Posts Tagged ‘UPenn’
Friday Links!
* Why the Fires in the Amazon Are So Bad. The Fires in the Amazon Were Set on Purpose. Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest. Thank goodness someone lost their job over this.
* But wait! There’s an easy solution to this! Can Mars Be Made Habitable in Our Lifetime?
* Elsewhere in the that’ll-solve-it bin: What if We All Ate a Bit Less Meat?
* 2 Scholars Will Leave MIT’s Media Lab Over Its Director’s Financial Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
* Want to Be an English Professor? It Gets Harder Every Year.
* Mesa College English Professor Showed QAnon Video in Class, Students Say.
* Justice corner! The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks. ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on Orange Is The New Black. Customers Handed Over Their DNA. The Company Let the FBI Take a Look. Precrime didn’t even work in the movie!
* What’s going on with Milwaukee’s population?
* ‘Forever chemicals’ detected at low levels in Milwaukee tap water for the first time.
* Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.
* The Ultimate List of What Star Trek You Should Watch Before Picard.
* Hasbro’s new Monopoly for Millennials game is an insulting experience.
* Tenured law professors behaving badly.
* The arc of history is long, but Major U.S. Phone Companies Agree to Plan to Combat Endless Robocalls.
* A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games.
* And MIT scientists prove you’re just lazy.
Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!
* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!
* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…
* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.
* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.
* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.
* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.
* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.
* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.
* This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.
* Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.
* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.
* The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.
* Death at a Penn State Fraternity.
* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.
* African Science Fiction, at LARB.
* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.
* Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.
* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.
* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.
* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.
* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.
* This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.
* A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.
* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.
* “Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”
* They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
* When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.
* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.
* Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.
* How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.
* What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.
* Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.
* * ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!
* Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.
* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.
* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”
* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.
* We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!
* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’
* An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.
* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?
* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.
* Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.
* The Digital Humanities Bust.
* We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.
* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?
* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.
* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.
Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.
That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.
* Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.
* Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.
* Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.
* The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
* In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.
* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.
* Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
* The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.
* I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.
* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.
* I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”
* An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.
* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.
* The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.
* The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!
* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
* Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette. Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long. As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to discuss this all at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example on Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a campus and for the students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21: “Indigeneities.”
* Climate change comes to Shishmaref, Alaska. Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
* But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: “hands up” transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages—the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, “hands up” isn’t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one’s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other—deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black—become the objects of state violence. “Hands up” cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
* Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man. Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops. California Cop Tweets That He Will ‘Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill’ Protesters. Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality. UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’ Cops Off Campus.
* Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse — If You’re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
* Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
* Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built. They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years. Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase. ASU English by the Numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
* Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
* The ‘Job Market’ That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile: According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp! The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
* The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It’s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
* The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
* Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions, suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
* This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
* Five Stories About Addiction.
* Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It’s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so. On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA’s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
* The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
* Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
* All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
* Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
* 18 Badass Women You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand — a stern “hush hush” to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens’s claim that “our belief is not a belief” could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, “atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.” He claims being an agnostic would be “a truer liberation” since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming — a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett’s Hamm when he exclaims, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”
* The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing—It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k altogether.
Gerry Canavan 