Monday Morning Links!

Gorblex-12’s log, day 5875. We have now replaced 95% of human society with cartoonish nonsense, and literally none of them have noticed.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 4, 2016

* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!

* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”

* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?

* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.

* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.

Entire #DAPL project has to be killed to avoid h2o contamination of Missouri and Mississippi rivers. pic.twitter.com/T3qo97ee6B

— Katherine Franke (@ProfKFranke) December 4, 2016

* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?

* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.

* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.

* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.

* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.

* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.

TFW you're aboard a 747 and the pilot has never flown any kind of plane before and he feels *great* about this.

— Fritz Bogott (@fritzbogott) December 4, 2016

It’s hard to imagine a way that Trump could signal “I’m very dangerous, do not give me any power” more than he has. https://t.co/6LCL4uhGo3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 2, 2016

when your day's going ok for five minutes then you remember all over that trump's about to be president pic.twitter.com/fE6hcIq6Ed

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 4, 2016

* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump —  general.”

* Identity politics and the alt-right.

* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”

* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:

During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.

Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.

if you die in an Internet conspiracy theory, you die in real life

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 5, 2016

* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.

* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.

* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.

* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.

* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?

* Stealing North Carolina.

* Italy votes no.

* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.

* Understanding survivorship bias.

* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.

* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?

* Life after Seinfeld.

* Fidel without Illusions.

* What does elephant taste like?

* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.

* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.

* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.

* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.

* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.

* Some grim news.

* America is already great.

* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.

* Every villain is the hero of their own story.

* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.

Tons of Tuesday Links

* Putting Time In Perspective.

* Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe, and the New York Times is ON IT.

* The Eliminative Turn in Education.

* The marketisation of our universities: Economic criteria get precedence over what’s good in human terms.

* Black female professor reprimanded for pointing out existence of structural racism to white male students.

* “The Great Stratification” at CHE essentially argues that academia turn into the skid and establish an official multiple-tier levels of instruction, like the hierarchy of care that exists in medicine. I think this misunderstands the nature of medicine; it’s not that medicine has somehow escaped the logic of deprofessionalization so much as it’s simply the last “good career” to do so. Medicine is only starting to see the flexiblization that has already destroyed everybody else.

* Most History Ph.D.’s Have Jobs, in Academe and Other Solid Occupations. Lots of hand-waving and dedifferentiation here.

* Meritocracy! Well-Off Children Are Six Times More Likely To Attend Elite Colleges.

* CFP: Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative.

* Attacks on Obama over the rough rollout of the ACA hit the president where it hurts: his attempt to replace politics with expert management.

* Los Angeles public schools has a billion dollars for iPads but not teachers, custodians, or librarians.

* Fast Food Strikes Will Hit 100 Cities On Thursday.

* On teaching outside your field: The Courage to be Ignorant.

* More Kotsko! The solution to unemployment isn’t better-trained workers: Or, Systemic problems have systemic solutions

* Dare to get the federal government off weed.

* Exploited laborers of the liberal media.

* All that compiles is not gold.

* A Graduate Student Left to ‘Die on the Vine’ Finally Gets Her Day in Court.

* Shimizu, a Japanese architectural and engineering firm, has a solution for the climate crisis: Simply build a band of solar panels 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide (pdf) running all the way around the Moon’s 11,000-kilometer (6,835 mile) equator and beam the carbon-free energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves, which are converted into electricity at ground stations. 

* Now Jeff Bezos wants his own robot army. But don’t believe the hype!

Bezos’ neat trick has knocked several real stories about Amazon out of the way. Last week’s Panorama investigation into Amazon’s working and hiring practices, suggesting that the site’s employees had an increased risk of mental illness, is the latest in a long line of pieces about the company’s working conditions – zero-hour contracts, short breaks, and employees’ every move tracked by internal systems. Amazon’s drone debacle also moved discussion of its tax bill – another long-running controversy, sparked by the Guardian’s revelation last year that the company had UK sales of £7bn but paid no UK corporation tax – to the margins. The technology giants – Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al – have have huge direct reach to audiences and customers, the money to hire swarms of PR and communications staff, and a technology press overwhelmingly happy to incredulously print almost every word, rather than to engage in the much harder task of actually holding them to account.

Missed delivery notes of the future. My week as an Amazon insider. A Cyber Monday paean to the unsung hero of consumer capitalism: The Shipping Container.

* Harlan Ellison releases his never-produced 1966 Batman episode pitch.

* A Map of the United States’ Mythical Lake Monsters.

* The bonfire of papers at the end of Empire.

* Dozens of commuters missed connections Sunday night when Delta Airlines kicked them off their Gainesville-to-Atlanta flight to accommodate the University of Florida men’s hoops team.

* How (one guy at) Gawker manipulates you.

* The stalker economy.

* Scott Walker’s War on Christmas.

* Writers hate the very idea of symbolism.

* What Steven Moffat Doesn’t Understand About Grief, and Why It’s Killing Doctor Who.

* Colleges are teaching economics backwards.

* Hunting witches at UNC.

* How to be a feminist (according to stock photography).

* To boost concern for the environment, emphasize a long future, not impending doom. Meanwhile, impending doom: Shocking report reveals that 21,286 animal species are under threat of extinction.

* And paging Margaret Atwood: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?