Posts Tagged ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’
It’s Monday Everywhere But In Your Heart Links
* Very regrettably, SFRA 2020 has been cancelled. The 2020 Science Fictions, Popular Cultures conference at HawaiiCon might be our next chance…
* The Best Solo Board Games, or Welcome to the Gloomhaven Century. And while we’re on the subject: the Frosthaven kickstarter starts this week!
* I’ve been debating about whether to ‘go public’ on having coronavirus – which I kind of did inadvertently this morning. So, now I may as well share my experience(s) with you in order to help those who are worried about it or who are thinking they might have it. Here goes…
* ‘Since I Became Symptomatic.’
* Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. With Coronavirus Disrupting College, Should Every Student Pass? Marquette goes pass/fail (if you want it). Forced off campus by coronavirus, students aren’t won over by online education. Coronavirus threatens the UW system. If the Coronavirus Collapses State Budgets, What Will Happen to Public Colleges? Will Coronavirus Close Your College for Good? Liberty University once again finds a way to do the worst possible thing. It will only get weirder. After Coronavirus, the Deluge. And I’ll look down and whisper… no.
* How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask. Pandemics Show How the Free Market Fails Us. The Lockdown Is an Opportunity to Redefine What Our Economy Is For. Coronavirus May Add Billions to the Nation’s Health Care Bill. Canada’s Coronavirus Response Shows Why We Need Medicare for All to Fight This Pandemic. ‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide. Rural Towns Insulated From Coronavirus Now May Take A Harder Hit Later. This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It. Workers Are More Valuable Than CEOs.
* The Curve Is Not Flat Enough. Illinois reports death of infant with coronavirus. Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. Doctors And Nurses Say More People Are Dying Of COVID-19 In The US Than We Know. Zoochosis. Who’s to blame. Some U.S. Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse Than Wuhan’s. The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases. 13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital. Inside a Brooklyn Hospital Right Now. How the Pandemic Will End. A 9/11 Every Day for a Month.
* The World Needs Masks. China Makes Them — But Has Been Hoarding Them.
* Having cancelled the Olympics, Japan discovers that it too is awash in coronavirus.
* Study ‘Clearly Shows’ Putin Did an Amazing Job Secretly Brewing Up the Novel Coronavirus.
* More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection. Blood from people who recover from coronavirus could provide a treatment.
* EPA suspends enforcement of environmental laws amid coronavirus.
* A record 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits as the coronavirus slams economy. Record-breaking unemployment claims may be vast undercount. Coronavirus unemployment benefits. Here’s who qualifies and how much they get. How do 3 million newly unemployed people get health care? Why Is America Choosing Mass Unemployment? Coronavirus Shock Is Destroying Americans’ Retirement Dreams. MLMs are using the coronavirus to recruit new sellers. Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure. Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country amid the coronavirus crisis. Trump Wants to ‘Reopen America.’ Here’s What Happens if We Do. Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform.
* Now that’s what I call setting expectations. The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV. Inside Joe Biden’s bizarre coronavirus bunker. He’s gonna lose, folks. The amazing thing. The tough choice. Andrew Cuomo’s Coronavirus Response Doesn’t Mean He’s Crush-Worthy. Report: Fox News is worried about legal action after misleading viewers about coronavirus.
* That time Hemingway was quarantined with his sick kid, his wife, and his mistress. Animal Crossing and social distancing. Abbey Road restored to original glory while everybody and their cameras are stuck indoors.
* Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance.
* Once is misfortune; twice looks like carelessness.
* A story of the twentieth century.
* This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.
…
We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.
* A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has ignited a firestorm of controversy.
* #actually there’s at least one more copy of Data’s engrams still in B4 so this is definitely not over. Elsewhere on the Picard beat: Star Trek: Picard is the dark reboot that boldly goes where nobody wanted it to. Star Trek: Picard, Fancy Sheets, and the Meaning of Home.
* These Researchers Want You to Live In a Fungus Megastructure.
* Rick and Morty Just Released a Short Samurai Film and It’s Awesome.
* The Dispossessed, Part II: May You Get Reborn on Anarres!
* The only good Twitter account is this Third Amendment memes one.
* Polarized Near-Infrared view of Saturn, processed using Cassini data taken in November 2012. NASA Data Shows Something Leaking Out of Uranus.
Not CoronavirME — CoronavirUS
* The new SFFTV is out, a special issue on Blade Runner and its legacies. It’s a really good one — check it out! Elsewhere on the SFFTV beat: Congratulations to Joseph Jenner, whose ‘Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect’ (from #12.1) has just been shortlisted for the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies’ Award for best Doctoral Student Article/Chapter!
* This week’s must-read: The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.
* Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction.
* “Oh My God, It’s Milton Friedman for Kids”: A historian of capitalism exposes how Choose Your Own Adventure books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”
* UC Santa Cruz Fires 54 Graduate Student Workers. UCSC cancels classes, shutters services as demonstrators block roadways. I Believe in the Strike. UCSC, The Fate of Graduate Education, and the Future of the University. After Announcing Firing of Grad Assistants, UC-Santa Cruz Is in Turmoil. “So far UCSC has spent $5.1 million dollars on police rather than meet with striking graduate students; this is nearly 25% of the cost of an annual COLA for all graduate students.” MLA Statement. Donate to the strike fund.
* The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s. The New School of Labor Rights.
* Critical theory represents the power, not the corruption, of the humanities.
* Debtors of the World, Unite!
* First Covid-19 outbreak in a U.S. nursing home raises concerns. The ominous days leading up to the coronavirus outbreak at Life Care Center in Kirkland. ‘We’re gearing up for something extremely significant’: Top hospitals across the US told us how they’re preparing for the coronavirus outbreak. Cronyism and Conflicts of Interest in Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. ‘To hell and back’: my three weeks suffering from coronavirus. The new normal. To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China. Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life. WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought. Another senior politician has died of coronavirus in Iran, where 8% of the parliament is infected. State by state, we’ve still barely tested anyone. When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain Coronavirus? New CDC guidance says older adults should ‘stay at home as much as possible’ due to coronavirus. AIPAC. CPAC. Get ready for live-streamed funerals. Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus. Port of Los Angeles Sees Coronavirus Impact Sharply Reducing Imports. As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP. CoronaCoin: A coronavirus speculative deathwatch cryptocurrency. ‘If We Don’t Work, We Don’t Get Paid.’ How the Coronavirus Is Exposing Inequality Among America’s Workers. America Is About to Get a Godawful Lesson in Why Health Care Should Never Be a For-Profit Business. The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead. We’re in trouble.
* SXSW Cancelled, Unbelievably. The effect on Austin will be massive. Event Admits It Has No Insurance for Coronavirus Cancellation.
* First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow. UW, Seattle University classes moving online starting Monday. Stanford too. As Coronavirus Spreads, the Decision to Move Classes Online Is the First Step. What Comes Next? Coronavirus Looms Over March Madness.
* Graphic Novels Your Kid (Probably) Hasn’t Read Yet.
* What to Say to Your Daughter About Campus Sexual Assault.
To bring the spirit of these lessons into a child’s home, parents can focus on building a relationship with their daughter that teaches her that she is equal to men and has the right to set her own boundaries and see them respected. For dads, a simple thing to try is letting your daughter brush you off sometimes. Let her question your authority, talk back, and leave the room in the middle of an argument. These changes could be especially important if the greatest risk to your daughter comes from an authority figure, but they will apply to her peers too.
* Is Miscarriage Is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It? The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go.
* The race to save Polesia, Europe’s secret Amazon.
* We Re-Ordered The Entire Democratic Primary Calendar To Better Represent The Party’s Voters. Twilight of Chris Matthews. Daily Caller gets one I can’t help but pass along. Bring in the boss? ‘This Was a Grift’: Bloomberg Staffers Explain Campaign’s Demise. America’s black billionaires have no place in a Bernie Sanders world! The Liberal-Conservative-Socialist Case for Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren: A Populist for the Professional Class. Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race. ‘Bailey’ vs. ‘blood and teeth’: The inside story of Elizabeth Warren’s collapse. How Elizabeth Warren Lost. It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren. Capitalism Is Rallying Behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans What They Want. Democrats Rallying Around Joe Biden Could Alienate Generations of the Party’s Youth Support. Biden can finish Bernie off in Michigan. Who Said It: Trump or Biden? Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s 2020 Campaign Makes Me Sick with Fear for Our Future. I just remembered Joe Biden is fine. Electability in the time of coronavirus. What if there’s no hope? Sanders campaign hatches comeback plan.
* Lots of my political thoughts have been going viral on Twitter lately, from the proper level of identification with a candidate to the ego protection of despising Bernie Sanders to just straight up rants to a pretty solid sitcom pilot. But nothing approaches a random repost of a meme I saw on Facebook.
* This seems fine: Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups.
* The head of CIS was illegally appointed and it barely even registers.
* The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread gets to The Dispossessed. And from the archives: Sexual Violence in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Towards an Interpretation.
* I don’t want to shock you: Why algorithms can be racist and sexist.
* Larry Nassar victims want accountability. Olympic officials offered cash and veiled threats.
* Woody Allen Memoir Dropped by Hachette After Staff Walkout.
* Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?
* In a lot of office environments, “bad energy” might be code for “old” or “overweight” or “knows too much about labor law,” but one veteran WeWork employee said Rebekah’s firings were seemingly random and without obvious prejudice. “She was just a spoiled baby,” the employee said.
* Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds.
* Susana Polo writes for Polygon about her Twitter account, which, year-round, tweets out events in Lord of the Rings on the day that they happened. (via MeFi)
* Now I know you’re just making these up: “the snow firehose.”
* And Shell is now She’ll. Namaste.
Wednesday Night Links!
* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.
* Shoot this post into my veins.
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.
* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!
* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.
* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.
* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.
* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!
* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.
* When rich people can’t get along.
* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.
* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.
* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.
* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.
* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.
* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).
* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.
* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.
* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!
* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’
* The things you learn on Twitter.
* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.
* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.
* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’
* And somehow I always knew it would end this way.
Wednesday Links!
* How the US built the world’s largest immigrant detention system. A list of companies that contract with ICE.
* Checking in on Duke and UNC under siege.
* 2019 Genius Grant awardees, including Lynda F’ing Barry.
* Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group. The Whitesplaining of History Is Over.
* The kids are all right: Students protest demonstration policy, deliver letter to Zilber.
* Wisconsin students make up smallest share of UW-Madison freshman class in at least 25 years. The Great Decline.
* And on the China and college beat: US universities see decline in students from China. China’s Higher-Ed Ambitions Are at Odds With Its Tightening Grip on Academic Freedom.
* Impacts ‘accelerating’ as leaders gather for UN talks. Earth’s Oceans Are Getting Hotter And Higher, And It’s Accelerating. ‘Unprecedented Conditions’ Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The African Congo Is Quietly Being Deforested As The Amazon Rainforest Burns. Scientists Set Out to Drift With Arctic Ice for a Year to Study Climate Change. On white supremacy and green living. The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History. This is daytime. Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End. “You’re So Accustomed to the Erasure and the Normalization of Catastrophism.”
* Can a burger help solve climate change?
* The Bible may have a naming discrepancy, and a Duke researcher plans to correct it.
* I might have done this one already, but what the hell: Le Guin’s work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living.
* A real “hold my beer” moment for neoliberalism: A doctor and medical ethicist, who happens to be Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, argues life after 75 is not worth living.
* Chris Ware, whose Rusty Brown is finally out, about which I am very excited, celebrates Peanuts.
* Epic Disasters: Revisiting Marvel & DC’s 1980s Famine Relief Comics.
* What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
* Normal society that is definitely normal and good.
* Die a villain, or live long enough to rebound as a hero.
* Will Google’s quantum computing breakthrough change everything?
* The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century. Surprisingly solid #1 and #2 picks.
* And I’d like to see Ol Donny Trump wriggle out of this jam! Impeachment step by step.
Fall Syllabus #2: Environmental Protection!
My other course is also super exciting: a version of the “Material Cultures” course I developed with an NEH grant a few years back devoted to “Environmental Protection.” Some of the assignments are pulled from the ecologically focused modules of the old Cultural Preservation course, others are new to this one.
Again, below you can find the course description and week-by-week schedule; full syllabus is here…
Recently, “sustainability” has become a powerful concept in both academic discourse and popular debate; however, since the time of Heraclitus in Ancient Greece philosophers have recognized that change is inevitable and that there is always tension between what we should preserve and what is disposable. This course will use interdisciplinary scholarship to probe the central question underlying all environmental protection: what should we value enough to pass on to future generations? It will ask students to confront this dilemma by interrogating what precisely makes a natural resource sufficiently valuable to cherish and keep. In our time, the concept of “value” is dominated by economic language, but this view is crucially incomplete: what gives objects value is not their exchangeability but the fact that humans care about them and are willing to preserve and maintain them. A park is just open land, after all, until someone declares it worthy of protection. Establishing and asserting these sorts of non-economic values has long been a defining characteristic of study in the humanities, which have always appreciated how shared heritage links us to the past, creates meaning and relevance in the present, and allows us to shape our collective future. In that spirit we will examine a wide variety of political, philosophical, and aesthetic questions around sustainability, and environmental protection, and develop a framework for engaging pressing contemporary debates about the preservation of our shared natural heritage.
| T | Aug 28 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS Charles Stross, “Designing Society for Posterity” (Web) |
| Th | Aug 30 | Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future(Chapters 1-3, plus epilogue) |
| T | Sep 4 | Johan Rockstrom et. al, “Planetary Boundaries” [D2L] John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology against Capitalism” [D2L] Naomi Klein, “Climate Rage” [Web] |
| Th | Sep 6 | Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” [Web]
Responses to Rich from Robinson Meyer, Naomi Klein, Alyssa Battistoni, and Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes [Web] |
| T | Sep 11 | Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (first half) |
| Th | Sep 13 | Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (second half) |
| T | Sep 18 | S.B. Banerjee, “Necrocapitalism” [D2L] Arundhati Roy, “The Greater Common Good” [Web] Vandana Shiva, “Earth Democracy” [Web] |
| Th | Sep 20 | Clare Kendall, “A New Law of Nature” [Web] Mihnea Tanasescu, “When a River Is A Person” [Web] Manuela Picq, “Can the Law Prevail Over Chinese investments in Ecuador?” [Web] |
| T | Sep 25 | case study: Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars2-3, 94-96,133-158, 168-179 [D2L] |
| Th | Sep 27 | Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (first half) |
| T | Oct 2 | Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (second half) Lisa Wells, “The Blaze” [Web] FIRST PAPER MINI-WORKSHOP |
| Th | Oct 4 | CLASS CANCELLED FOR MILWAUKEE COUNTY ZOO TOUR |
| T | Oct 9 | Kathy Rudy, “Where the Wild Things Ought to Be” [D2L] Kim Stanley Robinson, “Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans. It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet” [Web] FIRST PAPER DUE |
| Th | Oct 11 | FALL BREAK—NO CLASS |
| T | Oct 16 | Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” [D2L] McKenzie Wark, “Critical Theory after the Anthropocene” [Web] film (in class): Ramin Bahrani, “Plastic Bag” |
| Th | Oct 18 | Daniel Hartley, “Against the Anthropocene” [Web] Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” [Web] Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence” [Web] |
| T | Oct 23 | Richard McGuire, Here |
| Th | Oct 25 | Richard McGuire, Here SECOND PAPER MINI-WORKSHOP |
| T | Oct 30 | Graeme Wood, “Re-Engineering the Earth” [Web] Eduardo Porter, “To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact” [Web] Adam McGibbom, “There Is No Quick Fix for Climate Change” [Web] Phil Torres, “Engineering the atmosphere: Is it possible? And would it prevent catastrophe, or cause it?” [Web] Alexander C. Kaufman, “The King of Climate Fiction Makes the Left’s Case for Geoengineering” [Web] Peter Frase, “Geoengineering for the People” [Web] |
| Th | Nov 1 | case study: refreezing the Arctic Robin McKee, “Could a £400bn plan to refreeze the Arctic before the ice melts really work?” [Web] SECOND PAPER DUE |
| T | Nov 6 | Kim Stanley Robinson, introduction to Future Primitive [D2L] Ernest Callenbach, “Chocco” [D2L] 99% Invisible, “Ten Thousand Years” [Web] |
| Th | Nov 8 | Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home |
| T | Nov 13 | Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home |
| Th | Nov 15 | Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home |
| T | Nov 20 | Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home |
| Th | Nov 22 | THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS |
| T | Nov 27 | Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation |
| Th | Nov 29 | Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation
FINAL PAPERS/PROJECTS MINI-WORKSHOP |
| T | Dec 4 | Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation film (out of class): Annihilation LAST DAY OF CLASS |
| Th | Dec 6 | CLASS CANCELLED DUE TO INSTRUCTOR TRAVEL |
| W | Dec 12 | FINAL PAPERS/PROJECTS DUE BY 10 AM VIA D2L DROPBOX |
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* CFP: Darkness.
* Never Tell Them Your True Name: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin.
* The Demanding, Essential Work of Samuel Delany: The Atheist in the Attic.
* Games for a Fallen World: On the Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene.
* Why we march: a then and now look at Marquette student’s involvement in protests.
* Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability. The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.
* A grim new angle on the intergenerational struggle: Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors.
* Harvard study estimates thousands died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria.
* Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger.
* The Criminalization of Knowledge.
* A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student. Niall Ferguson, amazingly. Niall Ferguson quits Stanford free speech role over leaked emails.
* It’s Not Liberal Arts And Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed.
* Inside the NCAA’s years-long, twisting investigation into Mississippi football.
* Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty.
* Here’s every Star Wars movie, ranked by female screen time. Should Donald Glover Have Played Han Solo? Disney and Star Wars: An Empire in Peril? The growing emptiness of the Star Wars universe. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves.
* Isaac Cates on Infinity War‘s False Conclusions.
* How Tolkien created Middle-earth.
* Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls. White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them. TMZ Goes MAGA. Can the Rule of Law Survive Trump?
* Three tweets on impeachment from Corey Robin.
* thread re: how NYT has now basically locked out Congressional Dems from commenting on Trump news.
* Trump’s ‘Forced Separation’ of Migrant Families Is Both Illegal and Immoral. Separated at the border: A mother’s story.
* After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back. Customs stole a US citizen’s life savings when he boarded a domestic flight, now he’s suing to get it back. Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood. This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk.
* Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google.
American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?
* In the richest country in the history of the world: Nine year old raises thousands of dollars at lemonade stand to help pay brother’s medical bills.
* Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself agreeing with David Brooks.
* Bear’s Dairy Queen ice cream treat earns zoo $500 fine.
* Archaeologists uncover remains of man crushed as he fled Pompeii.
* Why Isn’t Asbestos Banned in the US?
* Choose-Your-Own-Security-Disclosure-Adventure.
* Meet the Rising New Housing Movement That Wants to Create Homes for All. Tenant and Squatters’ Rights in Oakland.
* We compared Milwaukee police reports on Sterling Brown’s arrest with the video. They don’t match.
* Jury Leaves $4 to Family of Man Killed by Sheriff’s Deputy, Along With Many Questions.
* LARB reviews Dirty Computer.
* How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language From a Terrible One. How to Build a World.
* Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a “residential” zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I assume the rivers of meat blood come later.
* A weather report from an alternate universe, in which science is real and people aren’t idiots.
* Climate grief in the classroom.
* Banning straws won’t save the oceans.
* Bet this won’t either: Trump Prepares Lifeline for Money-Losing Coal Plants.
* Summah. Don’t kill your wife with work. If these trends continue. Teach the controversy. Dads & grads. When you’re almost forty.
* “Says he had to stage his own murder in order to capture someone, apologises to his wife.”
* How #MeToo Impacts Viewers’ Decisions on What to Watch.
* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.
* How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking.
* The art of the grift in 21st century Manhattan.
* Shockingly, ‘impossible’ EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all.
* New podcast watch: Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes. The Good Place: The Podcast.
* An oral history of the Muppets.
* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.
* We’re not prepared for the genetic revolution that’s coming.
* And you can’t argue with the facts: Wearing glasses may really mean you’re smarter, major study finds.
people and nature
Thursday Links!
* Call for papers: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult
* On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of ‘The Floor is Lava.’
* There were like 15 separate Trump bribery scandals just yesterday. This one could be the biggest.
* Happy anniversary, Robert Mueller.
* None dare call it fascism: Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. “These aren’t people. These are animals.” ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. Abolish the ICE Prison Complex.
* The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo.
* The Solo reviews are rolling in. Disney has already moved on.
* Revisiting Springsteen’s worst decade.
* Michigan State University Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Larry Nassar’s Victims. Report: USC Ignored Gynecologist’s Alleged Misconduct.
* Is Chicago Experiencing a Historic Preservation Crisis?
* Can Artificial Intelligence Help Find Alien Intelligence?
* The story you don’t care about, in the format you don’t want, in the series you’ll forget about while it’s still airing: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Will Focus On Young Aragorn.
* Same thing but Young Alfred.
* The Wrath of Khan Director Reveals He Was Making a Star Trek Trilogy for CBS, But It’s Been Delayed.
* How can you make Arrested Development season five even less promising? Netflix’s top scientists are hard at work.
* Elsewhere in entertainment news: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.
* Scenes from the Anthropocene: Scientists Match Pollution in Greenland’s Ice Sheet to Events from Ancient Greece and Rome.
* Someone, somewhere, is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect.
* We can now see how humans have altered Earth’s water resources.
* Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.
* Inside the largest comic book collection in the world.
* Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park.
* It is sometimes said that a generous basic income could empower workers to better resist their capitalist bosses. This familiar claim regarding the emancipatory potential of basic income has things almost exactly backwards. A universal basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is an organized working class already powerful enough to extract it. This fact should inform the Left’s political strategy.
* And I always knew: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.
Tuesday Morning Links
* A new documentary will explore the life and legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Janelle Monáe on Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism at Spotify.
* How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public.
* But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape. The Culture Wars Are Dead! Long Live the Culture Wars.
* Among the Hottest Job Markets on Campus: Police Officer.
* Call for papers: Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University.
* A mother and child fled Congo fearing death. ICE has held them separately for months, lawsuit says.
* A DACA Recipient Graduates Amid Deportation Fears.
* The drug war is (still) a race war.
* Black Panther and the Black Panthers, at NYRoB.
* Sweet Briar Milkshake Ducked awfully fast.
* Social media has come under increasing scrutiny for reinforcing people’s pre-existing viewpoints which, it is argued, can create information “echo chambers.” We investigate whether social media motivates real-life action, with a focus on hate crimes in the United States. We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign, and are uncorrelated with other types of hate crimes. These patterns stand out in historical comparison: counties with many Twitter users today did not consistently experience more anti-Muslim hate crimes during previous presidencies.
* Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang.
* If people on food stamps made Jared Kushner’s paperwork mistakes, they might starve.
* Not even 18 months in and they’ve completely dropped all pretense.
* There could be life on Europa, and they only have water cannons.
* Cobbled together in America by Americans, and inspired by contractual obligations and market demands, nothing about the Hey Jude album was “authentic.”
* Two X-Men fan letters from 1976, one who thinks Chris Claremont’s new run can only be saved by jettisoning the diverse cast, the other from a woman of color glad to see herself represented in the pages of her favorite comic. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
* Westworld against libertarianism.
* Workfare for the Private Equity Crew.
* In Praise of Alien3. I heard from a lot of these folks when I compared Infinity War to Alien3 the other week.
* The misassigned voters lived in a predominantly African American precinct that heavily favored Democrats in the fall, raising the possibility that they would have delivered the district to Simonds had they voted in the proper race.
* So inspiring: Disgraced congressman gets a second chance.
* For Peterson, the purpose of our politics and books and films and TV is to protect us from the feminine, which is a crazy and destabilizing energy. Certain culture is good for the brain and certain culture is bad, making you antisocial and destructive. Peterson loves both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories in which men save sleeping women with a kiss, and hates Frozen, a film in which Prince Hans turns out to be the bad guy. Frozen has “no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics,” he explained in Time this year. We must tell the same ancient story over and over, Peterson says, or we will all go insane.
* Literally no one could have predicted: Arrested Development’s Season 4 “Remix” Is an Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
* There’s nothing the human race can’t achieve.
* Retirement policy is basically alchemy.
* Self-driving cars are human experimentation.
* Defending the indefensible: What Isle of Dogs Gets Right About Japan.
* How you’re gonna die, by the numbers.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* And nothing gold can stay: goodbye, Peppa Pig.
Holy Thursday Links!
* William Strampel, Nassar’s former boss at MSU, charged with criminal sexual conduct. MSU Spent Half A Million Dollars Monitoring Nassar Victims’ And Journalists’ Social Media Accounts. Every single member of the upper administration at MSU must resign.
According to MLive, investigators in February found dozens of photos of nude women as well as pornographic videos and a video of Nassar with a young patient on a computer in Strampel’s office.
* Sexuality, childhood, and spanking as sexual assault.
* UW-Stevens Point may reconsider proposed humanities cuts after student protests.
* A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that congressional races are so heavily rigged in favor of Republicans that the United States can barely be described as a democratic republic. The upshot of their analysis is that, to win a bare majority of the seats in the U.S. House, Democrats “would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points.”
* Who Foots Most of the Bill for Public Colleges? In 28 States, It’s Students.
* “Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive.”
* This is a strike to save higher education.
* Oklahoma teachers say they’re going on strike next week.
* Fred Walker’s Career May Not Be Over. But His Presidency Is.
* I heard you like obstruction so I got you some obstruction in your obstruction.
* ‘Deeply weird and enjoyable’: Ursula K Le Guin’s electronica album.
* Here’s how Popular Science covered ‘Star Trek’ in 1967.
* Civilization Player Gets Space Race Victory In 90 AD.
* A Scheme to End the World’s Worst Acid Trip.
* Race, Gender, and Disability in Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time.
* Stormy Daniels Directed a Cyberpunk Porn Thriller That Predicted Our Current Dystopia.
* The Vikings got a billion dollar stadium, and tax payers paid half of that cost. And now…
* Something Happened on Television.
* A California sheriff is posting inmate release dates to help ICE capture undocumented immigrants. ICE gained access to Santa Clara County inmates, breaching sanctuary policies.
* Whatever the potential merits of the arguments might be, it’s tortuous, to say the least, to read anguished warnings about “fake news” from someone who was in the West Wing during the heyday of Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, fictitious attempts to buy refined uranium from Niger, and completely nonexistent alliance with Al-Qaeda; to hear about the threats posed by presidential incompetence from a former staffer of the same White House that so brazenly let New Orleans drown; to be lectured on the perils of executive belligerence and polarizing rhetoric from the man credited with coining the phrase “Axis of Evil”; or to be subjected to sermons about kleptocracy and calls to decency, honor, and the rule of law from someone whose former political boss spent eight years oozing nationalist machismo to champion torture, extrajudicial detention, and aggressive war and who possibly became president in 2000 because his brother just so happened to be the governor of Florida.
* The Newest Frontier in American Jurisprudence Is Trump’s Twitter Feed.
* Hey, Wired — leave those kids alone.
* It shows just how far a man of means will go to get something he can’t buy: the right to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in America.
* Seems pricy, but I’ll allow it.
* Advertising will destroy the auto industry next.
* Scientists say they’ve discovered a new human organ. Behold the interstitium!
* Well, when you put it that way.
* Bulgaria Alleges Julia Kristeva was State Security Agent.
Weekend Links!
* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”
* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!
* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.
* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…
* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.
* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.
* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.
* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.
* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.
* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.
* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.
* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”
* The female price of male pleasure.
* The gig economy and sexual harassment.
* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.
* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.
* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.
* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.
* Oh no.
* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.
* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.
* A world without Holocaust survivors.
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.
* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.
* On the greatness of Swastika Night.
* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.
* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.
Wednesday Links!
* In case you missed it yesterday: the CFP for SFRA 2018 (7/1-7/4 at Marquette)!
* “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Rest in peace, Ursula K. Le Guin. The art of fiction. Fantastic.
* CFP: Petrocultures 2018 (Glasgow University).
* 19 Long-Lost Historical Words You Absolutely Need In Your Life.
* A new study finds an alarming rise in a novel form of psychological distress. Call it “neoliberal perfectionism.”
* But what if forty years of neoliberalism’s violently reiterated dogma that “there is no alternative” has left us incapable of imagining not only better worlds but also worse ones? On dulltopia.
* How Twitter Hooks Up Students With Ghostwriters.
* There are some things no man was meant to know: Should vegetarians assume they can eat French fries?
* U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Niles, accompanied Amer Othman Adi to immigration headquarters Tuesday morning for what they thought would be a routine meeting. Instead, Adi, 57, was jailed and told he would be held until his deportation, which was over a dispute about the validity of his first marriage to an American in 1979.
* ‘I won’t fly refugees to their deaths’: The El Al pilots resisting deportation. Same sex couple sues State Department over decision on son’s citizenship. Border patrol arrests ASU adjunct who gave food and water to immigrants. ICE deporting its own protestors.
* Stochastic terrorism watch: Man threatened to kill CNN employees.
* Tourism to U.S. under Trump is down, costing $4.6B and 40,000 jobs.
* “Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says.”
The report, commissioned under the Obama administration, was considered so explosive that it was originally marked “Secret/ No Foreign,” with the recommendation that it remain classified until June 9, 2042. The report was finished in June 2017, but it appears to have included data only through 2016, before the Trump administration took office.
* A New Jersey college fired a professor, claiming they were “immediately inundated” with complaints of “fear” after she defended a BLM event on Fox News. We sued to look at the complaints. Total number of complaints in the first 13 days: one.
* The future is not good: South Korea, gripped by suicide epidemic, criminalizes suicide-pacts.
* What I’ve learned from my tally of 757 doctor suicides.
* Illustrated thought experiments.
* Nintendo headquarters, c. 1889.
* Rate My Professor and the adjunct professorate.
* Know your ethical conundrums. Free will. Scalars vs. vectors. When God closes a door, he opens a window.
* And when they knew the Earth was doomed, they built a ship.
Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day Links
* Call for Papers: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene.
* People that found their doppelgängers in art museums.
* We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities in order to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. Many of us stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some barely audible phrases involving “skills,” “relevance,” “a changing economy,” “engagement,” and “values.” The reason it does not come out as something coherent or articulate, much less compelling, is that the ideas behind the words are just as hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
* George Ciccariello-Maher Resigns: “We are all a single outrage campaign away from having no rights at all.” Iowa senator proposes bill decried as ‘political litmus test’ for universities. A note to tenured faculty.
* Meet the black architect who designed Duke University 37 years before he could have attended it.
* J.R.R. Tolkien, Beyond Good and Evil.
* What was Leia supposed to do in Episode 9?
* Teach the controversy: the legend of Mark Hamill’s face.
* Another profile of the worst job on the Internet.
* NANO issue 12, a special issue on The Force Awakens.
* Ada 12, radical speculation and Ursula K. Le Guin.
* What if Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?
* Anomie. Quantum Mechanics. Love. Stotting. Zeno. Choice paralysis. Frosty. Melville. Poetry. Keep scrolling!
* Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.
* Why Is a Small Montana Town a Hotbed of Far-Right Activity? Emboldened white nationalists? Look no further than this liberal Oregon college town.
* Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners.
* US nuclear tests killed far more civilians than we knew.
New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
* Obamacare and the survival test.
* How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America. Extreme poverty in America. World’s richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1tn this year. The U.S. without pensions. No ‘Easy Answer’ To Growing Number Of Stray Dogs In The U.S., Advocate Says. Long after Trump is gone, we’ll still be fighting him. As Wildfires Raged, Insurers Sent in Private Firefighters to Protect Homes of the Wealthy. Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong. Death in an Amazon dumpster. The homeless and the coming cashless economy.
* Why Has Science Only Cured One Person of HIV?
* Same: Young American Men Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers. WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition in 2018.
* I’m starting to take this stuff personally: Poor social skills may be harmful to health.
* I mean really. Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?
* Academics ‘face higher mental health risk’ than other professions.
* Atheism is caused by poor breath control.
* The Rise and Fall of the Racist Right.
* Every Black Mirror. Against SNL. Against Star Wars. Disney Apparently Expects ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ To Bomb. How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit.
* When Michael Jackson Almost Bought Marvel.
* Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme. How We Know It Was Climate Change. And just because there can never be a single moment’s peace from toxic masculinity: Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly.
* Can humanity make peace with its death?
* Seinfeld: The Point and Click Adventure.
* The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth.
* Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime.
* Marquette in the ne — oh no, this again?
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”
* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference, May 2018. CFP: The Future of Fandom. CFP: J. G. Ballard and the Sciences.
* The Rise of Brittle Paper: The Village Square of African Literature.
* The Library of America’s Story of the Week is an Ursula K. Le Guin classic, “The Day Before the Revolution.”
* Four book series that are shaping the future of science fiction on television. Butler! Okorafor! Jemisin!
We all know it is ending.
Trump is not an aberration. There will be no “return to normal.” The damage has been done. America is over.
* For years, Richard Florida preached the gospel of the creative class. His new book is a mea culpa.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The Ludicrous Prepper Plans of the Super Rich.
* Today’s “dominant cultural elite”—those Currid-Halkett has labeled “the aspirational class”— “reveal their class position through cultural signifiers” instead of material possessions, as was the custom during the golden age of conspicuous consumption. Ownership of relatively luxurious products (large electronics, SUVs) is now so widely accessible that the new elites eschew material things not because they’re reluctant to publicly display their affluence but because material goods no longer offer enough distinction. The hottest commodity for this group, whose members range from “partner[s] in a law firm” to “unemployed screenwriter[s],” is participation in a value system with the imprimatur of moral excellence: the conviction that they are living in the best (most responsible, most mindful, most objectively right) ways. These consumers are united by “shared cultural capital” as opposed to similar financial standing. “This new elite,” she contends, “is not defined by economics.”
* How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
* Soviet Pseudoscience: The History of Mind Control.
* The Mind-Set List, Faculty Edition.
* What is antifa? Who are the antifa?
* Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.
* Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter. Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV. A bizarre memo by an administration official suggests why Trump was so hesitant to blame white nationalists for the fatal violence in Charlottesville. Trump and his party continue to creep ever closer to a destination that once seemed unthinkable. And three and a half years of his term remain. Optimist. McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency. The President of Blank Sucking Nullity. “We tried to stop him.” Losing Mitt. If you want a vision of the future.
* 7 things Republicans could do to check Trump without ditching conservative policy.
* Was it worth it, America? Was it?
* Forever and ever amen. How the Forever War Brought Us Donald Trump. Trump’s Afghanistan buildup is revealing a rift among Democrats.
* Whose heritage? Lee comes down at Duke.
* How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother.
* Catholic priest steps down after revealing he was a Ku Klux Klan member decades ago.
* I Used To Be a Neo-Nazi. Charlottesville Terrifies Me.
* If you’re one of the more than 140,000 people doing time in a Texas state prison, you’re not allowed to read books by Bob Dole, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Sojourner Truth. But you’re more than welcome to dig into Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” or David Duke’s “My Awakening.”
* Leaving town at rush hour? Here’s how far you’re likely to get from America’s largest cities.
* “Buffy at 20″ will have to find some way to reckon with Joss Whedon at 53. Joss Whedon was never a feminist. Joss Whedon and the Feminist Pedestal: A Reading List.
* Infographic of the far future.
* Machine learning and misogyny.
* Afrofuturism has finally been gentrified.
* This deal is getting worse all the time. Because you demanded it.
* Marvel’s Black Panther Has Been Fighting White Supremacists For Decades and He’s Not About To Stop.
* Marvel Superheroes Who Basically Only Protect New York City, Ranked.
* In the future every franchise will be revived for fifteen minutes.
* Game of Thrones is definitely collapsing under its own weight. Bady and Mesle. Game of Thrones has become a terrible show. “Straining plausibility.” Game of Thrones‘ “Instantaneous Westeros Travel” Fallacy Is Driving Me Insane. Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story.
* Dogs Are Turning Blue in India for the Saddest Reason.
* Astronaut Pee and Sweat Could Be the Key to Getting Humans to Mars.
* A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think.
* Family Jumps Rising Drawbridge in Car, Lands on Other Side.
* A bonus episode of Thor: The Lightning and the Storm for your listening pleasure.
* And the arc of history is long, but Chuck E. Cheese is phasing out its animatronic bands.
Gerry Canavan 