Posts Tagged ‘violence’
Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!
- SFFTV 15.1! SFRA Review 52.1! And some upcoming projects: a special issue of SFFTV on disability! Uneven Futures!
- Syllabus for Film Theory: Disability & Technology.
- CFP: Anticolonialism as Theory Symposium. CFP: Popular Fiction. The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.
- A great piece from Adam Kotsko on having to come to terms with the unfortunate late work of a great thinker who helped shape his career.
- “Lena” is a true story. You knew it was when you read it.
- 40 useful concepts you should know.
- Drawing blood: notes on Maus. The real reason some people are so afraid of ‘Maus.’ Why Maus Opened the Door to Comics as Literature in Schools.
In light of a Tennessee district banning MAUS, I'm sharing the greatest two pages ever written and drawn about the importance of children's literature and protecting children's access to books, starring Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak. From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997. pic.twitter.com/hC2jyHicPN
— andrewkarre (@andrewkarre) January 27, 2022
Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?
… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?
- Batman Swallowing His Own Cape: The Modern Caped Crusader’s Narrative Autocannibalism.
- Comixology was basically perfect for what it wanted to be, so of course Amazon trashed it.
- Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics.
- Mysteries of free speech: ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill: Florida Senate passes controversial LGBTQ school measure. Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns. Wisconsin Republicans advance bills that would let 18-year-olds carry concealed weapons at school. Wisconsin GOP votes to limit race theory at UW schools. Republican lawmakers plan legislation to break up MPS, expand vouchers to all students in a proposal to overhaul K-12 education. North Carolina superintendent abruptly removes MLK-themed novel from 10th grade class. Idaho librarians could face jail time for lending “harmful” books.
- This Is the End of Affirmative Action.
- What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example.
- The University Crisis: Does the pandemic mark a breaking point? College Endowments Saw Stellar Returns as the Market Soared. Academic Freedom and Tenure: University System of Georgia. What the heck is going on in Georgia higher ed? Tenure Without Teeth. Grotesque Inequity. Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions.
- The Overbuilt Campus.
I’ve been in college continually since 1998 (now in 36th grade) and I think it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been similarly present to comprehend just how much worse the student experience has gotten since the 90s https://t.co/ZkXX5XXnRf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2022
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2022
- Mold, radon in FSU building tied to eight cancer cases in faculty report.
- Cripping the Neoliberal University – We need a Politics of Care.
- The Academic Conference Will Never Be the Same.
- The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class.
- U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries. What Do Masks Do to Kids? It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading.
- New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump. ‘The Dark, Forgotten Carnival.’ Jan. 6 committee says Trump violated multiple laws in effort to overturn election. Criminal Charges Against Trump Just Became Way More Real. Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.
- Detroit overtaxed homeowners $600M. Years later, advocates still seeking reparations. Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole.’
- ‘Shadow pandemic’: Advocates worry lockdowns have fuelled surge in partner violence.
- The school shooting generation grows up.
- How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood.
- Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development?
- I’ve always wondered about this: Texas trampoline parks aren’t regulated or inspected. We found 494 injuries in DFW region.
- Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Climate Reality? In a First, Alaska’s Arctic Waters Appear Poised for Dangerous Algal Blooms. US military faces crisis in Hawaii after leak poisons water. This 1882 surveying error saved a patch of forest from logging. IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown. Carbon dioxide will have to be removed from air to achieve 1.5C, says report. How to Repair the Planet. Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it.
the problem in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/B3zDH15jI3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022
I have been exploring the work of Nukina Shunichi, a 19th century Samurai turned scifi writer recommended to me by one of my undergrads.
— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022
Why don't we have this writer on more syllabuses? He's completely overturned my view of the development of SFF.https://t.co/eAVuFrlQyk
- Climate Change Lurking Behind Every Corner: Review of Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious.
- From ‘Dune’ to climate change, UChicago scholar draws from unique experiences in new course.
- The Death of Philip K. Dick Brought to Life.
- The Octavia Butler Novel for Our Times. Not that one. Not that one either.
- Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress.
- I should teach this again: The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society.
- Defamiliarising Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction.
- Disney Censors Same-Sex Affection in Pixar Films, According to Letter From Employees.
- Enough people purchased a chemical on Amazon to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts. Amazon has continued to sell the product.
- Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete.
- PSA: Renting From Hertz May Get You Arrested. For real: If you’ve rented a car from Hertz, there could be a warrant out for your arrest.
- He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return.
- And on the pedestal these words appear: After Burning for Days, a Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks.
- Against the Contemporary American Essay.
- What is Love in African Fiction?
I think it’s bad for knowledge production that once a term reaches a certain level of obvious importance (like “Anthropocene”) it suddenly becomes “boring.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2022
- Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned: How a struggling bartender became the face of a resurgent left.
- Biden’s signature legislation expired. Recipients are wondering: WTF happened? The devastating effects of losing the child tax credit.
- Household debt jumped by $1 trillion in 2021, the most since 2007. Inflation rose 7.9% in February, as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years. Rents reach ‘insane’ levels across US with no end in sight. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee Is Helping Workers During COVID. As inflation heats up, 64% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.
I think Democrats were more or less certain to get slammed in the midterms no matter what they did — the real problem is that this window was their only opportunity to get anything done for the next decade and (just like in 2009) they blew it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2022
One US Senator “heard stories” about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit “for drugs” without any evidence or data to back it up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2022
He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying https://t.co/kOyuFp6ig4
- A Rhodes scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks.
- Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer. ‘This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out. How Ukraine could become a nuclear crisis. Russian bombs. Why It’s Important To Debate Foreign Policy Even In Times Of Conflict.
- You don’t exist. I’ve been saying it for years!
I’ve said it before but I think it’s at least plausible that contemporary history seems so bizarre because there’s only a handful of universes where humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cold War https://t.co/CMjcSFlbEE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 28, 2022
If you’d told me then that the late 90s were just about as good as things were going to get, man, I’d have had a lot of questions
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022
- No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
- Star Wars: You know, for kids.
- ‘The history of fantasy is racialized’: Lord of the Rings series sparks debate over race.
- Villeneuve’s “Dune”: Blending Spectacle and Cultural Erasure.
- Star Trek 2023 Movie To Reunite Kelvin Crew, Production Set To Start By End Of Year. What Happened to Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Film? Every Detail About His Canceled Pitch. Star Trek: Picard’s narrow tightrope.
- Futurama is back, again, again.
- Five years on, Breath of the Wild’s open world is still unmatched.
- “It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max Feud.
- Back to the Future: The Musical.
- Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China. ‘Fight Club’ Author Chuck Palahniuk Says China’s Censored Ending Is Actually Truer to His Vision.
- The US has plans to patrol the space around the moon. The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say. We’re Not Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds. The quest to avert an asteroid apocalypse is going surprisingly well.
privatizing the Earth didn’t wipe out poverty did it https://t.co/xyWhdvxp1H
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2022
- Garbage Hunters: Deciphering North Korea Through Its Trash.
- ‘I just feel like Rhode Island has failed’: The family of a 12-year-old girl with autism is among those in limbo because of the lack of services for those in crisis.
- Dividing Up the Autism Spectrum Will Not End the Way You Think.
- The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Enough Truck Drivers.
- As intended: The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans.
- Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale. Cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit. Snowpiercer Asks Us to Imagine the End of the World — And the End of Capitalism. The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage Are Wrong.
I have a crypto curious person in my life who explained that it’s because no one knows what happens with crypto when the power goes out for a long time, which is a pretty big problem for something that is supposed to be prepper currency https://t.co/U3fe0kl4KK
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2022
- We need to talk about this Scarlet Witch action figure.
- Mapping the celebrity NFT complex. Web3 is the future, or a scam, or both.
- New Data Shows 61% Rise in U.S. Prison Deaths in 2020. Only One (1) Media Outlet Reported On It.
- The U.S. is limiting compassionate release in plea deals. Many say that’s cruel.
- Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions. Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.
- Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
- Marquette has changed its university seal. Indigenous Education at Marquette.
- The Dawn of Everything.
- Against longtermism.
- A Henry Darger Dispute: Who Inherits the Rights to a Loner’s Genius?
- In my 35 years as a reporter, I have never seen anything of Afghanistan’s magnitude.
- Rich people, y’all.
- Types of dissertations.
- Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies.
- Giant spiders expected to drop from sky across the East Coast this spring.
- Vegetarians have 14% lower cancer risk than meat-eaters, study finds.
- What I Learned From Recording My Thoughts for an Immortal A.I. I mean…
- And the arc of history is long, but…
which in turns suggests he grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series on TV https://t.co/qo7GK6pvdy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2022
— This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists (@unflicuneballe) January 22, 2022
most of the cast is simply too old https://t.co/qkcc9bTYKW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2022
Written by gerrycanavan
March 12, 2022 at 6:38 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, Ada Palmer, Adam Kotso, administrative blight, affirmative action, Afghanistan, African literature, Afrofuturism, Agamben, Alabama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon, America, anti-colonialism, asteroids, autism, Batman, biopolitics, books, Breath of the Wild, bullying, cancer, capitalism, CFPs, child poverty, China, China Miéville, climate change, comics, Comixology, conferences, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, denialism, Detroit, disability, Disney, dissertations, Dune, East Germany, ecology, elections, essays, Facebook, Fight Club, FIYAH, Fledgling, fossil fuels, free speech, FSU, games, gay rights, geoengineering, Georgia, guns, Hawaii, Henry Darger, Hertz, How the University Works, humanitarianism, indigeneity, inflation, IPCC, Jacobin, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, kidney donation, Kim Stanley Robinson, longtermism, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, marriage, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, Maus, Minnesota, MMAcevedo, Moby-Dick, moral panics, musicals, neoliberalism, NFTs, Nintendo, North Korea, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Omega Point, Ozymandias, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, Pulp Fiction, Putin, race, racism, Russia, Scarlet Witch, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, SFFTV, SFRA, SFRA Review, slavery, Snowpiercer, spiders, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Starbucks, Stasi, suicide, Superman, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Census, The City and the City, the Moon, theory, Tolkien, trampolines, truck drivers, true crime, Trump, Twitter, Ukraine, Uneven Futures, unions, vegetarians, violence, war on education, World War 3, yachts, Zelda
Thursday Night Links!
* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.
* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.
* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?
* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.
* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.
* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.
* Here come the esports majors.
* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.
* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.
* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.
* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.
* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.
* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!
* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.
* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.
McConnell added that it would require 67 votes to change Senate rules to prevent a trial from taking place – so the rule change won’t happen. But he can move to dismiss after the trial begins. “How long I’m on it is another matter,” he said of a trial
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2019
The Senate voting along party lines to refuse to hold the trial at all — which is what they would have to do for this to work — is probably the best case scenario for the Democrats short of conviction (which is a fantasy). https://t.co/n3yJ5bXcut
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 28, 2019
* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.
Mitch McConnell's wife is Secretary of Transportation.
Mitt Romney's niece is RNC Chair.
Antonin Scalia's son is up for Secretary of Labor.
etc. https://t.co/TS5ut3ydEb— Jonathan Dresner (@jondresner) September 29, 2019
This looks like a meeting of the human villains from every Muppets movie. pic.twitter.com/IO64xvFmia
— Devin Field (@thatdevinfield) October 2, 2019
Every worry people have about the way mass media leads people to eliminationist and genocidal thought is present in every form of rightwing media, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News. The foundation is laid.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2019
* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.
* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.
* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”
* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.
* How they teach slavery, then and now.
Here is a page from "Our Virginia: Past and Present" by Joy Masoff (2010). Notice the reference to free blacks expressing loyalty to the Confederacy and of course the black Confederate claim:
"Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks…" pic.twitter.com/outkKpaIS7
— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) October 1, 2019
* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.
* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.
* I suppose this is canon (again).
* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.
* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.
* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.
* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?
* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.
* Absolutely psychotic nation.
* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.
* get you a man who can do all three
get you a man who can do all three pic.twitter.com/yYOLHQPZNn
— Dickie Greenleaf (@ohgoddickie) September 28, 2019
* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.
* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.
* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!
* This one is a real america.jpg too.
* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.
* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.
* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, active shooter drills, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, aliens, Amber Guyger, America, apocalypse, Asimov, austerity, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bojack Horseman, breakfast cereals, Bret Stephens, broken windows theory, Buffy, Buffy studies, canon, carbon, CBP, CFPs, childhood, class struggle, climate change, college sports, Columbia, comics, death, deportation, discovery, Disney, Donald Trump, Ecohorror, ecology, Edward Snowden, eliminationism, Elizabeth Warren, emergency, Encyclopedia Galactica, English departments, Enron, equality, esports, Estonia, failure, Fermi paradox, film, Foundation, Fox News, free college, futurity, games, Garrett Hardin, gay rights, geography fan fiction, Google, growth, guns, HBO, His Dark Materials, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ICFA, immigration, impeachment, imperialism, John Kelly, kids today, KKK, labor, lacrosse, leakers, lesbian separatism, Mara Jade, Marquette, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, media, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, mortality, NCAA, nepotism, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, Philip Pullman, philosophy, plantations, poetry, police-industrial complex, politics, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, proceduralism, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rich kids, scams, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, selfies, Sesame Street, slavery, Sony, Spider-Man, sports, Sports Illustrated, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, Tarantino, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the economy, the Gothic, The Muppets, the Pyrocene, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, therapy, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, Tom Holland, tragedy of the commons, trans* issues, transphobia, Twitter, vaping, violence, violences, Virginia, WeWork, whistleblowers, white supremacy, work, X-Men
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
* No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
* How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
Our first images of Abaco from air. pic.twitter.com/rPmXuKDrSD
— Travis C-Carroll (@TravisCC) September 3, 2019
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
* The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
* South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
* Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
This is literally every cohort of kids for the last forty years or more. Dumb fads sweep through again and again, chewing up valuable time in the ONE CHANCE that these kids have to get a basic education. https://t.co/Hl9jSiv8A0
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 3, 2019
* Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
* She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
* In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
* This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
This is a hell of a thread. If you're concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police. https://t.co/SiwwLEh8jo
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 3, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2019 at 8:34 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, apocalypse, apps, Baby Boomers, Ben and Jerry's, Bernie Sanders, boycotts, Bret Stephens, Britain, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, concentration camps, democracy, democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, drug addiction, ecological humanities, education, educational debt, ethics, fact-checking, fall, Flint, France, free speech, general election 2020, gerrymandering, golf, Goonies, graduate student movements, Grenada, guns, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice cream, immigration, James Tiptree Jr., Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, kids today, lead, Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michigan, millennials, Neal Stephenson, New York Times, North Carolina, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oztmandias, parenting, politics, poverty, Prince, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, publishing, rehab, restaurants, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex offenders, slavery, socialism, South Dakota, Tesla, the Bahamas, the courts, the law, the Senate, The Testaments, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tiptree award, unions, Vietnam, violence, voting machines, Waffle House, war crimes, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, water, wildfires, Yemen
Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!
* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.
* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.
* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.
* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.
* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.
* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.
* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.
* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.
* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.
* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.
* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.
* Let’s talk about peeing in space.
* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.
* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!
* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.
* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.
* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.
* Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.
Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.
* ‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.
* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.
* But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.
* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.
* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.
* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”
imagine being a billionaire and funneling all your stolen money into a fantasy plan to colonize mars like a cartoon villain instead of just like, planting trees
— ghoulia👻 (@c00lia) July 24, 2019
Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!
— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019
The glacier "Ok" used to be a glacier but lost its status as such in 2014 when it had shrunk too much. This is a brand new memorial shield in its honour. #climatechange pic.twitter.com/0YlIewvDJe
— Olafur Margeirsson (@IcelandicEcon) July 19, 2019
“the face app reveals a desire for a future which will never arrive” -just a friendly Wednesday afternoon text exchange
— Sarah Osment (@sm_osment) July 17, 2019
* To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.
* Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.
* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.
* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.
https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985
Children were hungry, children were traumatized. They consistently cried and some wept in their interviews with me. One 6 yo girl, detained all alone, could only say "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared" over and over again. She couldn't even say her own name.
— Brandi Buchman (@BBuchman_CNS) July 12, 2019
Forget about history; it’s like we didn’t learn anything from every single Twilight Zone episode.
— (((Goldwasser))) (@PurestRobin) July 16, 2019
* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.
* Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.
Qualified immunity is so out of control that these cases barely register. But here's another one from the 9th Circuit: Cops got qualified immunity for stealing someone's money because it isn't "clearly established" that cops can't steal your money. https://t.co/YSFqBraiHO
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 25, 2019
* Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.
* It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.
That two-tweet sequence really is remarkable. "Aha! This demonstrates that the president's entire project has always been about white supremacy! (a beat) I reiterate my call to him to work with me on the kind of immigration policy we can both agree on"
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 14, 2019
my 32-year-old self strongly relates to this pic.twitter.com/AM9py4b7t9
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 25, 2019
Pelosi Concerned Outspoken Progressive Flank Of Party Could Harm Democrats’ Reputation As Ineffectual Cowards https://t.co/bF91vZf4oy pic.twitter.com/Zna5ZvvFZH
— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 25, 2019
* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.
It's tempting to think "oh man how can they be this stupid," but the truth is Pelosi and Schumer want McConnell to use the debt ceiling against them. They want the excuse to go back to their base and say "sorry, we tried, but those damn Republicans won't let us do anything." https://t.co/BYEqppv2jo
— derek davison (@dwdavison) July 22, 2019
* What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.
* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.
* How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.
* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.
somewhere or another William Gibson describes the role of the science fiction writer as predicting what happened two years ago https://t.co/uDuTBck6kg
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 25, 2019
* For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.
* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.
* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.
* Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!
* The end of the Supreme Court.
* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.
* The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?
* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.
* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.
* In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.
* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.
* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.
* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.
Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.
* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”
* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.
* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.
* MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.
* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.
* Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.
* Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.
* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.
* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.
* Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.
* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”
* The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.
* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.
In 1989, the cash-strapped Soviet Union paid Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate & a destroyer in exchange for $3 bln worth of Pepsi. This caused Pepsi to become the 6th largest military power in the world for a moment, before they sold the fleet for scrap recycling. pic.twitter.com/zlsPLEV7re
— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) July 1, 2019
* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.
* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.
* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.
* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!
giant alligator flick Crawl is bad but actually good bc a) rising sea levels have made its setting broadly relatable & b) it's a competent, unpretentious genre movie, a dying mode that might be extinct in 10 years
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) July 16, 2019
* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!
* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.
* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.
* How the retweet ruined the Internet.
* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.
* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.
It won;t happen but I always thought, what with the Picard series getting press, that a good plot point for a future trek is a split between a defeated but hostile Borg Collective and a newly emergent Borg Cooperative.
— John Leavitt 🌹 (@LeavittAlone) July 21, 2019
* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.
* A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”
* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.
* How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.
* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.
* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.
* Sexism and the car crash dummy.
* Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.
* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!
* It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.
* Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.
* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”
* I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.
* The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.
been saying it for years, and will keep saying it: anomized precarity and a privatized forever war have offered a more fertile breeding ground for fascism – and stronger obstacles to resisting it – than a mass mobilized world war followed by a global depression ever could
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 27, 2019
* He did.
* And the good news is: We can’t lose!
Written by gerrycanavan
July 27, 2019 at 4:55 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic job market, Afrofuturism, Al Franken, Alabama, Alaska, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alligators, alternate history, America, animal studies, animals, Apple, apps, archaeology, Article II, artificial intelligence, Asia, basketball, Berkeley, billionaires, Bob Dylan, brain-eating amoeba, Brexit, capitalism, Captain Picard, car crashes, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, chaos theory, children, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college rankings, Columbia School of the Arts, Columbia University, comics, communism, concentration camps, conferences, Crawl, CVs, debt ceiling, Democrats, deportation, diabetes, disability, disability studies, Disneyland, domestic violence, Donald Trump, DoorDash, Dr. Strange 2, drugs, DSA, Duncan Jones, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, efficiency, Electoral College, Emmett Till, farmer's markets, fascism, fast food, food stamps, fossil fuels, Fox News, freelancing, futurity, games, general election 2020, gerrymandering, glaciers, graduate student nightmares, guilty pleasures, guns, Handmaid's Tale, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, insulin, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Jesuits, Jesuits in Space!, Joanne Ramos, kids today, Kodak, Lord of the Rings, Lower Decks, lunch debt, Lyme disease, Malthus, Marvel, Matt Shea, meritocracy, Mexico, MFAs, Middle-Earth, millennials, Moon, Mr. Rogers, multi-level marketing, Mute, Nancy Pelosi, NASA, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nintendo, Notre Dame, nuclearity, nuns, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, opiods, outer space, Palestine, pedophiles, peeing, penguins, Pentagon, Pepsi, philosophy, podcasts, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, polls, precrime, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, radical theology, rape, rape culture, Rent, Republicans, rich people, Robert Mueller, robots, Roko's Basilisk, RPGs, schools, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, scooters, Scott Walker, segregation, self-driving cars, sexism, sexual harassment, SFRA, Siri, slowness, soccer, social media, socialism, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, student debt, suicide, Supreme Court, syllabi, Tawny Newsome, television, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, The Farm, the humanities, the law, the mob, the rent is too damn high, the Smithsonian, the South, the transistor, the university in ruins, the weird, the wisdom of markets, Thor 4, ticks, Tolkien, torture, Toys R Us, trans* issues, Twitter, University of Alaska, Utopia, Vandermeer, violence, voting, war on education, Watchmen, water parks, wildfires, William Gibson, woeness, work, writing
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
Universities are some of the best institutions we have, run by people who despise everything they stand for.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2019
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
Democrats: Republicans are under the sway of a death cult whose precepts make no sense and which is led by an utter buffoon
also Democrats: we should nominate Joe Biden for president
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2019
you couldn’t talk about a sports team with this kind of childlike naivete, but every adult in the country does it about the Founders https://t.co/GWgglA3VZu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2019
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
Left: The Onion, 2015
Right: The New York Times, 2019 pic.twitter.com/R2Cw9EIOzv— mcc (@mcclure111) May 9, 2019
I think it was @PatBlanchfield who taught me to read all of American politics through the lens of Boomer incontinence. https://t.co/zu9boSLIBu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2019
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
We are now emitting every ten years as much carbon as was produced in the first two centuries of industrialization. https://t.co/KFIeJOMkxG
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) May 23, 2019
New Greta Thunberg mural in Bristol pic.twitter.com/EP8GnQ4GU2
— Joe Ware (@wareisjoe) May 30, 2019
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
Every VC funded online publication became a woke clickbait mill for a simple reason: the metrics told them this was the best performing type of content. pic.twitter.com/tqMEEtVI9n
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 9, 2019
What is of interest is how what began as a cynical metrics and cost-driven expedient became a a set of genuine ideological commitments through an online radicalization process driven by cycles of trolling and performative victimhood
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 9, 2019
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
This is what happens when all we're encouraged to focus on is the brief dopamine rush of "unspoiled" plot twists: the conveyor-belt model of media consumption. https://t.co/4NUZn68VrT
— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) May 17, 2019
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 4, 2019 at 2:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2050, 5G, academic publishing, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, air travel, aliens, alternate history, Amazon, America, apocalypse, aristocracy, Avengers, balloons, Belgium, Bernie Sanders, birds, Boening, Britney Spears, California, Canada, cancer, capitalism, carbon, catastrophe, CBP, CFPs, China, cities, civilization, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, crisis, CRISPR, critical university studies, cruelty, David Foster Wallace, David Wallace-Wells, debate, deep time, deportation, depression, DHS, diabetes, disaster, Donald Trump, Dril, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Endgame, environmental racism, Exhalation, extinction, fascism, feminism, flooding, folk heroes, fossil fuels, Fox News, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2020, genes, genetic engineering, genetics, George Romero, George Soros, golf, graduate student movements, Grand Canyon, Greta Thunberg, Guantánamo, guns, hagfish slime, helium, Hell, history, homelessness, horror, Houston, How the University Works, Hungary, ice, immigration, impeachment, insects, insulin, Jeanette Winterson, Jeff Bezos, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, koalas, labor, liberals, literature, Louisiana, Lyft, magic, Marquette, Mars, mass shootings, MCU, meritocracy, Mexico, millennials, Milwaukee, Mitch McConnell, Mortal Kombat, NASA, NCAA, necessity defense, neoliberalism, nice work if you can get it, Nintendo, nostalgia, nuclearity, outer space, paradise, Paradoxa, parenting, party city, pedagogy, photography, police, police corruption, politics, pollution, post-Earth capitalism, poverty, privacy, protest, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, Robin Hood, San Francisco, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-defense, Sesame Street, shaving, socialism, South Carolina, spoiler alert, Standing Rock, Stanford University Press, Star Trek, stem cells, student debt, student loans, suicide, Susan Sontag, Ted Chiang, Thanos, the Anthropocene, The Bell Curve, the Constitution, the cosmos, the courts, the Democrats, the Founders, the humanities, The Joker, the law, the Midwest, the Moon, the truth is out there, The Wandering Earth, the wisdom of markets, trash, true crime, Trumpism, Uber, UCLA, UFOs, unions, Utopia, vegans, violence, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, weather, wildfire, work, YouTube
Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!
* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.
* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?
* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.
* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.
* The market can’t solve a massacre.
And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”
* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.
* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.
* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.
* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.
* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.
* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
Rex Tillerson taught me it was ok to be weird. :(
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2018
One key lesson people will hopefully take from the Trump administration is that rule of law does not apply to powerful people and what is referred to as the "justice system" is solely a means of perpetuating white supremacy. America is fundamentally a lawless nation.
— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) March 18, 2018
* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.
* The rise of the prison state.
* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) March 17, 2018
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.
* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.
* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.
* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.
* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.
* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.
* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.
* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.
Stephen Hawking was an atheist so the correct benediction is “See you again when the Omega Point aliens resurrect all sentient beings at the end of time.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2018
* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.
* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.
* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.
* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.
* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.
* Hate spree killings in Austin.
Too Many Cooks (2018)pic.twitter.com/5qhKLwqBum
— Alice Knows Karate (@KeikoTakamura) March 16, 2018
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
(dir. Joe & Anthony Russo) pic.twitter.com/g81KAPyRaw— Simpsons Films (@simpsonsfilms) March 16, 2018
* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.
* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.
* Happy International Women’s Day.
* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.
* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.
* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.
Gulf of Maine Books has vision pic.twitter.com/8mVd2Z6PPb
— Parkivist (@Parkivist) March 11, 2018
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
don't do it bitch pic.twitter.com/H2ji9B6nmV
— Bitchcoin (@SubMedina) March 17, 2018
* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.
* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.
* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, Adam Kotsko, Adorno, Afrofuturism, America, Andrew McCabe, apocalypse, atheism, Austin, automation, Avengers, Batman, Black Bolt, Black Panther, Black Panthers, blizzards, Brecht, cartoons, civilization, class struggle, climate change, college sports, colonialism, comics, conservatives, corporations, crisis, dark side of the digital, David Foster Wallace, dehumanization, democracy, deportation, Donald Trump, dystopia, ecology, economics, EPA, existential risks, fantasy, FBI, feminism, fraud, games, General James Mattis, goodbye cruel world, guns, Harvey Weinstein, hate crimes, home ownership, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Infinite Jest, Infinity War, Jaimee Hills, jobs, kids today, KKK, magic, Make America Great Again, March Madness, Marvel Cinematic Universe, mass shootings, massacres, millennials, misogynoir, Missouri, mowing the lawn, Moya Bailey, my media empire, National Geographic, Nazis, NCAA, Neil Gaiman, neoliberalism, neuroscience, Obama, obituary, opioids, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Peter Frase, podcasts, poetry, politics, pollution, pop culture, prison-industrial complex, prisons, privacy, privilege, race, racism, rape, rape culture, real estate, Republicans, retail, Rex Tillerson, robots, Roe vs. Wade, Saladin Ahmed, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Stephen Hawking, superheroes, Supreme Court, surveillance, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the Beatles, the Constitution, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the Singularity, the wisdom of markets, To Catch a Predator, Too Many Cooks, toys, Utopia, violence, voting, vulture capitalism, wages for housework, Wakanda, war on drugs, Wisconsin, YouTube
Monday Morning Links!
* Noah Berlatsky isn’t done talking about the Oankali.
…that the Oankali represent *perfection* of the toxic ways that humans interact w/ each other + w/ nature rather than a utopian alternative.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 16, 2017
And so XG is a story about an invading hyperpower that takes what it wants — bodies, sex, land, resources — and leave death in its wake. 5/5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 16, 2017
* Is Tony Stark the Real Villain in Spider-Man: Homecoming? I think Marvel owes China Miéville a writing credits.
* The Short, Unhappy Life of a Libertarian Paradise.
* Medievalism and white supremacy.
* By June 2011, only 49 of the 3,000 long-term seats had been sold. By December, the school said that they were $113 million short of their goal. Kansas tried a similar long-term seat plan and they abandoned it after it failed spectacularly. Cal tried to pivot away from the seat selling plan by 2013, but by that point, a gaping budget shortfall was staring them in the face, and that was just from paying off the debt. The Bears now owe at least $18 million per year in interest-only payments on the stadium debt, and that number will balloon to at least$26 million per year in 2032 when Berkeley starts paying off the principal stadium cost. Payments will increase until they peak at $37 million per year in 2039, then subside again in 2051 before Berkeley will owe $81 million in 2053. After that, the school is on the hook for $75 million more and will have six decades to pay it off. The stadium might not get paid off until 2113, by which time, who knows, an earthquake could send the stadium back into the earth or football as we know it might be dead.
* Easily one of the worst academic job ads I’ve ever seen, which is saying something.
* Teens Discover The Boston Garden Has Ignored Law For Decades, May Owe State Millions.
* Here are the hidden horrors in the Senate GOP’s new Obamacare repeal bill. The Cruz amendment. One vote away.
These folks think God is talking to them when it rains but don’t notice health care votes keep getting delayed due to emergency surgeries.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 16, 2017
* Team Trump Excuses for the Don Jr. Meeting Go From Bad to Worse. The Bob Mueller century. Was it a setup? Everything old is new again.
* Trump’s wall vs. the drug trebuchet.
* After a Harrowing Flight From U.S., Refugees Find Asylum in Canada. Foreign-born recruits, promised citizenship by the Pentagon, flee the country to avoid deportation. Trump administration weighs expanding the expedited deportation powers of DHS. The corporation that deports immigrants has a major stake in Trump’s presidency.
* US approves oil drilling in Alaska waters, prompting fears for marine life.
* President Trump’s Air War Kills 12 Civilians Per Day.
* FBI spent decades searching for mobster wanted in cop killing. Then they found his secret room.
* When the White House doxxes its critics. And a novel counterstrategy.
* Rest in peace, George Romero, and no jokes.
* All 192 characters who’ve died on “Game of Thrones,” in alphabetical order. Interesting interview with Martin on the process of adaptation.
* A New Yorker profile of Dr. Seuss from 1960.
* Like Star Wars, but too much.
* Linguistic drift and Facebook bots.
* Where are they? They’re aestivating.
* We’re still not sure if it’s legal to laugh at Jeff Sessions.
* Alaska Cops Defend Their ‘Right’ to Sexual Contact With Sex Workers Before Arresting Them.
* Dialetics of universal basic income.
* Juking the stats, Nielsens edition.
* Cheek by jowl with nanotechnology is science fiction’s notion of cyberspace as an abstract space, a giant planetary storehouse for information. (The idea comes from William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer.) Is it possible that some part of the Web might become so complicated that it comes to life? Might it be hostile to us? Suppose it’s clever enough to take over machines and build Terminator-like creatures to do us battle? Personally I don’t think that’s very likely, but I do think the problem of the 21st century is going to be the problem of misinformation. And we’d better solve it by the 22nd century, or we will have another reason not to entertain much hope for cities—or, indeed, any kind of civilization a millennium hence. Samuel Delany, 1999.
* Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures.
I go around writing 2017 all the time, but if I actually stop and think that 2000 was 17 years ago I get dizzy for a second.
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) July 17, 2017
I'm tired of explaining this. A pornographer is someone who makes pornography. A pornoMANCER is someone who summons porn from worlds beyond.
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) July 16, 2017
* What Is Your Mother’s Maiden Name? A Feminist History of Online Security Questions.
* I’d listen to every episode: Welcome to My Podcast, In Which I Do a Feminist Analysis of Thundercats and Sob Quietly.
* Might as well go ahead and put this on our nation’s tombstone: America’s Lust for Bacon Is Pushing Pork Belly Prices to Records.
* Imagine being so toxic that even a brand doesn’t feel like it has to pretend to like you.
* And Jodie Whittaker Is Doctor Who‘s Next Doctor, meaning this CFP for a special issue of SFFTV is all the more relevant! Don’t be the last to submit your 9000-word exegesis of the one-minute teaser trailer…
Written by gerrycanavan
July 17, 2017 at 9:12 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, AHCA, Alaska, amusement parks, Ann Coulter, artificial intelligence, bacon, Berkeley, Bob Mueller, Boston, Boston Gardens, Canada, CFPs, China Miéville, class struggle, colonialism, Colorado, Colorado Springs, Cory Doctorow, Dawn, Delta, deportation, Disney, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, doxxing, Dr. Seuss, drill baby drill, drugs, Facebook, fake news, feminism, Fermi paradox, film, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, George Romero, health care, How the University Works, Idaho, immigration, immortality, impachment, imperialism, ISIS, Jeff Sessions, Jodie Whittaker, juking the stats, kids, language, laughter, libertarianism, linguistic drift, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, medievalism, Mexico, misinformation, Nielsens, Nixon, Noah Berlatsky, noncompete clauses, Oankali, obituary, Occupy Cal, Octavia Butler, oil, parentings, pigs, politics, pornomancy, Putin, rape culture, refugees, Republicans, Russia, Samuel R. Delany, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Scrap Iron Man, security questions, speech, Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Wars, Ted Cruz, television, the Arctic, the mob, the Senate, Thundercats, Tony Stark, trampolines, transporters, trebuchets, true crime, universal basic income, violence, walls, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, Xenogenesis, zombies
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: The Handmaid’s Tale: Gender, Genre Adaptation – a one-day symposium. Race and The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood Annotates Season 1 of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’
* A Dangerous Business: Being a Female Professor.
* Two Americas: Those Who Leave Home, and Those Who Stay.
* A Brief History of Violence Against Members of Congress. The start of a disturbing new chapter.
* But now we have legislation that will change the lives of millions, and they haven’t even summoned the usual suspects to explain what a great idea it is. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, Republicans have decided that even that’s too much; they’re going to try to pass legislation that takes from the poor and gives to the rich without even trying to offer a justification. More at Vox.
* American Health Care Tragedies Are Taking Over Crowdfunding.
* The Senate health care bill is expected to allow states to relax the Affordable Care Act rules only on benefits, not on pricing as the House bill does. But that change could impact people far beyond those states, according to anew analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress — because it could lead to a return of annual and lifetime benefit limits, and not just in the states with the waivers. Don’t stop working those phones.
* Trump buckles on the Dreamers. But: Border Patrol Arrests Immigrants Seeking Medical Care During Desert Heat Wave. Trump’s move to deport Iraqi Christians stirs outcry. ICE nabs teenager hours before his senior prom, days before his graduation ceremony.
* Trump is likely to get much, much worse. Here are a few big things to watch for. A Very, Very Dangerous Situation. The WaPo Obstruction Blockbuster and the World of Hurt To Come. Robert Mueller chooses his investigatory dream team. Here we go.
* Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, ranked by their over-the-top praise of Trump.
* Now That’s What I Call #TheResistance.
* It’s very slowly happening here.
* That’s part of a far broader story: Republicans have a coherent and awful vision, while Democrats have a better but confused vision. Republicans want to cut taxes all the time; Democrats want to sometimes cut some taxes and certainly aren’t committed to raising taxes on principle. Republicans want to ban all abortions; many Democrats favor certain restrictions on abortion, depending. The ur-Democratic legislation is Obamacare, which undoubtedly improved the status quo but which is a tangled mishmash of public and private and which does not offer anything like a simple and coherent policy like “Medicare for all.” Republicans are the party of small government; Democrats are the party of jury-rigged quasi-entitlements via convoluted tax credits. Is it any wonder conservatives win so often? An evil but directly and unapologetically stated policy platform beats a better but cowardly and convoluted one any day, politically.
In both the UK & the US right now, only the left can defend its position on most issues without outright lying and/or intolerable vagueness.
— Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation) June 14, 2017
* If social compacts without any leeway for idiosyncrasy or dissent tend toward dictatorship, untrammeled individualism tends toward nihilism. The once-again great America Trump envisages is a fusion of the worst of both, and you can’t say our movies didn’t predict him. Wherever America’s right stuff now elusively resides, its wrong stuff in right-stuff disguise is on display for all the world to see—at multiplexes everywhere, not just on Fox News.
* This though I’m not crazy about: Brain-Eating Parasites Thrive As Global Warming Heats Up U.S. Lakes.
* “People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument,” he said. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action, when in fact, if it’s actually true we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t still get there if we all just chip in.
* Number of people serving life in US prisons is surging, new report says.
* US credit card debt to surpass $1 trillion this year, report says.
* A scholar of the Ku Kux Klan explains how the KKK used the same trolling tactics as the alt-right.
* Five officials will face manslaughter charges for Flint water crisis. PA supreme court: was illegal to steal elderly woman’s home because her son sold $140 of weed. Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory.
* Robot puts all of humanity to shame by achieving perfect score in Ms. Pac-Man.
* This New Museum Imagines a World Where Capitalism Is Dead.
* If there is no real economic recovery forthcoming—and there is not—and if the university cannot be restored without one, do any possibilities remain? They do. We would have to imagine a world that did not peg public funds to private profits. Our current understanding of “public” presupposes a thoroughgoing privatization of the world that shortly preceded the appearance of the modern university. There is no going back. But if there is to be something ahead, an emancipation of learning, it will not be discovered in the hearts and minds of administrators and legislators persuaded to see the error of their ways, but in a transformation of the society beyond the edges of campus. Who Can Save the University?
* For graduate students fighting to unionize, time is running out.
* Today’s horrific fire in London’s Grenfell Tower is a symbol of a deeply unequal United Kingdom.
* Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize Winner.
* Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cars R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
* Why is TV awash in afterlives, hells, and purgatories?
* There’s just one story, and we tell it over and over.
* Witchcraft and dueling are now legal in Canada.
* Abolish the trucking industry.
* Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s.
* Estimated Number of Injuries and Reported Deaths Associated with Inflatable Amusements, 2003-2013.
* Bruce Springsteen is headed to Broadway.
* I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand the objection.
* Presenting the best of Hello from the Magic Tavern.
* What real words are actually valid CSS HEX colors?
* Alarm clock dropped inside wall still going off daily after 13 years.
* Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.
* “Rakka” is the first sci-fi short film by Oats Studios, directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Chappie), featuring the aftermath of an alien invasion that has enslaved millions of humans. The free 22-minute film, which features the amazing Sigourney Weaver, is available to stream for free on Steam, YouTube and the Oats Studios website.
* And guys, it’s official: I’m a bestseller.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 17, 2017 at 4:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #TheResistance, academia, academic books, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Adam Sandler, afterlife, AHCA, alt-right, America, America capitalism, artificial intelligence, assassination, authoritarianism, Big Bads, Bill Cosby, Bob Dylan, bosses, bouncy castles, brain-eating parasites, Broadway, Canada, cars, Cars 3, censorship, CFPs, Chip and Dale, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, climate change, color, comics, Congress, consumer debt, credit card debt, crowdfunding, Cthulhu, democracy, Democrats, demographics, deportation, diets, Disney afternoon, District 9, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, Duck Tales, dueling, ecology, England, fascism, film, fire, Flint, foreclosure, games, GoFundMe, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, graduate students, Great Lakes, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, health care, health insurance, Hell, Hello from the Magic Tavern, How the University Works, Hulu, ice, immigration, impeachment, It Can't Happen Here, Ivanka Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, KKK, Labour Party, lead poisoning, lies and lying liars, lifetime limits, Lovecraft, Make America Great Again, Margaret Atwood, Marvel Cinematic Universe, mass extinction, mass incarceration, Michigan, Moby-Dick, movies, music, musicals, Nancy Pelosi, Neill Blomkamp, Netflix, never tell me the odds, nightmares, Nobel Prize, obstruction of justice, Pac-Man, pedagogy, plagiarism, podcasts, police, police violence, politics, pre-existing conditions, prison, prison-industrial complex, public safety, public universities, Purgatory, race, racism, Rakka, rape culture, Republicans, Rescue Rangers, retcons, Robert Mueller, robots, Russia, Salvage, science fiction, self-driving cars, sex, Springsteen, statistics, Steve Scalise, sweatshops, teaching, television, the 1980s, the Cabinet, The Handmaid's Tale, the Left, the Senate, there's just one story and we tell it over and over, totalitarianism, Transformers, trucking, unions, United Kingdom, violence, Vonnegut, war on drugs, water, weight loss, witchcraft, Wonder Woman, writing
Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks!
* Once more, with feeling: Should You Go to Graduate School?
* CFP: Not Reading: University of Chicago English Graduate Conference.
* What are Muppets, anyway? Monsters from an evolutionary perspective.
* No.
* The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.
* Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign. More. More.
* Dungeons and Dragons and the class system.
* Bruno Latour: The New Climate.
* Which country shall we bomb today?
* Against “Fearless Girl”: 1, 2, 3. And a counterpoint.
* The Secret at the Heart of A.I.: No one really understands how it works.
* Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense.
* How artificial intelligence learns to be racist.
* The new Star Wars theme park seems like a place my kids will completely love.
* The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners.
* The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban.
* California State University cannot justify administrative growth, manager raises, audit says.
* The coming British bloodbath.
* The fake news long con: The Anne Frank Center.
* Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia.
* “I always have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the economies of post-collapse fictional societies.”
* Every Sci-Fi Star Map. Keep scrolling, we’re not done yet!
* Why the FBI Kept a 1,400-Page File on Einstein.
* American energy use, in one diagram. 410. There hasn’t been a cool month in 628 months. A closer look at how rich countries “outsource” their CO2 emissions to poorer ones. Countries Need to Move to Zero-Carbon Energy Now–Here’s Why.
* Why are doctors giving anti-psychotic drugs to toddlers? Kids Who Use Touchscreen Devices Sleep Less at Night. Let the children play.
* A New Study Confirms What You’ve Long Suspected: Facebook Is Making People Crazy.
* History as a never-ending struggle to delay the Nazi takeover of the world.
* Star Trek: Discovery delayed again, again. Ian McShane says a Deadwood movie script’s made its way to HBO. Every New (and Returning!) Development Thrawn Brings to the Star Wars Universe. ‘Locke and Key’ Pilot From Carlton Cuse Set at Hulu. Can Batman Beyond save the DCEU? And because you demanded it!
* Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science.
* What’s the most American movie ever made?
* NASA announces one of Saturn’s moons could support alien life in our solar system. NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere. Space Leaves Astronauts Partially Blind, and We May Finally Know Why. Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist.
* Recycling is in trouble — and it might be your fault.
* Why United Was Legally Wrong to Deplane David Dao. How Much Money Will David Dao Make From United Airlines?
* Moderate drinking is good for you, if you don’t control for wealth.
* Nintendo doesn’t want you to be happy.
* Jeff VanderMeer amends the apocalypse.
* It might be easier to make a list of who isn’t working for Putin.
* The Landmark Sexual Assault Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.
* There’s just one story and we tell it over and over.
* Editing the Constitution: Wisconsin conservatives are pushing for a constitutional convention. What are their motives? Oh, I bet it’s fine.
* Fifteen Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Film and TV Projects with Black Talent to Get Excited About.
* First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump.
* Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a federal informant?
* Trustees of the Whittier Law School said on Wednesday that it would close down, making it the first fully accredited law school in the country to shut at a time when many law schools are struggling amid steep declines in enrollment and tuition income.
* If you want a vision of the future. The thing is though. The hero’s journey.
* And just in case you haven’t heard: Capitalism is violence.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 24, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Afrofuturism, alcohol, alcoholism, America, amusement parks, Amy Hungerford, animals, Anne Frank, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Batman Beyond, Big Pharma, books, Borne, Boston marathon, Brexit, Bruno Latour, bureaucracy, California State University, Captain America, catastrophe, CFPs, China Miéville, civilization, class struggle, climate change, collapse, comets, comics, Constitutional Convention, David Dao, David Milch, DC Comics, Deadwood, deportation, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, early modern, ecology, economics, Einstein, energy, English departments, evolution, Expanded Universe, Facebook, fake news, FBI, Fearless Girl, Florida, general election 2016, General Thrawn, Ghostbusters, Google, graduate school, Hail H.Y.D.R.A., HBO, Hero's Journey, Hillary Clinton, humanitarianism, if you want a vision of the future, immigration, iPads, Jeff Vandermeer, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Henson, kids today, kindergarten, labor, Labour, law schools, libraries, Locke and Key, maps, Marvel, mental health, Muppets, NASA, Nazis, neoliberalism, NES Classic, Nintendo, no, now my story can be told, Octavia Butler, Octavia's Brood, outer space, parenting, play, politics, pornography, Putin, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reading, real estate, recycling, retail, revenge, rising sea levels, Sam Spicer, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, sea level rise, sex, Should I go to grad school?, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, superheroes, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Constitution, the courts, the law, there's just one story and we tell it over and over, think of the children, this is fine, Title IX, trees, ugly duckling, United, United Airlines, United Kingdom, Utopia, violence, Wall Street, walls, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Wisconsin, work, zoos
Tuesday Links!
* FiveThirtyEight has been doing a great series on Mars colonization. Today’s entries are all about space sex. Also: Everything About Mars Is The Worst.
* Also at FiveThirtyEight: The Odds You’ll Fill Out A Perfect Bracket.
* TRAPPIST-1 seems like a no-go for humanity, but three of the worlds are close enough for life to hop between them.
* New York 2140 vs. The Collapsing Empire: Which New Sci-Fi Novel Is for You?
* ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Turns 20, from my “Buffy at 20″ co-organizer James South.
* On the coming apocalypse (and other’s people’s babies).
Your grandchildren were murdered by your parents.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2017
* What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
* From the archives: Snow Days Under Socialism.
* No, big snowstorms like this aren’t normal.
* America elected a parasite. Let’s take away health insurance from 24 million people. Or 26 million, who’s counting. This Level of Corruption Is Unprecedented in the Modern History of the Presidency. Gotta save money to steal money. “Senate Democrats prepare for spring battle over Trump’s border wall.”
24 million people losing insurance is roughly equivalent to the population of:
VT
AL
ND
SD
DE
MT
RI
ME
NH
ID
WV
NE
NM
KS
WY**combined**.
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 13, 2017
more people will lose health insurance under trumpcare than the entire population of florida
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 13, 2017
Fun fact: AHCA is projected to kill 17,000 people its 1st year. If all 301 GOP congressmen vote for it, each will have murdered 56 Americans
— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) March 13, 2017
find a man who smiles at you the way Paul Ryan smiles at a rise in the infant mortality rate
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 13, 2017
Ah good, Paul Ryan is finally clearing up some misconceptions about the GOP's health plan: pic.twitter.com/FWRiMb30Ni
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) March 14, 2017
TRUMP: I will use the bodies of dead 64-year-olds to build my wall.
DEMOCRATS: lol I thought you said Mexico would pay for it— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2017
* Remember the People America’s Healthcare System Has Already Killed.
* The university in ruins, Trump edition.
* The Party of Eugenics. They both are, honestly, but the GOP is just so much more vulgar about it.
* At every moment when Trump might have been stopped, when he might have been forced into bankruptcy, had his credit denied, had his loans called in, his licenses revoked, at every juncture where he might have been convicted of a crime or sent to jail—and, again, this is well before he makes his successful bid for the White House—some unplanned and unintended conspiracy of economic reason and political lowlifery mobilizes to protect him. (And it really is unplanned and unintended. The genius of the American system is how the Invisible Hand works to produce systemic vice rather than incidental virtue.)
* We’re heading towards something very ugly: Employers can ban staff from wearing headscarves, European court rules.
* American Empire: The Reboot.
* Seeing red: Membership triples for the Democratic Socialists of America.
* The Onion struggling to lampoon Trump.
* Violent video games found not to affect empathy, again.
* The hype for Logan seems to be reaching comical proportions, but still, you’d be hard-pressed to find another recent superhero movie that was worth emulating.
* Should a Chimpanzee Be Considered a Person?
* MMMBop: Hanson announces 25th anniversary tour as your death rapidly approaches.
* The economics of airline classes.
* Bowie impersonates other singers like Springsteen, Lou Reed. Everything has been bullshit since Bowie died.
* Because you demanded it! Young Sheldon.
* USA Today discovers Hello from the Magic Tavern. They’ve hit a real stride lately as story events have allowed them to move away from their standard format — and they were great before.
* Every Author on Your English Syllabus, Summed Up in a Single Sentence.
* It’s Donald Trump’s Fault Iron Fist Is Bad, Not Marvel’s, Says Star Finn Jones. If you say so.
* A People’s History of the Marvel Universe. Via Abigail Nussbaum’s second Hugos post.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 14, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, aging, AHCA, airlines, America, animal personhood, animals, apes, apocalypse, austerity, because you demanded it, Big Bang Theory, Bowie, bracketology, Buffy, CBS, chimpanzees, class struggle, climate change, conferences, democratic socialism, Donald Trump, ecology, empire, English classes, eugenics, Europe, extrasolar planets, FiveThirtyEight, games, general election 2016, Hanson, health care, Hello from the Magic Tavern, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugos, I grow old, infant mortality, international students, Iron Fist, Islamophobia, John Scalzi, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Logan, longevity, March Madness, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Mexico, MMMBop, monkeys, moral panic, mortality, movies, music, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York 2140, outer space, Paul Ryan, podcasts, politics, race, racism, Republicans, satire, sex, snow, socialism, Springsteen, Steve King, super-agers, superheroes, syllabi, television, The Collapsing Empire, The Onion, the university in ruins, Trappist-1, Trumpcare, Veep, violence, visas, white people, Wolverine, Young Sheldon
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
Los Angeles County (red) has a larger population than each of the 43 individual states shown in blue. #mapping #geography pic.twitter.com/hBbPFWxwzB
— Mark Abraham (@urbandata) March 1, 2017
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 12, 2017 at 4:19 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolish men, abolition, academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, advertising, Africa, Alberta, aliens, alt-right, America, Andy Daly, Angel, anniversaries, anti-Semitism, art, austerity, Avatar, Berkeley, bonobos, brains, Buffy, Bush, California, Canada, capitalist realism, CEOs, CFPs, Charles Murray, CIA, cities, class, class struggle, climate change, cloning, college, college football, college sports, comedy, comics, conferences, crowdfunding, David Graeber, death, democracy, Democrats, dentistry, despair, dibs on the screenplay, dick pics, Dilbert, drugs, ecology, emeralds, espionage, famine, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, for-profit schools, Frankenstein, free speech, Fukushima, futurity, games, gems, general election 2016, general strike, Georgia, gerrymandering, GINA, grading, graphic novels, Great Lakes, Hamilton, Harry Potter, health care, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ideology, Indiana Jones, Iron Fist, ITunes, James Cameron, Japan, JCCs, Joss Whedon, Kim Stanley Robinson, King Kong, liberalism, look upon my works ye mighty and despair, Los Angeles County, Lovecraft, Lower Ed, maps, Mar-a-Lago, Mark Fisher, Marquette, Marvel, Mary Shelley, medicine, men, Middlebury, Mike Pence, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches, mortality, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, New York 2140, NFL, nuclear power, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, opioids, outer space, Ozymandias, pedagogy, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, polls, pollution, poverty, pre symptomatic genetic testing, prison, prison-industrial complex, privacy, protest, psychedelic drugs, race, racism, radiation, Republicans, resistance, Review, Russia, Rutgers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, scientific racism, segregation, SEIU, sex, SFRA, Siberia, Silicon Valley, standardizd testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, starvation, stories, strikes, stupidity, teaching, terms and conditions, terrorism, The Bell Curve, The Brady Bunch, the eerie, The March for Science, the weird, Trappist-1, Tressie McMillan Cottom, true crime, Trump, Trumpcare, unions, universities, US attorneys, Utopia, Venn diagrams, violence, voting, water, West Virginia, white supremacy, women, woolly mammoths, X-Men, zeitgeist
Monday Morning
* In local news: Dangerous Levels of ‘Erin Brockovich’ Chemical Found in Local Drinking Water.
* Great little Wisconsin story about the hotel NFL teams stay at when they play the Packers.
* To understand Charlotte’s rage, you have to understand its roads. A Homegirl Reflecting on Charlotte Uprising.
* Homeless and in graduate school.
* The survey that Williams was part of, the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), may be the first rigorous, detailed look at eviction in a major city. Interviewers like Williams spoke to about 1,100 Milwaukee-area tenants between 2009 and 2011, asking them a battery of questions on their housing history. The survey has already fundamentally changed researchers’ understanding of eviction, revealing the problem to be far larger than previously understood.
* The rise and rise of tabletop gaming.
* Here’s Everything Donald Trump Has Promised to Do on His First Day as President. Seven Days of Donald Trump’s Lies. Scope of Trump’s falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate. Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths. The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. Bruce vs. Trump. Trump’s jet vs. the taxpayers. Intel Officials Investigating Trump Advisor’s Ties To Putin Allies. Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia. Pregaming the debate. And again. And again. And again.
“Trump looked like a president tonight” will be the media’s mantra tomorrow night barring anything short of a stroke on stage.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 26, 2016
* Obama legacy project, take one.
* From the right: “Against democracy.”
* Democrats don’t actually want to win, exhibit 37,000.
* If you want a vision of the future:
The Democrats have become the party, not of some specific ideological agenda, but of the traditional system as such. One of Obama’s major goals has been to rehabilitate the Republicans and force them to act as a worthy opponent rather than an implacable foe. This approach was naive and in many ways dangerous, as shown most vividly when Obama tried to “leverage” the Republicans’ unprecedented brinksmanship on the debt ceiling to engineer a “grand bargain” on the deficit, but it fits with the view that the system only works if there are two worthy opponents locked in an eternal struggle with no final victories. We can see something similar in Clinton’s controversial decision to treat Trump as an outlier rather than letting him tar the Republican brand as such. It works to her political disadvantage — showing that her centrist opportunism is weirdly principled in its own way — but from within her worldview, the most important thing is to restore the traditional balance of forces.
The situation we are in shows the intrinsic instability of party democracy. An eternal struggle between worthy opponents is not possible in practice. Eventually, one of the two teams is going to decide that they want to win in the strong sense, to defeat the opponent once and for all. And if that desire cannot be achieved immediately, it will inevitably lead to a long period where the old enemy is treated as a foe — as intrinsically evil and illegitimate. Within the American system, with its baroque structure of constraints and veto points, that will lead to a period where government is barely functional, because the natural tendency will be for the radicalized party to refuse to go along with the system until they have full control over it.
* This would be a better story if they were going to dive in to how creepy this would be: Geordi La Forge Has a Ship Full of Datas in This First Look at Star Trek: Waypoint.
* Tonight in Jungeland: Chris Christie’s Chances For Impeachment Just Went Way Up.
* On the Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Brute Luck.
* Scientists have found a better version of the Dyson Sphere. Meet the Dyson Swarm, a vast mega-structure comprised of a plethora of solar panels.
* A walking tour of New York’s surveillance network.
* The Stolen War: How corruption and fraud created a failed state in Iraq—and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
* The Fallacies Of Neoliberal Protest.
* Please be true, please be true: Arrival Is a Scifi Masterpiece You Won’t Stop Thinking About.
* “The Battle of Algiers” at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point.
* Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said a two-year study he led concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. Challenge accepted.
* Cats sailed with Vikings to conquer the world, genetic study reveals. Trade between China and Rome in the ancient world, as tokened by a pair of corpses found in a London cemetery. (On that second one others say not so fast.)
* “…Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more “newsworthy” tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.”
* Breaking Bad at a Bronx charter.
* The Three-Body Problem in, well, China.
* A Law Professor Explains Why You Should Never Talk to Police.
* A History of Native Americans Protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.
* The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.
* A brief history of gang violence in Chicago.
* Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest is a start, but what if pro athletes refused to play? Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America — and Being Threatened for It.
* And if you want a vision of the future: They’re gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies.
They're gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies https://t.co/Ms9H5T61Te
— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) September 24, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
September 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing media bias, America, apocalypse, Arrival, bacteria, Barack Obama, Battle of Algiers, board games, Breaking Bad, cats, Charlotte, charter schools, Chicago, China, Chris Christie, class struggle, Colin Kaepernick, collapse, comics, computers, Dakota Access Pipeline, data, debates, democracy, Democrats, don't talk to the cops, Donald Trump, drugs, Dyson Sphere, Dyson Swarm, Electoral College, epistocracy, Erin Brockovich, eviction, ferries, film, five-second rule, food, football, futurity, games, gangs, general election 2016, Geordi LaForge, giant octopuses, graft, graveyards, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, Hitler, I grow old, inequality, lies and lying liars, luck, Mars, Milwaukee, NASA, Native Americans, Nazis, Nevermind, New Jersey, NFL, Nirvana, North Carolina, outer space, Packers, police, police brutality, policy, politics, polls, pollution, protest, Putin, race, racism, Republicans, rich people, riots, Rome, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, SETI, sports, Springsteen, Star Trek, Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang, Tetris, the Bronx, the circle of life, the courts, the law, The Three-Body Problem, TNG, total system failure, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Viking, violence, voting, water, white people, Wisconsin, word processing, worthy opponents
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
DEVELOPING: Sheriff in Greenville, South Carolina, vows to arrest anybody dressed as a clown after reports of creepy clowns across town
— Al Boe (@AlBoeNEWS) September 2, 2016
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2016 at 8:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic papers, Agamben, air travel, aliens, Alison Brie, ant colonies, ants, Apple, archaeology, Ark, Arrival, art, augmented reality, austerity, Avengers, Axiom, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, baseball, Batman, because you demanded it, Biff Tannen, birds, Brooklyn, Buffalo, California, capitalism, CBS, CBS All-Access, CFPs, Chris and Jack, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comedy, comics, conferences, corruption, cults, cultural studies, CUNY, Dan Hassler-Forrest, DC Comics, Democrats, dialectics, diversity, Donald Trump, Drexel, drug addiction, drugs, Dungeons & Dragons, editing, education, endowments, English departments, English majors, epipens, fads, fan culture, feminism, Fermi problems, film, football, forever war, fugitive slaves, Full House, G.L.O.W., games, Gene Wilder, general election 2016, Georgetown, gerrymandering, grift, guns, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, heroin, hoaxes, homeland security, How the University Works, humanity, hunger strikes, improv, In N Out Burger, independent film, Indiana, Internet Archive, intersectionality, iPads, Islam, Islamicates, Jack Kirby, Jeff Vandermeer, Judge Judy, kids today, legacy admissions, lockouts, Lois Lane, Long Island University, Macs, maps, Marc Maron, Mark Waid, maroon communities, Marquette, math, medicine, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, misogynoir, moms, Monster Studies, moral panics, Movies in Space, Moya Bailey, my misspent youth, my scholarly empire, NASA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York, Nicholson Baker, nostalgia, nuclearity, Number One, obesity, obituary, off switches, officer-involved shootings, oxy, Paradox, pedagogy, penises, Pepsi, play, plot, Poland, police, Police Quest, police violence, politics, pop culture, prenatal depression, prequels, prison-industrial complex, prisons, probability, professional wrestling, Quest for Glory, rape, rape culture, rebels, Rent, reparations, Roger Ailes, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, self-help, sequels, SETI, sexual assault, short stories, Sierra, slavery, socialism, solar power, South Carolina, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, state of emergency, state of exception, Story of Your Life, Stranger Things, streaming, strikes, superheroes, superhumans, Superman, taco trucks, Tarantino, teaching, Ted Chiang, Teddy Roosevelt, tenure, the archives, The Cage, the courts, the darkest timeline, the House, the humanities, the law, The Prisoner, the PTA, trigger warnings, true crime, unions, unnecessary sequels, violence, war on terror, Washington D.C., white privilege, white supremacy, whiteness, worldbuilding, writing, yes and, zunguzungu
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
Overnight totals:
4 injured officers
17 arrests
7 squads damaged, 2 totaled
48 ShotSpotter activations
6 businesses set on fire— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 14, 2016
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
This is fine. pic.twitter.com/uJawEv7mo7
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) August 11, 2016
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then they google to make sure it’s actually THAT pirate party
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 13, 2016
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
English has a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" https://t.co/6Inp9xNJ4n
— AllThingsLinguistic (@AllThingsLing) August 14, 2016
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
CONSPIRACY THEORY:
AUSTRALIA IS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/BJvqgK8USd— anna (@ttylgay) August 10, 2016
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
I saw this yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since pic.twitter.com/S2RVoBswyJ
— sam (@SamSt3bbins) May 16, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, abolish the Senate, abuse, academia, addiction, alcoholism, aliens, American exceptionalism, anagrams, animals, anime, architecture, austerity, Australia, Barack Obama, Bigfoot, body cameras, books, bronze medals, Bryan Fuller, Case Western, CFPs, cheating, Chernobyl, childbirth, chimera, China, China Miéville, Chris Ware, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, Cloud Atlas, cockroaches, comics, CWRU, David Mitchell, DC Comics, deafness, decency, democracy, disease, Disney, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, doping, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Electoral College, English majors, epistemic closure, ethics, faculty meetings, family leave, fantasy, feminism, film, Flint, flooding, FMLA, game theory, games, Gawker, general election 2016, girlhood, God, group writing assignments, groupwork, guns, Harry Potter, Hawaii, Hawaii Sign Language, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, human-animal hybrids, ice, Iceland, immortality, institutes, James Tiptree Jr., Jessica Jones, karate, Kenny Baker, language, lawns, lead, lead poisoning, license plates, linguistics, literature, Lois Lane, long jump, Louisiana, mad science, Making a Murderer, maps, Marquette, Mars, mass extinction, Mayor McCheese, McDonald's, McSweeney's, Mebane, medieval studies, mental health, mental illness, Merrick Garland, MetaFilter, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, Moirai, money, monstrosity, movies, Mr. Burns, muons, music, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, neoliberalism, New York City, Niku, No Man's Sky, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYC, Ocean's Eight, Octavia Butler, Olympics, online harassment, Orion, outer space, Paul McCartney, pedagogy, personality, Peter Thiel, physics, Pirate Party, podcasts, poetry, police, police violence, politeness, politics, polls, pregnancy, prisoner's dilemma, protons, Proxima Centauri, PT Cruisers, public universities, Puerto Rico, pulse drive, R2-D2, race, race-walking, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, Ray Kurzweil, reading, real estate, refrigeration, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, revenge, rickrolling, riots, sabotage, science fiction, Scooby Doo, segregation, self-driving cards, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, shipwrecks, silver medals, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, street signs, suicide, Suicide Squad, superheroes, Supreme Court, surrealism, surveillance society, syllabus, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Beatles, The Last Days of New Paris, The Last Saturday, The Little Mermaid, the Moon, The Night Of, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the Universe, Third Amendment, this is fine, ties, totality, traffic stops, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unions, violence, voting, water, wealth, weather, white privilege, whiteness, wilderness, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, writing
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 11, 2016 at 10:22 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #Lemonade, academia, active shooters, African American Studies, air travel, airplanes, amnesia, animal liberation, animals, anti-anti-imperialism, anti-Semitism, antibiotics, antidepressants, aphantasia, art, artificial intelligence, Astralnauts, Atlantic City, authoritarianism, averages, bacteria, Bernie Sanders, Beyoncé, Big Pharma, Broadway, Bruce Rauner, bullies, cabybaras, capybaras, cars, Chicago, class struggle, college majors, Commodore VIC-20, computers, con men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dan Harmon, deaf culture, deafness, death, Democrats, depression, diabetes, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, drone war, education, fandom, film, fire arrows, flexibility, flight attendants, flying cars, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, gas stations, Gawker, Google, guns, Hamilton, Han Solo, Harry Potter, hate, helplessness, hoaxes, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, Illinois, immigration, iPhones, John Oliver, junk science, kids today, Kodachrome, Kodak, Larry David, Larry Page, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Margaret Atwood, medicine, medieval times, medievalism, Milgram experiment, miracles and wonders, miscarriage, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, money, monuments, mourning, musical theaters, musicals, Nalo Hopkinson, neoliberalism, normality, O.J. Simpson, obituary, Oryx and Crake, our brains work in interesting ways, owls, parenting, Peter Thiel, Philip Zimbaro, philosophy, pigoons, police violence, politics, precrime, prison-industrial complex, privilege, psychology, psychopharmacology, PTSD, rape, rape culture, religious studies, Rick and Morty, Rolling Jubilee, scams, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, segregation, social media, Stan Lee, Stanford, Stanford Prison Experiment, Star Wars, statistics, Sunspring, tasers, Texas, the 1980s, the 1990s, the Force, the humanities, threats, time, time travel, Toronto, torture, Twitter, Uatu the Watcher, undocumented students, valedictorians, victim-impact statements, violence, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Western Illinois University, William Shatner, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, Yugoslavia, zoos