the best and the most powerful, the entire world is forfeit. This is of course the brutish proposition that sustains American hegemony—that has sustained since it since the get-go. It’s the same threat whether it’s mouthed colorfully by Trump, or stated matter-of-factly by a career military officer like Defense Secretary James Mattis, who warned that “the DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” But as with so much else, hearing it laid out so baldly, in yet another unplanned and unvetted Trump ad-lib, has an arresting effect. As out of the mouths of babes, so out of the mouth of our President: the truth brings us up short. We move from an initial, disavowing reaction of “This. Is. Not. Normal” to a nauseous, self-implicating “Oh God, this is what normal always was.”
* Timely! Ava DuVernay is developing Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel, ‘Dawn’ as a television series.
* Now More than Ever, We Wish We Had These Lost Octavia Butler Novels.
* The “Weird Thoreau” on ecological fiction and the cult of climate-change denial.
* Half the GOP Base Say They Would Support Cancelling the 2020 Elections. The Other Half Won’t Admit It.
* Right-leaning media outlets have moral culpability for what is happening, if not legal culpability. They created this. The coming Civil War.
* Mom Deported Because She Didn’t Change Lanes.
* On Tuesday, they will reluctantly split up their family, flying to Mexico with their 12-year-old son to start a new life, while leaving their three older daughters — who are 16, 21 and 23 — behind in the U.S.
* Healthcare workers rally to halt Oakland nurse’s deportation.
* How ICE Is Using Big Data to Carry Out Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crusade. Private prison companies are saying Trump’s immigration crackdown is looking good for business.
* Thank you, Wisconsin, for the beautiful gift. Editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times.
* How to Tell If Your Eclipse Glasses or Handheld Solar Viewers Are Safe.
* Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence.
* Better Business through Sci-Fi.
* People in rich countries are dying of loneliness.
* The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music. Is it possible to swim through coins, Scrooge McDuck style?
* Forever Yesterday: Peering Inside My Mom’s Fading Mind.
* Biohackers encode malware within a strand of DNA.
* Side effects kill thousands but our data on them is flawed.
* Why do some people get so upset when we talk about how diverse the ancient Greek and Roman societies were? Because if Classical antiquity is the foundation of western civilization and they were multiracial/multiethnic societies, then the idea that western civilization is a white accomplishment based on a history of white superiority is called into question.
* Congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Measuring the slow death of the Rabid Puppies.
* On Game of Thrones, the Cracks Are Beginning to Show. It’s bad y’all.
People make fun of Tolkien for obsessing over dates + distances but he was right, when you don't your story becomes a cartoon. #GameOfThones
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 14, 2017
GAME OF THRONES S07E07: “The Swimmer”
Jon returns to Winterfell to find it in ruins; he has been gone for decades. Tyrion bakes a cake.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 14, 2017
* The Soul of the Gamer under Communism.
* What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology? To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.
* When Bill Murray Saw the Groundhog Day musical. UPDATE: Nothing gold can stay.
* A map for extraterrestrials to find Earth.
* “I came home because I believed what they said about the new system and that it was supposed to be the best in the world,” said Williams, 67. “But now it seems if we get hit by another Katrina, the city will be gone.”
* Learjet Liberalism: Advocates for climate action should stop defending the rich.
* And in a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 25th Amendment, academia, aliens, alt-right, Alzheimer's disease, America, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Ava DuVernay, Big Data, Bill Murray, Charlottesville, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, color, communism, cultural preservation, Dawn, death squads, Democrats, deportation, depression, Disney, DNA, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, DuckTales, Durham, ecology, eldercare, Game of Thrones, gaming, George R. R. Martin, Groundhog Day, hacking, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ice, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana, Jeff Vandermeer, Katrina, Koch brothers, liberals, loneliness, Lord of the Rings, medicine, memory, Mexico, military-industrial complex, millennials, murder, musicals, my scholarly empire, National Security Council, Nazis, New Orleans, New Weird, North Carolina, North Korea, nuclear wars, nuclearity, Oakland, Octavia Butler, Pantone, pardons, politics, Prince, prison-industrial complex, private prisons, protest, purple, Putin, Rabid Puppies, Republicans, rising sea levels, romance novels, run them down, Russia, Sad Puppies, science fiction, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, solar eclipse, student loans, Taylor Swift, terrorism, the Confederacy, the kids are all right, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Thoreau, Tolkien, true crime, UFOs, Virginia, Voyager spacecraft, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, weird fiction, white people, white supremacy, whiteness, Wonder Woman, Xenogenesis, you and I are gonna live forever
Supersized ICFA Weekend Links!
* Hey, ICFAites! I’m posting this too late to hype yesterday’s talk on Black Panther and Wakanda as Nation, but there’s still time to hype my Rogue One roundtable at 8:30 and the Modern Masters of Science Fiction book signing at 12:30…
* One week from today! Buffy at 20!
* I really appreciated The New Inquiry‘s most recent issue on prison abolition, including this piece on home monitoring, this one on deaf inmates, and this one on bureaucratic malice.
* Awesome IndieGoGo success story: Nimuno LEGO tape.
* Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse.
* Teach the controversy: Did the CIA really astrally project to Mars in 1984?
* Neat project I’m coming late to: Young People Read Old SFF.
* “Mr. Thursday.” By Emily St. John Mandel.
* The Gig Economy and Working Yourself to Death.
* What Happens If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan? How to survive a nuclear blast.
* Other genres merely represent everyday life. Science fiction hopes to change it.
* New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being.
* The Existential Hokiness of Rick & Morty.
* Purplish Haze: The Science Fiction Vision of Jimi Hendrix.
* “Comrade, Can You Paint My Horse?” Soviet Kids’ Books Today.
* Being Kim Stanley Robinson. After the Great Dithering.

Julia muppet
Credit: Sesame Workshop
* Sesame Street’s newest puppet is a four-year-old with autism.
* Disabled Americans: Stop Murdering Us.
* “Let’s talk about the weird psychosexual energy in Beauty and the Beast.”
* “Humpback whales are organizing in huge numbers, and no one knows why.”
* Animal rights lawyer says zoos are solitary confinement for animals. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other. The beginning of the end of meat. Scientists are messing around with 3-D printed cheese.
* Great news: Authorities believe they’ve captured the individual responsible for most of the JCC bomb threats. The Slip-Up That Caught the Jewish Center Bomb Caller.
* With a 10-day supply of opioids, 1 in 5 become long-term users. Drugs are killing so many people in Ohio that cold-storage trailers are being used as morgues.
* With Trump Poised to Change the Legal Landscape, the Clock May Be Ticking on Graduate Unions. The shamelessness with which college administrations have courted this outcome is amazing, even by college administration standards.
* How One Family Is Beating the NCAA at Its Own Game.
* Here’s the Important Stuff That Happens in Iron Fist So You Don’t Have to Watch It. Netflix and Marvel’s Iron Fist is an ill-conceived, poorly written disaster. The Iron Fist TV Series Is Marvel and Netflix’s First Big Failure. Five Comments on Iron Fist.
* Paranoia in the Trump White House. Trumpism and academia. Trump’s Cuts. A day in the life of a poor American under Trump’s proposed budget. North Korea. The Incredible Cruelty of Trumpcare. Trumpcare goes down. Democrats Will Filibuster Neil Grouch’s Nomination. What to ask about Russian hacking. New York Attorney General Steps Up Scrutiny of White House. Why they voted Trump. r/Donald. It’s a better time to be doing any kind of leftist politics than it was a decade ago. Well, we’ll see…
Like the dog with two bones, the Freedom Caucus got so greedy about the number of children it could kill it didn’t get to kill any. #sad
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 24, 2017
* It’s hard in all this mess to pay attention to the little things, but man.
* My fascism will be big, beautiful, and sustainable, or it will be bullshit.
* Overall, Obama’s performance in office looks like most American presidencies since Reagan, not altering all that much at home while pressing ahead with imperial tasks abroad—in effect, a largely conventional stewardship of neo-liberal capitalism and military-diplomatic expansionism. No new direction for either society or empire emerged under him. Obama’s rule was in this sense essentially stand-pat: business as usual. On another plane, however, his tenure was innovative. For he is the first celebrity President—that is, a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that. Catapulted into the White House on colour charisma and economic crisis, and commanding the first congressional supermajority since Carter, Obama in office continued to be an accomplished vote-winner and champion money-raiser. But celebrity is not leadership, and is not transferrable. The personality it projects allows no diffusion. Of its nature, it requires a certain isolation. Obama, relishing his aura and aware of the risks of diluting it, made little attempt to mobilize the populace who cast their ballots for him, and reserved the largesse showered on him by big money for further acclamation at the polls. What mattered was his personal popularity. His party hardly counted, and his policies had little political carry-through.
* What If Students Only Went to School Four Days a Week?
* Body cameras and the nightmare state.
* When corporations colonize academia.
* White, Irish, and undocumented in America.
* Children as young as 3 detained 500 days — and counting — in disgraceful immigrant prisons. Rape Victims Aren’t Seeking Help For Fear Of Deportation, Police Say. Banking on Deportation. There was an Africa trade meeting with no Africans because all their visas got denied.
* Sheriff David Clarke’s jail forced a woman to give birth while in shackles. The newborn died.
* The long now: A Computer-Generated Coliseum that Will Disintegrate for 1,000 Years.
* Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.
* A special issue of Orbit devoted to David Foster Wallace.
* Functional illiteracy in Detroit.
* Why Does Mt. Rushmore Exist?
* Everybody in the NBA is obsessed with PB&J sandwiches.
* Missing Richard Simmons turned out super gross. Don’t listen.
* Congress Moves to Strike Internet Privacy Rules From Obama Era.
* I’ve been really interested in this: A major study finding that voter ID laws hurt minorities isn’t standing up well under scrutiny. A follow-up study suggests voter ID laws may not have a big effect on elections.
* Are we raising racists? Pay attention to what your kids watch on their screens.
* Tomb of Santa uncovered in Siberia.
* Educational attainment in America.
* The Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson Marriage Will Never Ever Return “Up To Infinity” Says Dan Slott.
* Or a tweet. Probably a tweet.
* A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman.
* Trans, Disabled, And Tired Of Fighting To Get Into Bathrooms.
* Appliances used to last decades.
* A year in Eden: Remaining cast of TV show finally leave their remote Highland home.
Now the remaining cast of a TV show have finally left their remote home – to virtual anonymity.
Instead of being crowned reality TV celebrities and fought over by agents, the 10 who made it through the 12 months have learned that only four episodes have been shown – the last seven months ago.
* Mr. Rogers vs. the Ku Klux Klan.
* Andy Daly reviews Review.
* CFP: Chuck Berry in the Anthropocene.
* SNL quick change, Jeff Sessions to mermaid.
* I still believe in a place called Duckburg.
* No.
* Action Lad and the Living Sword!
* And the arc of history is long, but there’s an Attack from Mars pinball machine remake coming later this year.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 25, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, administrative blight, Africa, America, Andy Daly, animal intelligence, animal minds, animals, appliances, Attack from Mars, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, bathrooms, Beauty and the Beast, Black Panther, body cameras, Bowie Studies, Buffy, bureaucracy, celebrity, cheese, children's literature, Chuck Berry, CIA, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, comics, corpocracy, corporations, creeps, cruelty, David Bowie, David Foster Wallace, deafness, democracy, deportation, Detroit, disability, Disney, drug addiction, drugs, Duck Tales, ecology, Eden, education, fantasy, fascism, games, George Herriman, gig economy, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, hacking, health care, How the University Works, ICFA, illiteracy, immigration, IndieGoGo, Iron Fist, Jacobin, JCCs, Jeff Sessions, Jimi Hendrix, kakistocracy, Kate McKinnon, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, King Kong, KKK, Krazy Kat, labor, leftism, LEGO, malice, management, Marquette, Mars, Martin O'Malley, Marvel, Mary Jane Watson, meat, mermaids, Mexico, Michigan, Milwaukee, Missing Richard Simmons, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, Mr. Rogers, Mt. Rushmore, Muppets, music, NBA, NCAA, Neil Gorsuch, Netflix, New York, New York 2140, New Zealand, Nintendo, North Korea, nuclear bombs, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, obsolescence, Octavia Butler, Ohio, outer space, parenting, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pinball, podcasts, police, police state, politics, prison, prison abolition, prison-industrial complex, privacy, race, racism, radiation, reality television, Reddit, Review, Rick and Morty, Rick Perry, rivers, Russia, Santa, satire, school, science, science fiction, Sesame Street, sex, Sheriff Clarke, Siberia, SNL, solitary confinement, Soviet Union, space junk, Spider-Man, stalking, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, terror, terrorism, the Anthropocene, the filibuster, the Internet, the Irish, the law, the long now, The New Inquiry, the Senate, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time travel, toys, trans* issues, Trump, Trumpcare, USSR, Utopia, voter fraud, voter ID, Voyager spacecraft, Wakanda, water, whales, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, young adult literature, young people, zoos
Closing Every Tab Not In Anger But In Disappointment Links
* I have a new essay out on zombies and the elderly in this great new book on zombies, medicine, and comics: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image. And if you’re interested in my Octavia Butler book, podcaster Jonah Sutton-Morse (@cabbageandkings) is going through it piece by piece on Twitter with #mmsfoeb. Also, check out this LARB interview with Ayana Jamieson on her work in the Butler archives!
* CFP: Comics Remixed: Adaptation and Graphic Narrative, University of Florida. CFP: ASLE 2017 (Detroit, MI). CFP: Special Issue of Green Letters on Crime Fiction and Ecology. CFP: Global Dystopia.
* Maybe the best thing you’ll read this year: Clickhole’s Oral History of Star Trek.
* Wes Anderson made a Christmas commercial. Updated Power Rankings coming soon!
* ‘Feast or Famine’ for Humanities Ph.D.s.
* Las Vegas is a microcosm. “The world is turning into this giant Skinner box for the self,” Schüll told me. “The experience that is being designed for in banking or health care is the same as in Candy Crush. It’s about looping people into these flows of incentive and reward. Your coffee at Starbucks, your education software, your credit card, the meds you need for your diabetes. Every consumer interface is becoming like a slot machine.”
* Jesuit university presidents issue statement supporting undocumented students. Catholic college leaders pledge solidarity with undocumented students. Dissent on sanctuary cities.
* Public universities and the doom loop. UW-Madison drops out of top five research universities for first time since 1972. Student visas, university finances, and Trump.
* Stealing it fair and square: In split decision, federal judges rule Wisconsin’s redistricting law an unconstitutional gerrymander. And so on and so on.
* The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.
* How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’ Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All. Postelection Harassment, Case by Case. Here are 20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today. Making White Supremacy Acceptable Again. Trump and the Sundown Town. No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design. If only someone had thought of this eight years ago! A time for treason.
Justification for all of America’s bananas, anti-democratic institutions was always to prevent the exact trainwreck they are now abetting.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 29, 2016
* Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him. Trump and the End of Expertise. On Taking the Electoral College Literally. Some Schmittian reflections on the election. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President. Emoluments. A running list of how Donald Trump’s new position may be helping his business interests. A billionaire coup d’etat. Wunderkind. Voting under the influence of celebrity. We have an institution that could stop this (no not that one), but it won’t. Wheeeeee! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!
* And I’m afraid the news only gets worse.
* “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Ms. Palmieri said.” Respectfully disagree! The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt. Who Lost the White House? Careful! We don’t want to learn anything from this.
It's not only The Simpsons who "predict" the future! A model Donald Trump crushes NY in this now-eerie still from the Ghostbusters set, 1984 pic.twitter.com/aSdhGM2h9v
— Histry in Pictures (@Histreepix) November 24, 2016
* I was reminded recently of this post from @rortybomb a few years ago that, I think, got the Obama years right earlier and better than just about anyone. And here he is on the election: Learning from Trump in Retrospect.
* Maybe America is simply too big.
* Inside the bizarre world of the military-entertainment industry’s racialized gamification of war.
* Trump’s already working miracles: Dykes to Watch Out For is out of retirement.
* The Nitty-Gritty on Getting a Job: The 5 Things Your English Professors Don’t Teach You.
* Remembering Scott Eric Kaufman.
* Huge Cracks In the West Antarctic Ice Sheet May Signal Its Collapse.
* Four Futures: Life After Capitalism review – will robots bring utopia or terror?
* If I developed a drug and then tested it myself without a control group, you might be a bit suspicious about my claims that everyone who took it recovered from his head cold after two weeks and thus that my drug is a success. But these are precisely the sorts of claims that we find in assessment.
* A world map of every country’s tourism slogan. Here Are the Real Boundaries of American Metropolises, Decided by an Algorithm.
* The youth concussion crisis.
* Cheating at the Olympics Is at Epic Levels.
* Mr. Plinkett and 21st-Century Star Wars Fandom. An addendum.
* Moana before Moana. This one’s pretty great by the way, my kids loved it.
* From the archives: Terry Bisson’s “Meat.”
* Stanislaw Lem: The Man with the Future Inside Him.
* U.S. Military Preps for Gene Drives Run Amok.
* Fidel Castro: The Playboy Interview.
* Cap’n Crunch presents The Earliest Show.
* Coming soon: Saladin Ahmed’s Black Bolt. Grant Morrison’s The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ.
* Parker Posey Will Play Dr. Smith and Now We Suddenly Care a Lot About Netflix’s Lost in Space. TNT fires up a Snowpiercer pilot. Behind the scenes of the new MST3K. The Cursed Child is coming to Broadway.
* “Magneto Was Right”: Recalibrating the Comic Book Movie for the Trump Age.
* Now my childhood is over: both Florence Henderson and Joe Denver have died.
* Of course you had me at “Science fiction vintage Japanese matchbox art mashup prints.”
* A brief history of progress.
* The first, last, and only truly great object of our time.
* And say what you will about OK Go, this one’s pretty damn good.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 2, 2016 at 12:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adaptation, addiction, aliens, Alison Bechdel, America, Antarctica, apocalypse, art, assessment, austerity, Ayana Jamieson, B.F. Skinner, banana republics, Barack Obama, behaviorism, billionaires, Black Bolt, Brady Bunch, Broadway, business, Calvin and Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Castro, Catholicism, celebrity culture, CFPs, cheating, Christ, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, class struggle, comics, concussions, Connor, coups, crisis, Dan Hassler-Forest, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, Disney, domestic surveillance, Donald Trump, Dykes to Watch Out For, dystopia, ecological humanities, Edward Snowden, Electoral College, emoluments, English majors, entertainment, expertise, fascism, Florence Henderson, food, football, futurity, games, gasification, gene bombs, general election 2016, genetics, Ghostbusters, graduate student life, Grant Morrison, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, ignorance is bliss, immigration, Infinite Jest, Japan, Jesuits, jobs, Joe Denver, kids today, Lauren Lapkus, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lone Wolf, Lost in Space, Magneto, maps, Marquette, Marvel, Marx, Marxism, meat, medicine, meritocracy, metropolises, military-industrial complex, Moana, mobility, moral panic, music, music videos, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, NSA, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, OK Go, oral histories, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pardons, Peter Frase, Playboy, politics, public universities, race, racism, reality TV, resistance, rortybomb, run it like a sandwich, Rust Belt, sanctuary campus, sanctuary cities, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Eric Kaufman, Scott Walker, Skinner boxes, Snowpiercer, soccer, sports, Stanislaw Lem, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, student visas, sundown towns, superheroes, surveillance society, surveillance state, teenagers, Terry Bisson, the archives, The Earliest Show, the humanities, the Internet, The New Inquiry, the Olympics, The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ, the Wisconsin Idea, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, tourism, trason, true crime, undocumented students, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Wes Anderson, white supremacy, Zoey, zombies