Posts Tagged ‘Thor’
Finely Curated May Fifth Links (Aged to Perfection)
* I’ve had a couple of short pieces of writing go up in the last few weeks: a piece on the often overlooked epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale at LARB and a followup piece on Infinity War and franchise time at frieze.
* Maybe my favorite Infinity War take. Bady! Nussbuam! Loofburouw! Scalzi! Dreyfuss! We’re the good guys, right? Pop Culture Won’t Save Us. How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism.
* There’s also been a couple other good pieces lately pushing on whether Handmaid’s Tale really should have had a second season.
* Two from Jaimee: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* The 2018 Marquette Literary Review is up. And so is SFRA Review #324!
* CFP: An Anthology on Carrie Fisher.
* CFP: Special Double Issue: Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.
* Twitter thread: we already live in a boring dystopia.
* Most-Liked Tweets of Famous Poets.
* Fred Moten in the New Yorker!
* Janelle Monáe in Rolling Stone!
* Maybe the best “there’s just one story and we tell it over and over” I’ve ever done.
* Channeling the anti-Trump #Resistance, a slew of recent books seeks to reduce democracy to a defense of political “norms.” But overcoming today’s crisis will take more political imagination.
* Three Identical Strangers, a dark documentary about identical triplets who were separated-at-birth. Amazing story. I wish I’d waited for the movie before Googling it.
* How a tiny protest at the U. of Nebraska turned into a proxy war for the future of campus politics.
* Just in time for my summer syllabi: Junot Diaz #MeToo Accusations Surface. No Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018.
* Michigan State. Michigan State. Michigan Goddamn State. SIU. Columbia. University of Illinois at Chicago. George Mason. UNC. And in some rare good news: Oregon.
* There is no campus free speech crisis: a look at the evidence.
* “The root cause of the F.B.I. investigation are the N.C.A.A. rules limiting — actually, prohibiting — compensation for players,” he said. “And none of the recommendations speak to them — none of them.”
* What does a non-academic job search look like for a rhet/comp PhD student? I put compiled some numbers to illustrate my experience over the last 3 months.
* What Jack Kirby proposed for the plaques on the Pioneer space probes.
* Infiltration into left-wing groups is just the sharp edge of an entire armory of political policing.
* Chicago’s drinking water is full of lead, report says. Newark Water Tests Show High Lead Levels, Prompting Threat of Lawsuit.
* Vaccine refusal is contagious — and there’s no cure.
* What’s Wrong With Growing Blobs of Brain Tissue?
* One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true.
* The arc of history is long, but Somehow, Jaxxon the Ridiculous Green Space Rabbit Has Made It to the New Star Wars Canon.
* How a Genealogy Site Led to the Front Door of the Golden State Killer Suspect.
* New Documents Reveal How ICE Mines Local Police Databases Across the Country.
* Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?
* LEGO crime boss busted in Portland. No jury in the world would convict him.
* $5,751.
* Lessons From Rust-Belt Cities That Kept Their Sheen.
* The Mighty Thor’s conclusion signals the end of a Marvel Comics era. What an odd comic this was. And meanwhile: This is the Dark Side of the Rainbow of our time.
* Enjoy a tarantula burger in Durham, North Carolina.
* In New Jersey, the top lobbying spenders are from the following industries: energy, healthcare, insurance, and… balloons.
* A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.
* eFterlife. Batmen and Robins. Natural selection. Good grief.
* ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Interactive Movie in the Works at Fox.
* Two years old, but who cares: “It smelled like death”: An oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course.
* And sure, let’s make ice-nine, at this point why not.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference, May 2018. CFP: The Future of Fandom. CFP: J. G. Ballard and the Sciences.
* The Rise of Brittle Paper: The Village Square of African Literature.
* The Library of America’s Story of the Week is an Ursula K. Le Guin classic, “The Day Before the Revolution.”
* Four book series that are shaping the future of science fiction on television. Butler! Okorafor! Jemisin!
We all know it is ending.
Trump is not an aberration. There will be no “return to normal.” The damage has been done. America is over.
* For years, Richard Florida preached the gospel of the creative class. His new book is a mea culpa.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The Ludicrous Prepper Plans of the Super Rich.
* Today’s “dominant cultural elite”—those Currid-Halkett has labeled “the aspirational class”— “reveal their class position through cultural signifiers” instead of material possessions, as was the custom during the golden age of conspicuous consumption. Ownership of relatively luxurious products (large electronics, SUVs) is now so widely accessible that the new elites eschew material things not because they’re reluctant to publicly display their affluence but because material goods no longer offer enough distinction. The hottest commodity for this group, whose members range from “partner[s] in a law firm” to “unemployed screenwriter[s],” is participation in a value system with the imprimatur of moral excellence: the conviction that they are living in the best (most responsible, most mindful, most objectively right) ways. These consumers are united by “shared cultural capital” as opposed to similar financial standing. “This new elite,” she contends, “is not defined by economics.”
* How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
* Soviet Pseudoscience: The History of Mind Control.
* The Mind-Set List, Faculty Edition.
* What is antifa? Who are the antifa?
* Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.
* Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter. Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV. A bizarre memo by an administration official suggests why Trump was so hesitant to blame white nationalists for the fatal violence in Charlottesville. Trump and his party continue to creep ever closer to a destination that once seemed unthinkable. And three and a half years of his term remain. Optimist. McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency. The President of Blank Sucking Nullity. “We tried to stop him.” Losing Mitt. If you want a vision of the future.
* 7 things Republicans could do to check Trump without ditching conservative policy.
* Was it worth it, America? Was it?
* Forever and ever amen. How the Forever War Brought Us Donald Trump. Trump’s Afghanistan buildup is revealing a rift among Democrats.
* Whose heritage? Lee comes down at Duke.
* How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother.
* Catholic priest steps down after revealing he was a Ku Klux Klan member decades ago.
* I Used To Be a Neo-Nazi. Charlottesville Terrifies Me.
* If you’re one of the more than 140,000 people doing time in a Texas state prison, you’re not allowed to read books by Bob Dole, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Sojourner Truth. But you’re more than welcome to dig into Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” or David Duke’s “My Awakening.”
* Leaving town at rush hour? Here’s how far you’re likely to get from America’s largest cities.
* “Buffy at 20″ will have to find some way to reckon with Joss Whedon at 53. Joss Whedon was never a feminist. Joss Whedon and the Feminist Pedestal: A Reading List.
* Infographic of the far future.
* Machine learning and misogyny.
* Afrofuturism has finally been gentrified.
* This deal is getting worse all the time. Because you demanded it.
* Marvel’s Black Panther Has Been Fighting White Supremacists For Decades and He’s Not About To Stop.
* Marvel Superheroes Who Basically Only Protect New York City, Ranked.
* In the future every franchise will be revived for fifteen minutes.
* Game of Thrones is definitely collapsing under its own weight. Bady and Mesle. Game of Thrones has become a terrible show. “Straining plausibility.” Game of Thrones‘ “Instantaneous Westeros Travel” Fallacy Is Driving Me Insane. Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story.
* Dogs Are Turning Blue in India for the Saddest Reason.
* Astronaut Pee and Sweat Could Be the Key to Getting Humans to Mars.
* A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think.
* Family Jumps Rising Drawbridge in Car, Lands on Other Side.
* A bonus episode of Thor: The Lightning and the Storm for your listening pleasure.
* And the arc of history is long, but Chuck E. Cheese is phasing out its animatronic bands.
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Sunday Morning Links!
* Somehow this one dropped out of the link post yesterday, but you know it hits all my buttons: Senate Parliamentarian Challenges Key Provisions of Health Bill.
* itshappening.gif. Democrats should be prepared to litigate pardons on every level, in advance. This is good too: Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes. We’re on the Brink of an Authoritarian Crisis. The Crisis Is Upon Us.
* Five poll numbers that should make Democrats uneasy. The fire next time. Signs of sanity from Chuck Schumer of all people, who’s been saying such things lately. 6 Months in, Is Trump’s America Living Up to Liberals’ Worst Fears? If Clinton Had Won.
* Connecticut mother facing deportation seeks sanctuary in local church.
* My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer.
* The Millennials Are the American Earthquake.
* The year is 2525. All life on Earth is extinct. Jared Kushner has just submitted a final corrected SF-86.
* Presenting Anthony Scaramucci’s deleted tweets. Inside Hunt & Fish, where beauties trawl for sugar daddies. One last time. And of course.
* Why does DC Comics hate Superman? It’s bizarre.
* Game of Thrones’s Medieval Crap.
* Rhapsody for the Anthropocene.
* The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel. Against Academic Conferences. I’m a long-married introvert who doesn’t drink, so if they outlawed conferences I’d probably come out pretty far ahead of the game — but I will say that #notallconferences are like what Matthew describes here: when I give a talk at the specialist conferences I usually go to there’s usually at least 20-30 people in the audience at each panel. (Maybe not at the early morning slot, but…) If panels are being that poorly attended as a rule, it’s likely a problem with the organization of the conference itself. I know my career has benefited a lot from finding out early which conferences were the right ones for me to be attending, and all of the opportunities that have made my career what it is came out of them. So it’s tough for me to say they’re not worth doing.
* I Studied the Humanities, and Now…
* Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay?
* Mapped: the United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.
* Cool world history visualization project at chronas.org.
* Adam Roberts previews what everyone says is the best European SF no one in America has ever heard of, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
* Die old and leave an incredible story.
* From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
* 29 minutes from New York to DC is a thing that is never going to happen.
* Chipotle Suffers Another Setback As Rats Fall From Restaurant Ceiling. Still, when you’re in the mood, Chipotle can really hit the spot.
* 7 Black Alt-History Projects That Would Be Better Than Confederate.
* 21 Today: The Rise of Speculative Fiction in Africa, year by year.
* Comic-Con seemed fun this year: Star Trek! Westworld! Stranger Things! Thor! Infinity War! Ready Player One! Ted Chiang! Flashpoint? Even Justice League looks reasonably competent. This seems… important for the sequel? And the dream of the 90s is alive in Captain Marvel.
* Lean in.
Wednesday Night Links!
* Journal Sentinel columnist James Causey was a third-grader at Samuel Clemens Elementary School. The problems of the city would play out with his classmates.
* Teen’s brothers witnessed his ‘violent, senseless’ death in Texas police shooting, family says.
* Flint puts 8,000 people on notice for tax liens for unpaid water bills.
* Ah, the holy mystery of free speech, with its inscrutable twists and turns.
* Today in academic controversies. I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent issue where my Facebook feed divided so evenly for and against.
* NASA, here to help: Science Fiction Space Technology Terms.
* Contingent No More: An Academic Manifesto.
*Democrats Can Retake the House in 2018 Without Converting a Single Trump Voter. Of course, they can lose that way, too… And speaking of losing. The coming clown show. I would have thought Gillibrand would be an instant frontrunner. Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. More on that last link here.
* A noncriminal mother of four was deported. Now in Mexico, she fears for her safety.
* Well, this seems fine: Donald Trump on whether he could start war with North Korea: ‘I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.’ How Trump Could Get Fired.
* The Whole World Is Now a Message Board.
* Why does a newspaper employ opinion columnists at all?
* Thor-centric podcast from Miles while Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is on hiatus.
* A Rare Journey Into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a Super-Bunker That Can Survive Anything.
* Finally someone said it: Let’s end compulsory schooling and stop forcing education ‘down everybody’s throat.’
* How your selfie could affect your life insurance.
* Shock finding: Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* Even more shocking! Men Are Less Moral after Exposure to Images of Sexy Women, Research Finds.
* Teach the controversy: Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Seems harsh.
* Mike Pence — IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!
Happy First Day of School Links!
* The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere. What Were Blogs?
* Phew, that was a close one: In a new book, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith argues there’s no such thing as time wasted online.
* …successful universities – surely including the University of Chicago – are congeries of safe spaces that factions of scholars have carved out to protect themselves from their intellectual enemies. More concretely – the University of Chicago has both a very well recognized economics department and a very well recognized sociology department. There is furthermore some overlap in the topics that they study. Yet the professors in these two departments protect themselves from each other – they do not, for example, vote on each other’s tenure decisions. They furthermore have quite different notions (though again, perhaps with some overlap) of what constitutes legitimate and appropriate research. In real life, academics only are able to exercise academic freedom because they have safe spaces that they can be free in.
* Graduate Students Are Workers: The Decades-Long Fight for Graduate Unions, and the Path Forward.
* Median income vs. public university tuition, 2000-2016.
* What Colleges Can Do Right Now to Help Low-Income Students Succeed.
* Secrets of my success: Yes, Students Do Learn More From Attractive Teachers.
* Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.
* The long, strange history of John Podesta’s space alien obsession.
* With a shift in martial arts preferences, the rise of video games — more teenagers play Pokémon Go in parks here than practice a roundhouse kick — and a perception among young people that kung fu just isn’t cool, longtime martial artists worry that kung fu’s future is bleak.
* The Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers Who Have Been Written Out of Christianity’s Early History.
* All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?
* Paris Is Redesigning Its Major Intersections For Pedestrians, Not Cars.
* Vice: All the Evidence We Could Find About Fred Trump’s Alleged Involvement with the KKK.
* Louisiana, for instance, made headlines earlier this summer when it was revealed that the state had spent more than $1 million of public funds on legal fees in an attempt to defend its refusal to install air conditioning on death row at Angola prison — even though the air conditioning would cost only about $225,000, plus operating costs, according to expert testimony. That astonished U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson. “Is this really what the state wants to do?” Jackson asked, calling the bill “stunning.” “It just seems so unnecessary.”
* The deep story of Trump support. The New York Times And Trump’s Loopy Note From His Doctor. Donald Trump has a massive Catholic problem. Trump might already be out of time. It’s Too Soon For Clinton To Run Out The Clock.
* When Steve Bannon ran BioDome.
* The Welfare Reform Disaster.
* Obama the Monument Maker. Obama Just Quadrupled The World’s Largest Natural Sanctuary.
* Tumblr of the year: The Grad Student. Keep scrolling! School hasn’t started yet.
* The Average Joe Accused of Trying to Sell Russia Secrets.
* The short, unhappy life of the Soviet Jet Train.
* The first theory of evolution is 600 years older than Darwin.
* Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
* They say the best revenge is a life well-lived. There’s a study out this year that suggests Frenchmen can feel pain. I don’t wanna be one of those people who think everything got worse around the time he hit his mid-twenties.
* My statement of teaching philosophy.
* Happy 101st, Alice Sheldon. Kirby’s 99th.
* Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.
* “No Man’s Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game.”
* Great moments in FOIA requests.
* Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery.
* Big data, Google and the end of free will.
* The logistical sublime: A Map Showing Every Single Cargo Ship In The World.
* Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Dakota Oil Pipeline Blockade.
* Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End.
* Replication projects have had a way of turning into train wrecks. When researchers tried to replicate 100 psychology experimentsfrom 2008, they interpreted just 39 of the attempts as successful. In the last few years, Perspectives on Psychological Science has been publishing “Registered Replication Reports,” the gold standard for this type of work, in which lots of different researchers try to re-create a single study so the data from their labs can be combined and analyzed in aggregate. Of the first four of these to be completed, three ended up in failure.
* Under pressure to perform, Silicon Valley champions are taking tiny hits of LSD before heading to work. Are they risking their health or optimising it? I reject the premise of the question.
* A special issue of Transatlantic devoted to “Exploiting Exploitation Cinema.”
* So last night, on a whim, I started collecting links to doctoral dissertations written by members of the House of Commons, and posting them on the Twitter.
* The Guardian reviews the new edition of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium.
* Missed this somehow in June: rumors of the four-point shot in the NBA. I’m not much of a sports person, but this fascinates me just as a lover of games.
* Le Guin honored by the Library of America (while still alive).
* King Camp Gillette introduced his safety razor, with disposable double-edge blades, around the turn of the 20th century. But before he was an inventor, Gillette was a starry-eyed utopian socialist. In 1894, he published “The Human Drift,” a book that, among other things, envisioned most of the population of North America living in a huge metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. Production would be fully centralized, making for the greatest efficiency, while all goods would be free to everyone. That’s the only way Gillette saw to ensure that the benefits of technological development would be shared. “No system can ever be a perfect system, and free from incentive for crime,” he wrote, employing a prescient metaphor, “until money and all representative value of material is swept from the face of the earth.” His blade was a model socialist innovation: Gillette replaced toilsome sharpening labor with the smallest, most easily produced part imaginable. The very existence of the Gillette Fusion is an insult to his memory.
* The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies.
* Soviet sci-fi movies in English online.
* Your one-shot comic of the week: Ark.
* And, finally, my story can be told.
I Just Can’t Believe It’s December Links
* Over the weekend, of course, we celebrated the first Star Wars Trailer Day in a decade. Your shot-for-shot dissection. A deeper look. Digging deeper still. The George Lucas Special Edition. Elsewhere on the Star Wars beat: Physicist Proves That R2D2 Is Lighter Than Styrofoam.
* English and foreign language jobs are down nearly 10% again, down almost 40% since 2007.
* New NEH Grants Will Promote Popular Scholarly Books.
* Call for Papers: Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor.
* Why colleges haven’t stopped binge drinking.
* Donors getting bold in Illinois: U. of Illinois Could Lose Big Gift by Rehiring Adjunct.
* A long, interesting piece on an anti-bullying measure passed by Madison faculty.
* When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths. Black Friday, Or the Circulation of Commodities.
* In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.
* Afrofuturism: The Sonic Companion.
* Putting The Sidekick In The Suit: Black Captain America, Female Thor, And The Illusion Of Progress.
* Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question.
* But where does it come from? My new answer: nobody builds a megadungeon. Megadungeons build themselves. They are the guilty conscience of rulership; the truth commission against power. Great power corrupts, and absolute power does what we’ve been told. Even those who want to rule well feel the attraction of expedient murder and petulant torture, the convenience of imprisoning one’s enemies without trial, buying off the priesthood and covering it all in a glaze of ceremony and pretty words. On this world, this eventually provokes its own reaction. Beneath the seats of power – castle; trading house; senate building – the accumulated sins happening above begin to literally undo the foundations. Dungeons grow. It might not be so tidy as: 60 starved prisoners in the last few decades means 60 skeletons, with hallways for them to roam through; 20 goblins and some rooms for them to squat in appear as a direct result of last year’s punitive expedition against the recalcitrant border villages; one ghoul for each speech in which you cloak your appetites in the honeyed words of dead philosophers, etc.
* How many people are locked up in the United States?
* Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid. The video that caught the cops lying about Tamir Rice. White Cops File Suit, Claim They Are Punished Too Much For Shooting People.
* Grand Jury Won’t Indict Officers In Ohio Wal-Mart Shooting, Either.
* Missouri almost out of money to attack Ferguson with. St. Louis police officers’ group demands Rams players be disciplined for ‘hands up, don’t shoot. Ferguson: Message from the Grassroots. No healing.
* Why Every Struggle Is Now a Struggle Against the Police.
* Similar cases yield very different results in Wisconsin prison system.
* Georgia’s Top Court Reins In Private Probation Firms For Illegally Extending Sentences. Reined in! The arc of history is long, but!
* Full Nihilism: “Six Reasons I’m Thankful for a Republican Congress.” Two of the six were “I’m bored.” Media professionals!
* One of the worst “errors” of the Obama presidency was the pivot to deficit reduction, when literally no one cares about deficit reduction.
* Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. Amway Journalism.
* Officials with a Northern California school district expelled a live-in nanny’s 9-year-old daughter after hiring a private investigator to ascertain where she lived, the Contra Costa Times reported. Having been caught, the school district has now reversed itself.
* Life after people: Someone Flew a Drone Through Chernobyl and the Result Is Haunting.
* Science proves people who still read fiction really are just better.
* How Often Do “Disruptive” Business Practices Actually Mean “Illegal” Business Practices? The Uberiest thing Uber’s done yet.
* Philanthropic Poverty: Bono and other philanthropic capitalists push charity to defend property.
* When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.
* The Super Mario 64 Goomba Nobody Has Ever Killed. The Coin That Took 18 Years to Collect.
* The real roots of midlife crisis, or, the second decade of this blog is going to be a shame. At least we have Charlie Stross’s thought experiments to comfort us.
* How Not to Get Away with Murder.
* My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK.
* An Open Letter to the Administration of Vassar College.
* This TNR piece on the Rolling Stone UVA exposé actually raises some relevant journalism questions, but my sense is this happens entirely by accident in the course of a kneejerk attempt to discredit the story.
* The false rape accusation as witchcraft.
. CTRL-F revenue, CTRL-F income, CTRL-F profit: Vox Media Valued at Nearly $400 Million After Investment.
* The 22-year-old appeared to have killed himself, police said. A handgun was found near his body inside the dumpster. The text he sent said he was sorry, “if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all f—ed up.”
* Even a single season of high school football might have harmful impacts on the brain.
* Your panel-by-panel breakdown of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Watchmen pastiche Pax Americana #1, this year’s instant-classic comic book.
* You don’t have to beg, borrow, or steal anymore: Black Mirror is finally on Netflix.
* Wanderers. Time Trap. Five Minutes.
* And finally, we get to the meat: Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him.
Sunday Reading at 10,000 Feet
* Someone put Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s keynote from ICFA this weekend on YouTube. The “Empire” ad Istvan plays from Computer Associates is amazing.
* Highest-ranking administrator at Marquette abruptly resigns.
* No! No! I won’t believe it! It’s impossible! Bottom line shows humanities really do make money.
* The other college debt. Revenue at Any Cost: Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Education. And from the archives: “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.”
* The first issue of Porn Studies is available online.
* Kim Stanley Robinson will be in Madison the first week in April for “Imagining Possible Worlds.”
* Hobbit hole playlet, a steal at a mere $3000.
* Marching on: marriage equality in Michigan.
* Police officers in Hawaii are lobbying lawmakers not to repeal a statute that allows them to …. wait for it … have sex with prostitutes during the course of legitimate investigations. Repeating my joke from Twitter, “legitimate” in that sentence is working so far it should be allowed to have sex with prostitutes while on duty…
* Race, cash, and the drug war in Florida.
* Black Preschoolers Face An Epidemic Of Suspensions.
* Autopsy shows Texas cop fired fatal shot from close range into sarcastic student’s back. The officer is currently on administrative leave.
* It should be no surprise that when law enforcement agencies investigate themselves, they find no wrongdoing—especially since a study of the FBI’s internal investigations found that they cleared themselves of wrongdoing in 150 out of 150 fatal shootings. With that track record, the public can’t be confident in the integrity of an investigation with this predictable outcome.
* Duke Energy Caught Intentionally Dumping 61 Million Gallons Of Coal Waste Into North Carolina Water.
* HBO In Talks with Lisa Kudrow to Bring ‘The Comeback’ Back for Season Two. I want to see that.
* CNN, still the absolute worst of all time.
* Ideology at its purest? Why not just believe the things bisexuals say about themselves?
‘At This Stage in the Superhero Bubble the Strategy Seems to Be to Protect the Investment by Minimizing Risk’
The thing is, though, that the kind-of-O.K. aspects of “Thor” have the effect of making it more depressing, rather than less. The movie cannot be an interesting, appalling train wreck because it lacks the spoiled grandeur of ambition gone off the rails. You can’t sit and marvel (as it were) over what went wrong because nothing, at the level of execution, really has gone wrong. Mr. Branagh has not failed to make an interesting, lively, emotionally satisfying superhero movie, because there is no evidence that he (or the gaggle of credited screenwriters, or Paramount, the sponsoring studio) ever intended to make any such thing. On the contrary, the absolute and unbroken mediocrity of “Thor” is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad.
We got back from the theater a little while ago, and I can now confirm A.O. Scott has the only Thor review you’ll ever need.
Lots of Black Friday Links
* You can listen to a segment of the Slavoj Žižek essay on contemporary apocalypticism that will appear in our upcoming issue of Polygraph here. (via Verso)
* The headline reads, Cigar-Shaped “Mothership” Plunges Argentinian Town Into A Blackout.
* 15 Toys Not to Buy Your Child This Christmas. Of course, science proves you shouldn’t buy anyone gifts at all. (Both links via Neil.)
* Is the public option now too watered-down to fight for? Matt Yglesias and Steve Benen join Josh Marshall in thinking this over. I feel exactly how I did on Monday: the point is to pass anything so it can be improved without a filibuster.
* North Carolina in the news! Kay Hagan is the Senate’s 17th wealthiest senator (via), while Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina has gotten itself in big trouble for improper issue advocacy against the public option.
* Other politics quick hits: HIV travel ban finally lifted. The national GOP has money problems. They’re talking about a war tax. Despite what you may hear in the press, Obama is pretty good at this whole international diplomacy thing. And Dubai is collapsing; couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.
* The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2009” list is already out.
* ‘Are Fake Academic Conferences the New Nigerian Prince Scam?’
* Little-used geek measurements.
Sheppey (distance)
I have to include Douglas Adams’ co-creation (with John Lloyd) here — It’s from The Meaning of Liff, their dictionary of things there aren’t any words for yet. All the words in the dictionary are British place names (the Isle of Sheppey is off the Kent coast). One sheppey is the closest distance at which sheep are still picturesque, and is about seven-eighths of a mile.
* Thor, a Marvel comics character I’m still pretty sure has to be an elaborate joke, will redefine what a superhero movie can be.
* Black Friday LEGO nostalgia.
* Ah, that explains it: that badly timed Dollhouse ARG turns out to be the work of overzealous fans.
Gerry Canavan 