* In times like these it is important to remember that border walls, nuclear missiles, and surveillance systems do not work, and would not even exist, without the cooperation of engineers. We must begin teaching young engineers that their field is defined by care and humble assistance, not blind obedience to authority. Without this crucial first step, organizing engineers’ labor in Silicon Valley and elsewhere may only yield counter-productive results. After all, police have benefited from some of the most powerful union representation and that has not proven liberatory for anyone. It is only after the engineering profession takes its place among other professions—ones that recognized their power and created systems of independent review and accountability—and comes to terms with its relationship to ethics and morals, can it be trusted to organize. Only then can we trust them to leave the siege engines behind and join us in building something new.
Posts Tagged ‘United Kingdom’
Friday Links!
- Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
- CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
- If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
- I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
- Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
- “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
- Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
- $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
- Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
- History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.
- Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
- The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
- Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
- How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
- I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
- A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
- We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
- Curation is not cancellation.
- This is why we can’t have nice things.
- The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
- Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
- Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
- “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
- Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
- Unions Are Cool Now.
- The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
- ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
- Life after vaccination.
- “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
- The Invention of murder.
- Inside the incel.
- ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
- The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
- We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
- Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
- The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
- Against WandaVision.
- Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
- What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.
Friday Night Links!
* All is proceeding as I have foreseen: Virginia Declares State of Emergency After Armed Militias Threaten to Storm the Capitol.
* How Science Fiction Imagined the 2020s.
* Watchmen’s future unsure at HBO as Lindleof bows out.
* And just for fun, one last time.
* A brand-new Zodiac where the signs are the Muppets.
* The latest anti-grad-student-labor nonsense at the University of Chicago.
* Trump’s America may be declining in global soft power—but US empire rolls on. Our Frightening Moment Was Years in the Making.
* …the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.
* Shocker: Health care spending decreases under single-payer systems.
* How Many Kids of ‘Millionaires And Billionaires’ Would Actually Benefit from Free College?
* Sex abuse crisis in Amish Country.
* When the movie is so bad you can really let your hair down: Dolittle Is One of the Worst Movies in Years.
* Not the worst map projection I’ve ever seen.
* An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Airplane Sleeping Positions.
* And the automoted utopia can never fail; it can only be failed.
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
* And in your heart, you know it’s canon.
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
* And imagine going back in time.
Just Another Saturday Night Linkdump
* CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic. CFP: Edited Collection, Fan Studies: Methods, Ethics, Research. CFP: Reclaiming the Tomboy: Posthumanism, Gender Representation, and Intersectionality. CFP: Special Issue on Indigenous and Sovereign Games. CFP: The Age of the Pulps: The SF magazine, 1926–1960. CFP: Productive Futures: The Political Economy of Science Fiction, Bloomsbury, London, 12-14 September 2019.
* Awesome #altac job watch: Humanities Editor at Minnesota Press.
* The second half of the Women’s Studies issue on Octavia E. Butler, featuring my article of Parable of the Trickster, is now officially out. Check it out!
* Find out when someone started crying during Endgame, and you’ll find out who they’ve lost. (Really, though, it doesn’t make any sense.) “Avengers: Endgame” is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of “cinema” by “content.” In Praise of Poorly Built Worlds. The Avengers are the heroes of ‘Endgame,’ but Disney was the villain all along. But this time, we’re talking about a tragedy beyond what could possibly be commemorated through memorial sites. It would land somewhere closer to mass suicide and total infrastructural collapse–and where Endgame is concerned, there are no tragedies, there is only Marvel. Eco-Villains: Thanos and the Night King. To put it bluntly, and in Deleuze’s terms, superhero films are action films for people who no longer believe in action, for whom the capacity to act has been overtaken by the spectacle. It’s probably the best version of what an Avengers movie can be. And even that turns out to be silly, sloppily written, and to require massive amount of suspension of disbelief. Is it really too much to hope that Marvel stops debasing its characters and stories with events that can never live up to the MCU’s individual pieces? Interview With A Local Man Returning After Thanos’ Snap.
* MCU continuity enters its “fuck you, that’s why” period.
* An analysis of both side’s tactics in the Battle of Winterfell, from a military strategist. A counterpoint.
* Hate to agree with Ross Douthat, but it really does seem to be the case that hype aside Martin is just warmed-over Tolkien, but worse in every particular. Bonus Twitter thread goodness on GoT and colonialism.
* America is a horror: on Jordan Peele’s Us.
* Vox celebrates the great James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).
* Keeping company with my Audible app over lunch, I’ve come to see it as the buddy our tech overlords have granted me in the isolation that they help to impose. I feel this way about podcasts.
* Report Realism: Tentative Notes on Contemporary Kenyan Writing.
Genres that strain realism—the gothic and neo-gothic, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, and so on—are conspicuously absent in Kenyan writing, even as they are incredibly well represented in Kenyan book consumption. We are not writing what we are reading; even the very popular Christian-themed fiction about fighting demonic forces, which is really a variation of the horror novel, remains relatively sparse in terms of what we write or, perhaps more accurately, what we choose to make public of our writing. The believable and the realistic are bounded by NGO narratives and perspectives. And too many writers believe that the only writing worth anything is the believable and the realistic: to be a “committed” writer requires adhering to report realism.
Report realism believes in the power of “truth,” whether contemporary or historical, with a faith that borders on fundamentalism. In report realism, the truth will set us free. Report realism confirms objective NGO reports and affirms what Kenyans feel to be the truth of a particular condition. In report realism, for instance, the Kenyan prostitute is always a morally degraded figure looking for a way out to a respectable moral life. This realism is celebrated and supported by the NGO organizations who fund writing competitions and publish winning entries devoted to describing the real Kenya and by mainstream publishers who have the conservative mission of producing appropriately moral literature.
* ‘It drives writers mad’: why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?
* The saddest story ever told, beating Hemingway out by one word: Esports Part-Time Online Instructor.
* Yes, you will get a job with that arts degree. With that history degree, too!
* Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university.
* 6 Majors Were Spared the Ax at Stevens Point. But the Damage Might Be Done.
* Students and (not) doing the reading.
* How to Be a Better Online Teacher.
* Getting a Game Studies PhD: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars. Game Boys: The “gamer” identity undermines the radical potential of play.
* Sexual harassment is pervasive in US physics programmes.
* The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s. Being a Black Academic in America.
* ‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus.
* Swarthmore Fraternities Disband.
* Marquette faculty, students and community members rally for unionization. Unionization effort at Marquette leaves organizers, administration in a stalemate.
* The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb. A Moral Stain on the Profession.
* “Student loan debt is crushing millions of families. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational: Universal free college and the cancellation of debt for more than 95% of Americans with student loan debt.”
* Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find.
* Stanford keeps Stanford University Press alive… for one year.
* Charles Koch gave $25m to our university. Has it become a rightwing mouthpiece? George Mason University’s Donor Problem and the Fight for Transparency.
* Grad Students at Private Colleges Were Cleared to Unionize 3 Years Ago. Here’s What’s Changed.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated.
* All Literature Is Climate Change Literature. The Green New Deal Costs Less Than Doing Nothing. Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies. ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: vast expanse of rainforest lost in 2018. Vietnam just observed its highest temperature ever recorded: 110 degrees, in April. ‘Decades of denial’: major report finds New Zealand’s environment is in serious trouble. Alaska’s in The Middle of a Record-Breaking Spring Melt, And It’s Killing People. The Folly of Returning to Paradise, California. Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital. Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse. “You did not act in time.” We Asked the 2020 Democrats About Climate Change (Yes, All of Them). Here Are Their Ideas. The Billionaire’s Guide to Hacking the Planet. What if air conditioners could save the planet? The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth. ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive. A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet. Between the Devil and the Green New Deal. Five years. And here comes eco-fascism.
* Down and Out in the Gig Economy: Journalism’s dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry—not to mention writers like me.
But for most of us, freelance journalism is a monetized hobby, separate from whatever real income one earns. The ideal relationship for a freelance journalist to their work becomes a kind of excited amateurism. They should hope for professional success and acceptance but always keep a backup plan or three in mind. They will likely not be welcomed past the gates of full-time employment. By year five or six, they might be rebranding themselves as “editorial consultants” or “content strategists,” realizing that any genuine fiscal opportunity lies in shepherding corporate content to life.
* ‘Two-Tiered Caste System’: The World of White-Collar Contracting in Silicon Valley. The Future of Unions Is White-Collar. We Just Remembered How to Strike.
* These five charts show how bad the student loan debt situation is.
* “I am a woman and I am fast.” The ongoing harassment of Caster Semenya is simply incredible.
* Ten years later, police lies about Oscar Grant come to light. And elsewhere on the police beat: We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records. New York City’s DAs Keep Secret Lists Of Cops With Questionable Credibility. Virginia police sergeant fired after being linked to white supremacy.
* Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes. Emails Show Trump Administration Had No Plan to Track and Reunite Separated Families. Militia in New Mexico Detains Asylum Seekers at Gunpoint.
* TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be.
* France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity. An art historian explains the tough decisions in rebuilding Notre Dame. How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral. The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy.
* Mental health minute: Researchers say there’s a simple way to reduce suicides: Increase the minimum wage. The challenge of going off psychiatric drugs. The kids are not all right.
* The Rise of Useless Health Insurance. High-Deductible Health Policies Linked To Delayed Diagnosis And Treatment. American Prescription Drug Prices Are Out of Control. One Man’s Furious Quest to Get to the Bottom of It.
* Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests.
* Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
* A new Gallup poll says that America is home to some of the most stressed people in the world, reporting extraordinary levels of anger and anxiety that could be cause for concern, say doctors.
* Workers Should Be in Charge.
* I Work With Suicidal Farmers. It’s Becoming Too Much to Bear.
* On crunch time in the games industry.
* Instagram Memers Are Unionizing.
* How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever.
* Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird.
* Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium.
* Believe them when they say they want to kill us.
* Children of the Children of Columbine.
* My parents didn’t tell me they skipped my vaccines. Then I got sick.
* How a mall dies, Milwaukee edition.
* The hunt for rocket boosters in Russia’s far north.
* Job-hunting will only get worse.
* Of course I believe in hell. I vote for Democrats.
* The gamification of fascism.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fandom, and anti-fandom.
* My feckless Googling had reaped a monstrous reality that I knew was going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I asked myself: Is there something righteous in facing reality, or would it have been better to stay ignorant? A surfeit of ugly knowledge is a feature of our age, a result of the internet carrying to our doorstep, like a tomcat with a dead rat, all manner of brutal information. How many others have flippantly Googled an old friend and discovered something ghastly? This was not knowledge as power; it was knowledge as sorrow.
* “Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats.”
* The oldest known tree in Wisconsin.
* A Video Game Developed To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Seems To Be Working.
* How “Liberal” Late-Night Talk Shows Became A Comedy Sinkhole.
* Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men. What Good Dads Get Away With.
* When Measles Arrives: Breaking Down the Anatomy of Containment.
* Despite being legally required to conduct audits since the early 90s and holding a staggering 2.2 trillion in assets, the Pentagon held its first-ever audit this week — which it, unsurprisingly, spectacularly failed.
* I have so little faith in the holders of the Star Trek IP I can’t greet any of this news with pleasure. Even the realization that Discovery is (finally) going to do something truly original in its third season just fills me with dread. And I don’t know how to feel about this at all: Star Trek: Picard Series May Not Reunite TNG Cast. Star Trek: Discovery’s Depiction of Captain Pike’s Disability is a Betrayal of Roddenberry’s Utopian Vision. My mini-tweetstorm on the subject.
* Sundown on Deadwood: David Milch, battling Alzheimer’s, finally finishes his TV Western.
* Professional obligation watch, god help me.
* Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer.
* Tolkien estate disavows forthcoming film starring Nicholas Hoult.
* John Lennon’s 15 year old report card.
* Colonizing Condiments: A (Very) Short History of Ketchup.
* The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.
* Obituary corner: Gene Wolfe Was the Proust of Science Fiction. Before the Labyrinthine Lore of ‘Dark Souls,’ There Was Gene Wolfe.
* Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention.
* Medicine is magical and magical is art / The boy in the bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart.
* Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs.
* The Great Pornwall of Britain Goes Up July 15.
* The United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan.
* what piece of cosmo sex advice most haunts your waking hours
* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix ‘buys 50 literary projects in last year.’
* It was in autumn that the happy face arrived. Death of a Salesman. No mathematics, no science can ever predict the human soul. Where do you want to eat tonight?
* 2019 National Geographic Travel Photo Contest.
* And only mass surveillance can save us now! Rough news day for Oxford if you ask me.
Just Another Monday Morning Linkpost
* I asked “If you were going to do a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM lit crit class where the gimmick was that you always returned to a foundational text for application, what would you choose?” and got some really good ideas. Right now, if I do it rather than a multiple-choice or wheel-of-fortune variant, it looks like it’s going to be Frankenstein.
* CFP for SFRA 2019, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
* Her Eyes Weren’t Watching God: The Empathetic Secular Vision of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin – Building a World.
* Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in first look at ‘Lord Of The Rings’ author’s biopic. Deadwood Movie Confirmed for Spring 2019 Premiere. And the new Aladdin movie looks worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.
* This week I went on a journey into the madness of The Phantom Podcast, which reviews the Star Wars prequel trilogy as if the series began with Episode 1, and I regret nothing. Scroll all the way down.
* Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided: There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.
* Students and Faculty Plan Walkout Over Johns Hopkins’ ICE Contract.
* How to Make Grad School More Humane.
* Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate.
* International Graduate-Student Enrollments and Applications Drop for 2nd Year in a Row.
* WTF Is Going on at Wright State? Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
* “Student Loan Relief or Paid Vacation? These Workers Get a Choice.” Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans.
* Every tweet in this thread is enraging. Every one.
* Julian Glander’s Art Sqool is about Froshmin, a small, round person who is going to an art school run by an artificial intelligence that is going to help Froshmin become a great artist. Or at least some kind of artist. Actually, thinking about it, the weird little robot who evaluates all of your art doesn’t make any promises about ability or skill or fame or recognition as a product of the time that Froshmin spends at Art Sqool. Wait, shit, is this a scam?
* When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation.
* When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)
* How Flight Attendants Grounded Trump’s Shutdown.
* The battle for the future of Stonehenge.
* 250 dead, $91 billion in damages: 2018 was a catastrophic year for U.S. weather; 4th-warmest for globe. A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan. Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases. Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. Global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. The end of the Colorado. Polar thinking.
* Latinos, blacks breathe 40 percent more pollution than whites in California, study says.
* Liberal Democrats Formally Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry. More here.
* Ugh. Gotta preserve this flawless system.
* Please Stop Writing Nancy Pelosi Fan Fiction.
* Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Dead.
* Meanwhile, it sounds like things going great in Britain.
* Brett Kavanaugh Just Declared War on Roe v. Wade.
* Parable of the Talents watch: Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency.
* “I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book.
* Sesame Workshop has finally given up on Bert and Ernie.
* On the end of The Good Place.
* Patreon planning to completely betray its user base, of course.
* Google is already way down that road. As is everyone else.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York’s establishment Dems to eliminate her district.
* Headlines from the end of the world: “Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate.”
* Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows. 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.
* “Hackers using black-market Israeli ICE-breakers to extort a billionaire who’s replacing his employees with robots, at the behest of a shadowy tabloid/petromonarchy alliance, is actually the cyberpunk future we were promised, and yet.” But for real.
* On Jaws 4. On a legally distinct Harry Potter.
* Young engineer upgraded the LEGO bionic arm he built for himself.
* I’m amazed it’s even legal to sell these paintings in Germany.
* Finland gave people free money. It didn’t help them get jobs — but does that matter?
* The meat industry vs. lab-grown meat.
* An antibiotic-style treatment for cancer? Let’s hope.
Sunday Reading, A Great Idea Whose Time Has Come
* SFFTV Special Issue CFP: Global Utopian Film and TV in the Age of Dystopia.
* CFP: The Sixth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 27-29, 2019.
* CFP: 20th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe.
* Pasadena on Her Mind: Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Her Hometown.
* The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy talks to the great Lisa Yaszek.
* When your stalker signs up for your class.
* When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals. To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates—has not improved over 6 years.
* US academics feel the invisible hand of politicians and big agriculture.
* Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor for using the N-word during a class discussion about a James Baldwin book in which the word appeared — and for sharing essays on the history of the word with students who complained to him about it. “Teaching & the N-word: Questions to Consider.” I have always personally abided by the use/mention distinction out of deference to black artists and what I see as an injunction not to rewrite their work for them (which has always seemed, to me, like centering whiteness too, just in a different way). But the social consensus around that is *rapidly* changing; I’m not at all sure what’s best, and it seems like a pedagogical minefield that the contemporary moment is completely unprepared to think through in a careful way.
* Fairfax was preparing to be Va. governor. Then Northam said he was staying put.
* Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet. Students Are Preparing for the First Major U.S. Climate Strike Next Month. There’s a big hole in the world’s most important glacier. Hell yeah, Upper Midwest. Climate signs.
* The Anthropocene started in 1492. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.
* How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth.
* ‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings.
* Lord of the Rings as D&D Campaign.
* Trump Allies Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Hiding or Dead. It Started on QAnon.
* The U.S. Needs to Stay Out of Venezuela.
* Snopes officially declares Facebook unfactcheckable.
* Automated background checks are deciding who’s fit for a home.
* New York Insurers Can Evaluate Your Social Media Use—If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed.
* We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole.
* As Drug Prices Rise, Is Boston’s Prosperity Based On A Moral Crime?
* Invincible has a solid voice cast, but for some reason I thought this show was going to be live action, and now I’m broken-hearted.
* Cop watch: FBI Warned Law Enforcement Agencies of Threat Posed by Non-Existent ‘Pro-Choice Extremists.’ Revealed: FBI investigated civil rights group as ‘terrorism’ threat and viewed KKK as victims. No Heat for Days at a Jail in Brooklyn Where Hundreds of Inmates Are Sick and ‘Frantic.’ Mentally Ill Prisoners Are Held Past Release Dates, Lawsuit Claims. Prison gerrymandering is distorting democracy in states across the Midwest and nationwide, leaving incarcerated people with inequitable representation—or none at all. ICE Agents Are Using Pennsylvania’s Courthouses as a Stalking Ground. The State Supreme Court Can Stop Them. One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases. The criminal justice system also has an ‘alternative facts’ problem. The FBI Has Your DNA Now.
* This was cool: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.
* Wisconsin basketball star has no plans to stop protesting racism during the national anthem.
* Breaking: everyone from uncontacted and isolated tribes is in the Bad Place.
* A new study finds Americans take the pain of girls less seriously than that of boys.
* Will Anyone Save Black Colleges?
* A spectre is haunting the 2020 Democratic primary.
* Let children be bored again. I ran this parenting suggestion by my seven year old and got a big thumbs down.
* I wish there were a different author than Jesse Singal, but the story is genuinely fascinating: How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author’s Budding Career.
* New to podcasts? Choose your genre!
* And these stamps sure are pretty.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Tuesday Night Links!
* ST: TNG: TNG: Patrick Stewart to Return as Capt. Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series for CBS All Access. Well, that’s something! CBS All Access Is Laying the Groundwork for Non-Stop Star Trek.
* Celebrating Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and black creativity at the first-ever Wakandacon.
* Draft schedule for the Worlding SF conference I’ll be keynoting at this December. Looking forward to it!
* Poem of the day: “A Metaphor.”
* Pedagogy flashback: Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* How to Prepare for Class. Against the Grade. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Another list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English).
* That rare thing, a good Twitter thread: What is the most interesting and revealing and hard-to-believe/understand statistic you know?
* Gasp, shock: Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions.
* What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism.
* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”
* Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature.” How Not to Talk About Climate Change. No, we didn’t almost solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. When Will Capitalism Answer For Its Crimes?
* 2018 Was Probably Already Doomed, But We Might Have Saved 2030.
* ‘Many parts of Earth could become uninhabitable’: Study’s grim warning.
* These 360 Drone Photos of the California Wildfires Are Devastating.
* ‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’ by Alain Badiou.
* Brexit continues to give Trump a run for his money in the deliberate-national-suicide-Olympics.
* Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception. The rise of QAnon Is a Sign That Trumpism Might Not Be Primarily About Trump at All. After mainstream exposure, QAnon is starting to fracture.
* Trump just keeps confessing to crimes and it just keeps not mattering.
* Alejandra ultimately decided to “self-deport” to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her. U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants. Worker Charged With Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. Man Detained by ICE Claims He Went Blind in One Eye After Agent Didn’t Believe He Had Diabetes. How Trump Radicalized ICE. Border family separation isn’t “zero tolerance” – CBP looked for parents to charge so they could kidnap kids. New Jersey Jail is Holding Nearly Triple its Capacity in ICE Detainees. What happens after ICE tears your family apart: ‘The storm descended.’ Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Judge upholds ruling that DACA must be restored. The Power of Abolish ICE.
* “We Need to Fight for Aloha”: Hawaii congressional candidate and democratic socialist Kaniela Ing on taking on Hawaii’s biggest corporations, a bold climate change agenda, and the necessity of opposing US imperialism.
* I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.
* Markets in everything: More Schools Are Buying ‘Active-Shooter’ Insurance Policies.
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is: It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear.
* Meanwhile, in serious environmentalism: Trump Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific.
* Fields medal stolen moments after it was awarded.
* There’s so much corruption in the federal government at this point it’s impossible to keep track of.
* A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world.
* The Trader Who Made a Massive Short Bet Against Nintendo.
* NRA Legal Strategy / Fundraising Appeal Goes Viral.
* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.
* How the NYPD recriminalized marijuana after the state decriminalized it. Internal documents reveal how Bronx prosecutors are taught to slow down cases.
* Democrats do the darnedest things.
* How the Cold War Created Astrobiology.
* A small-town couple left behind a stolen painting worth over $100 million — and a big mystery.
* These The Last Jedi Fans Put on a Mock Court Martial for Poe Dameron.
* Missing the point is the point: Pre-reading Young Aragorn.
* You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead.
* Amazing arbitrage opportunity.
* Sexuality and gender in science fiction games.
* Somebody get me Michel Foucault on the phone: Open Office Plans Increase Employee Stress, Reduce Productivity.
* Ask your doctor if R’lhygrex is right for you.
* Facebook getting pretty brazen even by Facebook standards.
* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage.
* The Great Recession Never Ended.
* Well, if they’re really sorry.
* The end of the writers’ room.
* The next stage of the Tesla scam.
* Chilling Testimony in a Tennessee Trial Exposes Lethal Injection as Court-Sanctioned Torture.
* Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors.
* And now they tell me! Why punishing your children doesn’t work.
Thursday Noontime Links!
* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.
* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.
* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.
* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.
* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.
* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* Deported for doing journalism.
* If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.
* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.
* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.
* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.
* America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.
* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.
* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?
* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.
* Snikt!
* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…
* Money is speech. It’s better actually.
* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?
* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.
* But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.
* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.
* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.
* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
* Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.
* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.
* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.
* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.
* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?
* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.
* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.
* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.
* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.
Monday Morning Links (The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mama)
* CFP: The Evolution of Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Academia Lunare.
* But the other thing that strikes me – we were talking early on about the history of modernity as connected in a structural way to the history of slavery, of capitalism, to histories of ordering and wasting – when I read that long history, a striking thing is capitalism’s impulse to abolish limits. From a capitalist’s standpoint, there are simply no limits. In regard to almost anything and everything, limitlessness is the law. Another striking thing is that capitalism aims to abolish some of the key dualisms without which the very idea of society as we understand it would have been unimaginable. To some extent, capitalism is the only religion without taboos humans have ever invented.
* The way it works is that, once the first settlers on a new planet demonstrate that they won’t die horribly from allergies, pathogens, or getting buried under the excrement of herds of titanosaurs, they then spread out to build mining settlements all over the planet, high-grade all the most accessible mineral deposits, drill for oil, and grow the infrastructure needed to build starships. With starhips built and trade links established, they grow into a mature colony over the course of a few centuries, all the while founding as many daughter colonies on new planets as possible. Eventually, they run into serious pollution problems, loss of usable mineral deposits, changing climate (both natural through the equivalent of Milankovich cycles, and anthropogenic), and a biosphere that coevolves to exploit the colony, because that’s just what life does (think pesticide resistant bugs, coyotes, superweeds…). At that point, the colony starts to fall apart. Interstellar trade shifts away from it (after all, whatever’s causing them to collapse them might be contagious). Ultimately the survivors hang on to become a truly resilient indigenous population in a backwater world–or all die horribly as their critical infrastructure fails. Their fate doesn’t matter to our interstellar civilization, because it has literally already moved on to new frontiers, boldly going where no man has gone before. So long as they can find new worlds to conquer, they can go on forever.
* Hard to argue with this reading of Harry Potter, honestly.
* “Eco-Philosopher Fails Hurricane Test, Crawls Under Rock.”
* A mere couple of hours away till the end of America, get excited.
* Still, God help me, I can’t get enough of this stuff: What if Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987?
* Madeleine Albright: ‘The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad.’ Yeah, that’s what I keep saying!
* America is catastrophically incapable of holding its elites responsible for their crimes, and that’s supposed to be the good news.
* Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation was a comically illegal slush fund and it just doesn’t matter.
* A Mexican couple was turned over for deportation this week when they tried to visit a New York military base to celebrate the Fourth of July with their son-in-law, who is an army officer. They had lived in Brooklyn for decades. More here.
The couple’s son-in-law is a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. According to the family, the Department of Defense won’t let him intervene in the case.
“Most worrying is the fact that both parents have recently undergone surgery and need medication,” the report said. “The Silvas say they have gotten calls from their mother, who said she was denied her medication. They say they have not heard from their father.”
This is a different army base in Brooklyn than the one that called ICE on a pizza delivery guy a few weeks ago.
* Trump admin won’t reunite all migrant families, will place some kids in foster care.
* Illinois governor profits off ICE detention center contracts.
* Not for nothing. Of course you’ve heard me sing this song before.
* Notes from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign.
* Even “being drunk” is culturally specific.
* Introducing the Marvel Curriculum: A look at film history via the MCU.
* What if HBO, but super, super creepy?
* How Much Does Being a Legacy Help Your College Admissions Odds?
* Elon Musk’s submarine is nonsense. Meanwhile.
* Brexit vs. Gibraltar. Brexit vs. Britain. Brexit vs. the Tories. Brexit vs. Brexit.
* I happened to listen to NPR for a few hours this morning, and I heard three stories that are very much connected to climate change without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.
* U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials.
* Like Pizzagate but it actually happened.
* 150 Cheers for the 14th Amendment.
* Killing all the whales and turtles to own the libs.
* Actually existing media bias watch: 1, 2.
* Siri: show me fragile masculinity.
* And the headline reads: “Fake sultan was scamming a Miami billionaire. Then he ate pork.”
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
If You Scroll Down Far Enough on This Linkpost You May Eventually Reach Content That Won’t Cause Immediate Existential Despair
* Call for Papers: Polygraph 28, Marxism and Climate Change. Call for Papers: Speculative Souths.
* Transformative Works and Cultures 27: Tumblr and Fandom.
* The Trump administration separated thousands of children from their families over a crime the justice system penalizes with a $10 fine. What’s Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated? Hell is this audio. Photos. Summer Camp at the Nightmare Factory. Toxic stress. For a 6-Year-Old Snared in the Immigration Maze, a Memorized Phone Number Proves a Lifeline. The Heartbreaking Case Of The 3-Year-Old Boy In Immigration Court. U.S. officials separated him from his child. Then he was deported to El Salvador. Mothers in a New Mexico Prison Who Do Not Know How to Find Their Children. Torn from immigrant parents, 8-month-old baby lands in Michigan. Families divided. Hundreds. 1,995. 3,700. Over ten thousand. Trump administration could be holding 30,000 border kids by August, officials say. “She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper.” “I have no information about your child.” “I Can’t Go Without My Son.” “These aren’t our kids.” Where are the girls? This is bad. History. Here Are Some of the Democrats Who Paved the Way for the Family Separation Crisis. The outrage over Trump’s heartless family separation policy provides an opportunity to reverse the bipartisan consensus that has long victimized immigrants. Protesters Flock to La Guardia to Support Immigrant Children. Protest held outside Bay Area ICE facility over immigration controversy. After Six Days, Portland’s ICE Blockade Is a City of More Than 80 Tents. First Step to Helping Children Sent to New York: Find Them. Governors won’t send Guard units to border if family separation continues. Governor orders probe of abuse claims by immigrant children. On the tarmac. Flight attendant: I won’t work flights that separate immigrant kids from families. Fundraiser to reunite immigrant families shatters Facebook record. Tender age. Kids Taken From Their Parents At The Border Get Their Toys Confiscated Too. Senate Candidate Arrested For Delivering Toys To Children’s Internment Camp. Substandard Medical Care in ICE Detention is Killing Immigrants, Endangering Lives. Poor Medical Care in ICE Custody Is Fatal. More Immigrants Died in Detention in Fiscal Year 2017 Than in Any Year Since 2009. Code red. Torture. Deputy sexually assaulted child, threatened undocumented mom if she reported it. Teens Describe Life Inside A US Detention Center. ICE detention of unaccompanied minors in New York is up more than 500%, city says. Boston Public Schools Superintendent Chang has resigned after it was revealed that BPS has been providing student info to ICE to help deport migrant schoolchildren. Businesses have made millions off Trump’s child separation policy. The corporation that deports immigrants has a major stake in Trump’s presidency. Private Prison Stocks Are Soaring Amid the Trump Administration’s Immigration Crisis. Ex-CIA Contractor Makes Millions Flying Immigrant Kids to Shelters. Southwest Key 1, 2, 3, 4. Betsy DeVos cashes in. Migrant children sent to shelters with histories of abuse allegations. Nearly Half of Funding for Child Migrant Care Went to Shelters With Histories of Abuse. Immigrant children forcibly injected with drugs, lawsuit claims. Unspeakable cruelty. The D&D thread. Even Laura Bush. ‘They are coming crying, almost hysterical.’ The chaotic effort to reunite immigrant parents with their separated kids. No plan. The courts must award damages to families torn apart by the policy. Some migrant family separations are permanent. 
There’s no migration crisis. 3 Charts That Show What’s Actually Happening Along The Southern Border. For the ages. The real hoax about the border crisis. Checkpoints in New Hampshire. Jogger Accidentally Crosses U.S. Border From Canada and Is Detained for Two Weeks. The Trump administration changed its story on family separation no fewer than 14 times before ending the policy. Trump’s Executive Order Turns Family Separation Into Family Incarceration. “There is a policy now on the part of our government for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to share information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That’s as new as four days ago.” Nothing but lies. The next phase. 120,000. The plans are ready. Simple from here. Malice aforethought. If only. American fascist party membership application, Atlanta, 1930. ICE detention centers in your state.
* Newsflash: they’ll support anything.
* We Owe Central American Migrants Much More Than This.
* The buses came right into the camps, in the middle of the courtyard there was a place separated by barbed wire, and the buses came into this area very fast. The children were told to leave the bus because one bus followed the next at great speed, and they had to make way for the buses behind them.
And so these unfortunate children were completely disorientated and at a loss; they left the buses in silence. They were taken in groups roughly corresponding to the numbers in each bus – there were sometimes fifty, sixty, eighty children.
The older ones held the younger ones by the hand, no one was allowed to go near these children apart from a few people amongst us, including myself, who had special permission. They were taken into rooms in which there were no furnishings but only straw mattresses on the ground – mattresses which were filthy, disgusting and full of vermin.
Question: Mr Wellers: Did all these children know their own names?
Answer: No, there were many infants two, three, four years old who did not even know what their names were. When trying to identify them, we sometimes asked a sister, an older brother – sometimes we simply asked other children if they knew them, in order to find out to find out what they were called.
* Hitler goes west: The secret plans for Nazi America.
* How to sleep at night when families are being separated at the border.
* We’re Not Better Than This. But We Can Try to Be.
* Former Border Patrol Agent To Current Agents: Refuse Orders To Separate Children.
* Takei: “At Least During the Internment…”
* States of Emergency: Imagining a politics for an age of accelerated climate change.
* White supremacy after Vietnam.
* Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag.
1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.
* Trump’s Military Drops a Bomb Every 12 Minutes, and No One Is Talking About It.
* Meanwhile, Trump’s cabinet is corruption central.
* Melania Trump Plays the Role of Medieval Queen.
* That D&D thread above linked up nicely with this vintage SMBC that popped across my feed this morning.
* Summoning the Future: The story of the British National Health Service, one of the twentieth century’s great working-class achievements.
* Auditioning for the Supreme Court: Republican judge orders the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau eliminated.
* Possible environmental factor for type-2 diabetes identifies: a chemical found in teeth-whitening toothpaste. Here’s the study.
* Another round of images from the Bodleian’s Tolkien art exhibit.
* Desistance and detransitioning stories value cis anxiety over trans lives.
* Shots Not Fired: A new Oregon law takes guns from people who may do harm.
* An oral history of “Because the Night.”
* The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence.
These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, have not been replaced. They are simply . . . gone. In an informal survey of Broadway, from 93rd Street to 103rd, I recently counted twenty-four vacant storefronts—many of them very large spaces, enough to account for roughly one third of the street frontage. Nearly all of them have been empty now for months or even years.
* Time travel on the blockchain.
* A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw.
* Amazon Workers Demand Jeff Bezos Cancel Face Recognition Contracts With Law Enforcement. Microsoft, under fire for ICE deal, says it’s ‘dismayed’ by family separations at border. A Cloud Is Not Just a Cloud.
* Subscribe, you loathsome, miserable worms. Historical New York Times tweets.
* When platforms that aggregate, distribute and monetize news — Apple, Google, Facebook — share revenues with publishers, maybe they should check against a provenance service to find out whether they’re rewarding someone who did original journalism, or someone who’s simply chasing clicks. Perhaps one or more platform would end up sharing revenues between the publisher that captured the clicks and the one that initially sponsored the investigation.
* The possibility of vacuum decay has come up a lot lately because measurements of the mass of the Higgs boson seem to indicate the vacuum is metastable. But there are good reasons to think some new physics will intervene and save the day.
* We have hints of a theory beyond quantum physics.
* With the Switch, the 130-year-old gaming giant has once again turned reports of its demise into Nintendo Mania. The Legend of Nintendo.
* The case against the case for the humanities, Stanley Fish edition.
So is there anything left once the justifications I have surveyed prove to be at best partial and at worse delusional? Well, what’s left is the position articulated by Oakeshott, a position I have always held, a position Small names the “intrinsic value” or “for its own sake” position. This position has the great advantage not of providing a justification but of making a virtue of the unavailability of one. Justification is always a mug’s game, for it involves a surrender to some measure or criterion external to the humanities. The person or persons who ask us as academic humanists to justify what we do is asking us to justify what we do in his terms, not ours. Once we pick up that challenge, we have lost the game, because we are playing on the other guy’s court, where all the advantage and all of the relevant arguments and standards of evidence are his. The justification of the humanities is not only an impossible task but an unworthy one, because to engage in it is to acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the humanities cannot stand on their own and do not on their own have an independent value. Of course the assertion of an independent value and the refusal to attach that value to any external good bring us back to the public-relations question: How are we going to sell this? The answer is. again, that we can’t.
* Here’s How That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* RIP, Koko. More here and here.
* Needle exchanges have been proved to work against opioid addiction. They’re banned in 15 states.
* “Falling Out of Love With the Nerdist Podcast: The allegations against Chris Hardwick mark the end of a complicated era.”
* MIT Clears Junot Díaz to Teach.
* Hyperexploitation at the laugh factory.
* Why are game companies so afraid of the politics in their games?
* Black Panther and the Black Panthers.
* A Brief History of Soviet Sci-fi.
* Octavia Butler Google Doodle.
* For one brief, shining moment, the Star Wars anthology films were being cancelled.
* Don’t give me good news, I’m too depressed.
* And here comes the Space Force. Would you like to know more?
Father’s Day Links!
* Statement of teaching philosophy.
* CFP: Empirical Ecocriticism.
* But anyone with a modicum of utopian imagination should be asking, what are the opportunities secreted within this emerging network of control? When older forms of democratic possibility are being foreclosed or rendered obsolete, what new (and perhaps better) possibilities can be found? How can the emerging order, which has thus far depended so much on deliberately produced ignorance, and on keeping its political allegiances occulted, be politicised? Utopian thinking beyond Brexit.
* In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” It Can Happen Here It Happened Here 18 Months Ago.
* The Trump administration’s policy of separating families is designed to erase hope—with devastating consequences for thousands of children. Extinguishing the Beacon of America. Conservative Religious Leaders Are Denouncing Trump Immigration Policies. A Legal Resident, an Arrest by ICE and Father’s Day in Jail. In Father’s Day plea, wife of man held by ICE after delivering pizza asks for his release.
* Yeah, that’ll do it: The National Institutes of Health on Friday canceled a mammoth study of moderate drinking after determining that officials had irrevocably compromised the research by soliciting over $60 million from beer and liquor companies to underwrite the effort.
* I should have seen this coming, but it still shocked me: NASA’s Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities.
* If You’re A Facebook User, You’re Also a Research Subject.
* James Bridle’s essay on disturbing YouTube content aimed at children went viral last year. Has the problem gone away – or is it getting worse?
* How does a Google-averse generation figure out how to deal with acne, fake friends, and boy trouble? On Instagram, of course.
* Well, sure: Americans Are Unprepared for a Nuclear Attack.
* Trump’s EPA Greenlighted a Pesticide That Harms Kids’ Brains. Hawaii Just Said, “Hell No.”
* High tech lock is “invincible to people who do not have a screwdriver.”
* Adventure House: the sequel to the Haunted Mansion that never was.
* And Wired Has Your Secret History of the Racy Module That Almost Ruined D&D.
Gerry Canavan 