Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘UC Irvine

Friday Links!

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* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.

* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.

* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?

* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.

* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.

* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.

The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…

* Next year, Greta!

* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.

Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.

* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!

Joe Biden’s Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to Acknowledge That.

Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.

* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?

How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.

* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.

* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.

The Making of the American Gulag.

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.

* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.

* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.

Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.

* Today in the nightmare society.

How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.

Beware the climate pragmatists.

Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.

A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.

* Understanding the professional-managerial class.

* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.

Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.

* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.

Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.

Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.

* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.

* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.

Rewatching Taxi Driver in the Age of Joker.

* So I do know what it’s like to be a bat.

Sunday Morning Links!

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* Picard trailer! Disco trailer! Short Trek! It’s truly a Golden Age.

* Some new poems from Jaimee up at her website.

* State DOT orders homeless to leave encampment under I-794 overpass in downtown Milwaukee by Oct. 31. I’m amazed this situation was allowed to go on this long and am worried that it will turn truly ugly now.

* Anyone want to buy a college?

He Was a Consultant for the Search; Now He’s the Chancellor. And the Faculty Is Furious.

* Now let us proclaim the mystery of speech.

College Students Just Want Normal Libraries. Fine, but get back to me when you figure out a way to turn that into graft.

* 22-year adjunct (and union leader) denied medical leave by UC Irvine following brain surgery.

* They were never going to land anywhere but “you’re damn right I ordered the code red.” Every Trump scandal follows a playbook. With Ukraine, the playbook finally might not work. If the rule of law meant anything to the American political class, Trump would have been impeached on the first day of his presidency. 2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified.’ CIA General Counsel Thought She Made Criminal Referral Based On Whistleblower Info. Bringing back all the classics. Chris Hayes explains it all. Crucial role of right-wing media missing from impeachment coverage. It’s the Republicans, stupid. Even Chris Cillizza gets it.

* I just hope they bring Rick Perry to justice.

* Never Trumpers, man.

* Immigrants will be denied visas if they cannot prove they have health insurance or the ability to pay for medical care, the Trump administration said. The government is simply lawless.

This Supreme Court Term Will Launch a Conservative Revolution.

 Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor.

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Luring Mexicans Across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma.

“It’s Very Unethical”: Audio Shows Hospital Kept Vegetative Patient on Life Support to Boost Survival Rates.

* Inside TheMaven’s Plan To Turn Sports Illustrated Into A Rickety Content Mill.

The Four-Day Work Week—Not Just a Daydream.

* Saving the planet without self-loathing.

* Deep dive into the scandal rocking online poker.

* America.jpg.

21-year-old oversleeps jury duty, goes to jail for 10 days.

* US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded.

* The billionaire class: “I’m a fiscal conservative, but a cultural nihilist.”

* Cops can do anything they want wherever they want whenever they want.

Bootleg film shows Florida prison in all its danger, squalor. An inmate shot it on the sly.

* Mosby lists 25 Baltimore police officers as discredited; prosecutors begin wiping out 790 convictions.

* From the archives: During the season 17 premiere of Sesame Street in 1985, after 14 years, the adults see Mr. Snuffleupagus for the first time.

* And from the other archives: Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.

* Top Joker burn. Joker and white resentment. Brogan breaks it down.

* House of X: still really good! I’m really interested to see where Hickman takes the franchise from here.

* DC continuity: still utterly bonkers!

* Still the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that cuts me the worst.

* And know, even in these dark times, there are still heroes in this world.

Monday Morning Links!

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* 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.

A Complete-ish List of Grad Students / Postdocs / Adjuncts / Alt-Acs / Whoevers in SF, Fantasy, and Horror Studies.

How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?

* Truly bizarre list of the top 100 films of the 21st century, almost tailor-made to annoy every single person viewing it.

* Employers have become obsessed with improving the health of their employees. But does it do anyone any good?

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.

* 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?

* Shots fired, Milwaukee.

* Oh, so there’s my problem.

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.

* Teenager’s memory resets every two hours after being kicked in the head, meaning she wakes up thinking every day is 11 June.

* 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.

* How not to mourn Toni Morrison.

* And American Pharoah has done more to resist the Trump administration in a single afternoon than the Democrats have done in the last nine months.

Oops, Forgot a Title Links

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* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they’ve run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.

* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was “produce more adjuncts,” but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.

* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.

University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.

* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.

* On working dads.

#charlestonsyllabus

* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.

How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.

* The flag might actually come down.

* For every “justifiable” gun homicide, there are 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and two accidental gun deaths.

Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why.

* CCC, call your PR office.

The brutal truth is that most of American political history is an experiment in seeing what will happen if national political elites agree not to offend white supremacist Southern white men.

* “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton.”

According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.

Surge!

But set Obama’s impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They’re certainly finding every possible way to blow it.

* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.

For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.

The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.

* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.

* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.

* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.

* What happens when the sea swallows a country?

* It’s just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.

* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.

* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.

Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple’s App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell’s revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don’t simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.

* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.

‘Star Trek’ Fan Invited to Pitch ‘Star Trek Uncharted’ TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.

* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From ‘Breaking Bad’ Will Appear in a Future Episode of ‘Better Call Saul.’

Written by gerrycanavan

June 23, 2015 at 7:53 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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