Black Friday Links! Will Not Save You Money!

* The “Buffy at 20″ special issue of Slayage is out, with an introduction by me and James South, interviews on the future of Whedon Studies with Rhonda Wilcox and Sherryl Vint, and seven terrific articles by conference attendees on “Restless,” “Normal Again,” Fuffy, Spike, mental health, anger, and the soul. Check it out! I think the interview with Sherryl is especially interesting if I do say so myself, and raises some intriguing questions about the status of Whedon Studies as a discipline going forward: “Whedon Studies after Whedon.”

* CFP: 21st Century Climate Fiction.

* Students Want to Write Well; We Don’t Let Them. We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know.

* Frankie Muniz doesn’t remember the show that made him famous.

* Becoming Anne Frank: Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?

* Here Are the Outrageous Incentives That Losing Cities Offered Amazon for HQ2. How to Stop the Amazon Extortion From Happening Again. Break up Amazon. More and more and more. And of course.

Democratic administrations made these deals with Amazon in NYC and NoVA because the Democrats’ vision of the future is also neofeudal corporatism.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 14, 2018

As an era of planetary climate emergency dawns, governments compete to give the most public money to the richest man on the planet.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 16, 2018

* It still doesn’t even approach the scale of the Foxconn con. Time to check in on the old job creators.

* Indigenous women kept from seeing their newborn babies until agreeing to sterilization, says lawyer. In 2017.

* With illness in shelters and hotels at capacity, wildfire evacuees desperately seek refuge. Made homeless by flames, evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation. California Wildfires Are A Bigger Public Health Nightmare Than Anyone Imagined. Dozens dead, thousands missing.

* Air pollution levels ‘forcing families to move out of cities.’ The Ecological Is Political. What were Ocasio-Cortez and 150 young activists doing in Nancy Pelosi’s office? The Green New Deal. And, you know, for kids: the Civ 6 climate change expansion.

* For First Act in Power, Democrats Consider Making Their Own Agenda Impossible to Pass.

* Silicon Valley’s boosters say it’s an innovative, meritocratic wonderland that rewards brilliant visionaries and just might save the world. That’s nonsense.

* Presenting your attorney general. This is going to be wild. It’s only been like a week.

* “I see this morning we are down to 26 ICE detainees,” Lt. Dan Lindhorst wrote in an email. “Could you please see if you can get these numbers up.”

* Trump spent $200,000,000 on the election stunt of sending 6,000 troops to the border, then withdrew them before the caravan arrived. A steal at twice the price!

* Authorities find a rocket launcher and pipe bombs during massive Florida white supremacist sting. The Great Race Panic. Scary Clowns. Brookings running cover for Bolsonaro, already.

* “Aides squared off against administration immigration hawks over an order they said was beyond the president’s constitutional powers.”

* Essentially every right wing media operation in the country is run at a huge loss while screeching about markets, markets, markets. It’s a truly amazing grift.

* On doctors and guns: staying in your lane.

* Girl, 13, Who Wrote Essay on Gun Violence Is Killed by Stray Bullet.

* Cop not charged, not disciplined, cleared of any wrongdoing and back on the job.

* Is any bit of this legal? The new “Cabinet order” was signed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not President Donald Trump. It allows “Department of Defense military personnel” to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention. and cursory search.”

* When your medicine spies on you. It’s becoming a habit.

* Northern Michigan U. Compensates 4 Who Were Threatened With Punishment for Speaking of Suicide. Bombshell Lawsuit Against Dartmouth. This gay college athlete was disowned by her parents and left with nothing. Just 96 of 30,000 people who applied for public service loan forgiveness actually got it. Stevens Points doomed to repeat it.

* The Gospel According to Mark Fisher.

* Of course Wes Anderson’s curated museum exhibit is full of weird oddities.

* The Reckoning. Children of the apocalypse.

* More on when AIs cheat.

* Facebook Is a Normal Sleazy Company Now. Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Delany, Deny, and Deflect.

* Twilight of Harry Potter.

* Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’ I don’t know, I think we can beat it.

* I only report the facts.

* The encounter between sovereignty and the natural life of the turkey is thus a failed one, and therein lies the turkey pardon’s messianic promise. The ultimate sovereign prerogative of the presidential pardon falls idle in its application to a subject who is incapable of guilt or innocence. As against the “zone of indistinction” that opens up between law and life in the sovereign exception, here we have a separation of the two orders without any overlap — a law that is inapplicable, and a life that is simply lived, in blissful ignorance of the legal order. In the messianic kingdom, we will all, in a sense, be the pardoned turkey that is left to live out its life in peace.

* brb working on like six different screenplays

* Sports always turns out to be more interesting than I thought.

* I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.

* Hey, Listen! Ocarina of Time, like me, is old. Even more at MetaFilter.

* No other work of art has so beautifully captured the feeling of the Trump years. It was actually a very good night for tweets.

* And nothing ever ends, Adrian.

75 million years ago, turkeys were 7 feet tall and built for speed. And one day, they’ll have their revenge. pic.twitter.com/TCwihao2YS

— Mαtt Thomαs (@mattthomas) November 28, 2013

Oops, Forgot a Title Links

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

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

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

* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.

Idea though that T/TT benefit from this move is still almost certainly wrong. Money is flowing to admin/graft/waste. https://t.co/nh76QWAYqP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2015

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

* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.

* On working dads.

* #charlestonsyllabus

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

* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.

* The flag might actually come down.

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

* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.

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

* CCC, call your PR office.

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

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

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

Surge!

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

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

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

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

* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.

* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.

* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.

* What happens when the sea swallows a country?

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

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

* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.

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

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

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

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

You Are Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Whatever else might be said about the Koch brothers’ annual fundraising and strategy event, for sitting Supreme Court justices to attend is obviously completely obscene.

The Right to Organize

The New York Times goes inside the cabal that runs the GOP. ThinkProgress has the full list of attendees. Jon Chait gets to the Stonecutters joke before I can. Matt and Ezra have more.

Wednesday Wednesday

I’ve been collecting links all day, but haven’t really had time to post until now. So here goes:

* How shoes wreck your feet. Via MeFi.

* The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere, with helpful descriptions of modus operandi and approximate stupid:evil ratio.

* Are lefty political bloggers the New New Left? Maybe, but if this is true we really need to get someone correcting Matt Yglesias’s typos full-time.

* Proximity: “somewhat like a cross between Risk and Go.” Sold!

* More on the food crisis at the Economist. Good discussion at MeFi.

* And in astoundingly cool news, they’ve finally perfected the bionic eye.

Castro, 9/11 Truth, Smears and Slurs, Accomplishments

Thursday links about politics and other junk.

* Utne takes a look inside the 9/11 Truth Movement.

* Via Ezra Klein, Rootless Cosmopolitan looks at the complicated and contradictory legacy of Fidel Castro.

What fascinates me, however, is the guilty pleasure with which so many millions of people around the world revere Fidel Castro — revere him, but wouldn’t dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. People, in other words, who would not be comfortable actually living in Castro’s Cuba, much as they like the idea of him sticking it the arrogant yanqui, his physical and political survival a sure sign that Washington’s awesome power has limits — and can therefore be challenged.

* Glenn Greenwald looks at a week of incredibly petty mass-media attacks on Barack Obama (all suddenly materializing in the moment that he is the presumptive nominee, as if by some kind of magic!):

The point isn’t that this reflects poorly on Obama’s electability — it doesn’t, at all (it might do the opposite). The point is that that one should expect what’s coming, and realize — most importantly — that our establishment press takes its cues in all sorts of ways from exactly the dark crevices from which this filth spews and they will lead the way in helping to spread it. The establishment press is dependent upon the GOP establishment, which for years has provided them with their sources and access, and helping to spread this poison is what they do.

All four of these so-called scandals are completely ridiculous, but it’s Bill O’Reilly’s “lynching party” comment that really blows me away—how could a remark like that be anything but deliberate?

And for the record, while I can’t really speak on the merits of last night’s John McCain non-story without knowing what was “lawyered out,” in its current form it looks as if it should probably have been spiked altogether, and I’m sorry to see so many liberal bloggers linking to it with such (understandable) glee. The material in the story that’s either actually relevant or actually damning—Keating, corporate jets, favors for lobbyists, and so forth—is completely drowned out by the silly whiff of sex scandal.

And of course, we should note that it’s not exactly against McCain’s interests to be perceived as being smeared by the New York Times… This is a lot better press for him than their endorsement was.

* Other Obama links: Andrew Sullivan’s list of Obama’s legislative accomplishments in a post entitled “Dear Chris Matthews: Please Do Your Job”—and please don’t think I take any pleasure in linking approvingly to something written by Sullivan—and news that Obama has won Democrats Abroad by a 2-to-1 margin, bringing the streak to 11-0.