Posts Tagged ‘West Virginia’
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 11, 2018 at 7:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with acting, actually existing media bias, Africa, African literature, Ainehi Edoro, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, America, animals, Anthropocene, anxiety, apartheid, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, billionaires, blackmail, books, Brexit, Brooklyn, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Christmas, Chuck Wendig, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college basketball, color, comics, communism, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, coral reefs, corruption, coups, CRISPR, debt, delicious French fries, democracy, deportation, depression, diabetes, dogs, domestic violence, Donald Trump, drones, East Germany, ecological humanities, ecology, English departments, English majors, financialization, fire tornados, Fortnite, Friday the 13th, games, Generation X, gentrification, geoengineering, George H. W. Bush, gig economy, glaciers, graduate school, graduate student movements, graduate student strikes, graft, Harry Potter, He-Man, health care, health insurance, Here, Hillary Clinton, history, housing associations, How the University Works, Hubble Telescope, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, insects, Instagram, insulin, intergenerational struggle, intergenerational warfare, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Jennifer's Body, jigsaw puzzles, Kim Stanley Robinson, lame duck session, Latin America, LEGO, life expectancy, lunch student, manic pixie dream girl, Margaret Atwood, Mark Lamont Hill, mass extinction, medicine, Megan Fox, memes, Michigan, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, military-industrial complex, millennials, minimum wage, Minneapolis, minority rule, money, Moscow, my particular demographic, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Carolina, nostalgia, NPR, obituary, Octavia Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, palm oil, Parable of the Sower, Paradoxa, parents, pedagogy, photography, plagiarism, podcasts, poetry, poets, points, police brutality, police dogs, police violence, pornography, poverty, Powerball, Prime Directive, prison, race, racism, radicalism, rape, rape by deception, rape culture, refugees, Republicans, rich people, Richard McGuire, Russians, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science fiction, science fiction studies, Silent Sam, social media, socialism, Square One, stunts, stuntwomen, suicide, superbabies, Supreme Court, surveillance, surveillance society, teaching, temp workers, the 1990s, the Arctic, the bezzle, the Confederacy, the Constitution, the courts, the economy, The Handmaid's Tale, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Lottery, the Pentagon, the Sentinelese, The Testaments, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, voter fraud, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, West Virginia, wildfires, Wisconsin, Worlding SF, writing
So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links
* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…
* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).
* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!
* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)
* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…
* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.
* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.
* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.
* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!
* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.
* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.
* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.
* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.
* Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.
* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.
* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.
* Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.
What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?
The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.
* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.
* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.
* The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.
* How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.
* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.
* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.
* Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.
* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.
* Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.
* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.
Politics corner!
* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.
* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.
* Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.
* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!
* I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’
* The political theology of Trump.
* Florida. Why is it always Florida?
* The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.
* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.
* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.
* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.
* Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.
* Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.
* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.
* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.
* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.
* Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.
* Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.
* Why are we in the Middle East?
* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.
Wisconsin voters cast *54%* of their ballots for Democratic state assembly candidates…and won 36% of the seats.
This is not what democracy looks like. https://t.co/OhN4LNY2B3
— Steve Kantrowitz (@skantrow) November 10, 2018
* Trans rights are human rights.
* Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.
* Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.
* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.
* Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.
* What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.
* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.
* Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.
* A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.
* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.
* How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.
* Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.
* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.
* “Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.
* Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?
* The story of a serial SWATter.
* The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”
* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.
* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.
* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.
* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.
* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.
* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.
* The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.
* A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.
* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?
* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.
* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 12, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, abortion, academia, academic writing, Afrofuturism, aliens, alt-right, Amazon, animals, Antarctica, apocalypse, Apu, Armistice Day, Arrival, art, artificial intelligence, asylum, ballet, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, bookstores, Brazil, Broken Earth trilogy, Cambridge History of Science Fiction, cancer, capitalism, Captain Picard, Center for 21st Century Studies, CFPs, childhood, Chinese science fiction, Chuck Wendig, citation, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, conferences, cruel optimism, cults, cursing, cussing, death, death penalty, debt, democracy, Department of Justice, deportation, DNA, Donald Trump, empire, epherema, ethnic cleansing, Exhalation, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, fascism, fim, Florida, Foundation, Foxconn, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerontocracy, graduate student life, grief, guns, Halloween, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, insects, insecurity, Iowa, Jaimee, Jeff Bezos, Jennifer's Body, Jesuits, K-Mart, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lovecraft, Madison, maps, Mark Bould, Marquette University, Marvel, Maryland, mass extinction, mass shootings, Matthew Whitaker, MFA, Middle East, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, minimum wage, miscarriage, monsters, Muppets, murder, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, Nike, Nobel Prize, Oumuamu, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pandemic, parenting, Pittsburgh, plastic, poetry, police, politics, precocity, pregnancy, public humanities, race, racism, Red Mars, Republicans, research, Robert Mueller, ruin, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scott Walker, Sears, self-driving car, Sesame Street, SFRA, SFRA Review, shoot shootings, social media, socialism, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, statues, stochastic terrorism, Supreme Court, surveillance society, SWAT teams, Ted Chiang, television, Texas, the Constitution, the courts, The Empire Strikes Back, The Fall of Gondolin, the flu, the House, the law, the Left, the Pentagon, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Strand, the university in ruins, The Wandering Earth, theology, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, University of Oregon, university police, USC, Vonnegut, voting, vulture capitalism, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, water, West Virginia, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, World War I, writing
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
When it comes to climate, if it's not action at disruptive scales and speeds, it's predatory delay.
That's when we are, now, after decades of inaction. That's the curve we're on.
We're completely out of time for gradual, incremental approaches and small comfortable steps.
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 13, 2018
Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017 (The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C) https://t.co/sqreCwhbDu pic.twitter.com/eY4TyVXmFh
— Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 (@kerim) August 24, 2018
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
There has been weather monitoring in the city of Wilmington, NC for nearly 150 years.
The most recent NCEP WPC rainfall prediction for Hurricane #Florence would shatter the historical record for 7-day rainfall accumulation by more than a foot. pic.twitter.com/CsSrSfRMKE
— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) September 13, 2018
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
Here’s where I would like to propose a thought experiment. Fast forward 66m years. Imagine some intelligent life form arrives (or re-evolves) on earth. It wants to know: what “caused” the sixth great extinction? What are they likely to conclude from the available evidence? 9/
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) August 26, 2018
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
The popular scifi of the 21st century will be Americans sublimating their guilt by imagining themselves as victims, and the rest of the world sublimating the nightmare that is an actually-existing hostile, amoral entity antithetical to human life
— بوكيبلينكي (@pookleblinky) August 14, 2018
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
Toni Morrison: 40
Mark Twain: 41
Marcel Proust: 43
Henry Miller: 44
JRR Tolkien: 45
Raymond Chandler: 51
Richard Adams: 52
Annie Proulx: 57
Laura Ingalls Wilder: 65
Frank McCourt: 66
Harriett Doerr: 74
Harry Bernstein: 96
No, you’re not too old to publish your first book.— Allison K Williams (@GuerillaMemoir) August 19, 2018
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 13, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, #TheResistance, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, academia, academic jobs, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air pollution, algorithms, aliens, America, animals, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, autism, Baylor, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, Brett Kavanaugh, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, college football, concussions, Confederacy, conferences, conspiracy theory, corruption, cryogenics, David Foster Wallace, decolonize everything, deportation, DHS, diabetes, dinosaurs, divorce, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Elon Musk, empire, ethics, evangelicals, fascism, fear, fecal time bombs, flooding, Florida, football, futurity, games, genre, god mode, guns, Haggerty Museum of Art, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Florence, hurricanes, I grow old, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Infinite Jest, insulin, intelligence, Japan, Jimi Hendrix, John McCain, Johns Hopkins, Ken Starr, labor, labor movement, lead, Louis C.K., mad science, magic, manure, Marquette, Maryland, mass shootings, McSweeney's, medicine, mental illness, Mexico, MFAs, Miami, millennials, Milwaukee, Minecraft, MLA, monkeys, Mt. Everest, musicals, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, natural disasters, NCAA, NFL, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, obituary, Octavia Butler, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pesticides, Philip Pullman, philosophy, police corruption, politics, poverty, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, Puerto Rico, Purdue, QAnon, race, racism, rape culture, real estate, real wages, Reddit, religion, Republicans, rich people, rivers, Sable Elyse Smith, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Second Life, self-driving cars, Serial, sexual harassment, SFRA, Silent Sam, socialism, souls, Space Force, sports, strikes, student debt, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, television, the courts, the humanities, the law, the middle class, the Moon, the Navy, the rich are different, the rule of law, the shy, the university in ruins, the VA, The Village Voice, there is not such thing as a natural disaster, time travel, Twitter, UFOs, UNC, unions, University of Akron, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, Veronica Mars, veterans, virtual worlds, volcanoes, Wakanda, weird Twitter, welfare, Wes Anderson, West Virginia, whiteness, wiffle ball, Wilmington, Wisconsin, work, writing, you and I are gonna live forever, zunguzungu
All Your Friday Links!
* The itself.blog Star Trek: Discovery event is underway! Star Trek: Discovery Is Optimism, But Not for Us. “Can you bury your heart”? Having feelings about Discovery. Star Trek: Discovery as the End of Next Generation Triumphalism.
* CFP: Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction (MLA 19).
* Jaimee Hills is officially a dangerous woman.
* The university in ruins: UW Stevens Point. The administration clearly doesn’t even understand what it’s proposing:
When releasing the plan, university officials said that English majors for teacher certification would continue. But Williams said that under the state Department of Public Instruction’s certification criteria, a person looking to become an English teacher has to have been an English major.
“They just both have to exist, or both have to be eliminated,” Williams said. “One depends directly on the other.”
The most salient fact of academia today is that low-cost humanities classes subsidize every other aspect of university operations. You will never hear a single administrator acknowledge this basic fact and indeed they insist that the money flows the other way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2018
* Professors earn about 15 percent less than others with advanced degrees, finds a study circulated Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Though perhaps some of us make it up in job satisfaction (really).
* Why Creative-Writing Programs Have Been Havens for Harassment.
* It has taken me two and a half decades to recognize that my experience of having a senior male nominal adviser and a female (usually more junior) actual adviser is common throughout academe. On Ghost Advising.
* Abusers and enablers in faculty culture.
* 5% raises in West Virginia. Onward to Oklahoma.
Today's front page is one worth saving pic.twitter.com/ig9SNqbpuZ
— Jake Zuckerman (@jake_zuckerman) March 7, 2018
* Snowflake students claim Frankenstein’s monster was ‘misunderstood’ — and is in fact a VICTIM.
* On the Blackness of the Panther.
* Loved this from Barbara Ehrenreich: Body Work: The curiously self-punishing rites of fitness culture.
If anything, the culture of fitness has grown more combative than when I first got involved. It is no longer enough to “have a good workout,” as the receptionist at the gym advises every day; you should “crush your workout.” Health and strength are tedious goals compared to my gym’s new theme of “explosive strength,” achieved, as far I can see, through repeated whole-body swinging of a kettleball. If your gym isn’t sufficiently challenging, you might want to try an “ultra-extreme warrior workout” or buy a “home fitness system” from P90X, which in 2016 tweeted a poster of an ultra-cut male upper body, head bowed as if in prayer, with the caption “A moment of silence please for my body has no idea of what I’m about to put it through.” Or you could join CrossFit, the fastest-growing type of gym in the world, and also allegedly the most physically punishing. The program “prepares trainees for any physical contingency,” the company boasts, “not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable, too. Our specialty is not specializing,” and the latter category includes the zombie apocalypse. The mind’s stuggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
* In this economy you’re either burned out, or you’re boxed out.
* The Secret NYPD Files: Officers Can Lie And Brutally Beat People — And Still Keep Their Jobs.
* A prosecutor who obtained a wrongful conviction that sent a Houston man to death row for nearly 10 years didn’t just withhold evidence but also denied under oath that he had information that supported Alfred Dewayne Brown’s alibi, court records show.
* Could Trump get a White House job if he weren’t president? Didn’t we already know Trump couldn’t get a loan before he was president?
For that reason win or lose I think the fights on the liberal-left will be a lot nastier after 2020 than they’ve been before. A huge part of the Democratic base is still living in denial about what this country has become.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2018
Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,— jesse farrar (@BronzeHammer) October 2, 2016
* Gratuitous cruelty by Homeland Security. Lying to the immigrant soldiers you promised citizenship.
* A Dozen Democrats Want To Help Banks Hide Racial Discrimination In Mortgages.
* Guess Who’s Not Coming To America? International Students.
— If you still feel pretty messed up about how they were just going to burn the Velveteen Rabbit, please mash all of the keys but mostly 2.
* White flight remains a reality.
[future history class]
Teacher: How did World War 3 start? Anyone? Yes, Khaleesi.
Girl: It started bec-
Teacher: No, I meant Khaleesi M. She had her hand up first.
Girl 2: It started because president Trump was hangry.
Teacher: Correct. [holsters gun]
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) March 3, 2018
* ‘50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.’
* The grim reality of job hunting in the age of AI.
* Wait, what exactly was Luke Skywalker’s plan in Return Of The Jedi?
* The opioid crisis has become an “epidemic of epidemics.” Meanwhile, a new study suggests opioids are no better than Tylenol for treating some kinds of pain.
* Kentucky’s ‘child bride’ bill stalls as groups fight to let 13-year-olds wed.
* False news stories travel faster and farther on Twitter than the truth.
* There’s no idea so terrible there isn’t someone in favor of it.
* York University philosophy professor and team submit brief supporting chimpanzee personhood.
* Ok, but you’re on a very short leash.
* Her name was Kanga and she was trouble.
I thought of how it all used to be, back when C.R. was young, when we still all believed things would get better. When we still had hope. In a way, hope is as powerful a drug as honey.
— Lavie Tidhar (@lavietidhar) March 7, 2018
* I Am the Very Important Longread Everyone Is Talking About.
* The United States of Middle-earth.
* And the arc of history is long, but.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 9, 2018 at 11:39 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, activism, actually existing media bias, advising, Amazon, America, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Barbara Ehrenreich, Black Panther, capitalism, Captain America, chimps, class struggle, consent, creative writing, cult film, dangerous women, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, English departments, fake news, Fight Club, film, fitness, Frankenstein, fraud, games, graduate student life, guns, harassment, homeland security, How the University Works, humanzees, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, international students, Jaimee Hills, job satisfaction, Kentucky, kids, liberals, Lili Loofbourow, longreads, Lord of the Rings, magic realism, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, McSweeney's, Middle-Earth, Milwaukee, MLA, mortgages, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Oklahoma, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pain, parenting, perjury, poetry, police brutality, police corruption, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Return of the Jedi, school shootings, science fiction, segregation, sex, sexual harassment, Sopranos, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, steel, strikes, Super Smash Brothers, taxes, teachers, Teju Cole, tenure, the gym, the humanities, the male glance, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Twitter, unions, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, West Virginia, white flight, Winnie the Pooh, Yale
Weekend Links!
* Clear your calendars for the An und für sich Star Trek: Discovery blog event, beginning Monday!
* A student project from my Tolkien class gets a great writeup at Marquette’s Digital Scholarship Lab.
* KSR’s next book has a cover.
* The MCU vs. America. What Black Panther can teach us about international relations. Weapons of Black Panther. And Žižek shows up two weeks late with a Killmonger-was-right take.
* The science of late sleepers.
* Why I’m Writing Captain America (And Why It Scares the Hell Out of Me).
* Mueller news you can use: almost all the Mueller leaks are from witnesses and tell us little or nothing about the true scope of the investigation or its likely outcomes.
* Hardware Wars: A People’s History.
* Wildcat teachers’ strike in West Virginia (but not on MSNBC). Onward to Oklahoma!
Working class movements always draw on and reanimate memories of past struggles in moments of conflict. This is the cultural core of the process of class formation.
— gabrielwinant (@gabrielwinant) March 2, 2018
One day, some group of workers we haven't yet conceived of will stand up for themselves by comparing themselves to teachers.
— gabrielwinant (@gabrielwinant) March 3, 2018
* Phew! Lucky coincidence.
* Buying a gun around the world. How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled. The Florida legislature’s push to arm teachers, explained.
* Public schools have been re-segregating for decades.
* Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast.
* NASA releases time-lapse of the disappearing Arctic polar ice cap. The age of climate migration.
* Homelessness in the Magic Kingdom.
* Great story about retirees who cracked the lottery.
* Brooklyn man wins nearly $1M lawsuit after NYPD cop tried to frame him on DWI charge.
* I’m Gen X again, maybe for good.
* I predicted this would happen: There is no psychohistory, and there never will be.
* I’ve used this as a hypothetical in class for years; let’s say I’m skeptical.
* The last word in Firefly fan physics: The Ultimate Solar System.
* A right-wing online “university” is on track for a billion views in 2018, its professors are some of the best-known conservatives in media, and its founder wants to put it in real schools. So how come you’ve never heard of it?
* And your micro-game of the week: Post/Capitalism.
Here is what humans really look like. The majority of your body is there for mobility and interaction. The core of your self is captured in this photograph. This would be conscious if it were still alive. pic.twitter.com/PwyUbL6ihZ
— Matt Taylor (@rhyolight) February 27, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
March 4, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Amazon, America, animals, Asimov, Big Data, biology, Black Panther, Captain America, class struggle, climate change, comics, demographics, Disney, Donald Trump, Douglas Adams, eating meat, Elsa, Firefly, Florida, Foundation, Frozen, games, gay rights, Generation X, guns, Hari Seldon, health insurance, homelessness, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, insider trading, Killmonger was right, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, labor movements, LEGO, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, math, memory, migration, MSNBC, my scholarly empire, NASA, Oklahoma, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, parody, pedagogy, physics, police corruption, politics, postcapitalism, psychohistory, race, racism, radio, Red Moon, retirement, Robert Mueller, science, science fiction, segregation, Serenity, sleep, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, strikes, taxes, teachers, teaching, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Lottery, Tolkien, viruses, war on education, West Virginia, white supremacy, wildcat strikes, work, you do not exist, Žižek
Time Travel Will NEVER Be Canon on gerrycanavan.wordpress.com, and Other Tuesday Links
* Dialectics of Black Panther: By sliding between the real and unreal, Black Panther frees us to imagine the possibilities — and the limitations — of an Africa that does not yet exist. Ultimately, “Black Panther” does what all superhero movies do: It asks us to place faith in the goodness of individuals rather than embracing revolutionary structural change. In effect, the Wakandan Kingdom is caught between two bleak visions of America: walling itself off, or potentially imposing on other nations. The Afrofuturistic Designs of Black Panther. ‘Black Panther’ offers a regressive, neocolonial vision of Africa. Africa is a country in Wakanda. What to Watch After Black Panther: An Afrofuturism Primer. I was asked to write a short piece for Frieze building on my blog post from the weekend, so look for that as early as tomorrow…
* Adam Kotsko’s talk on Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman is now streaming from mu.edu.
* Major nerd news: Star Wars: Rebels just introduced time travel into the main canon for the first time. There were minor, often debatable incidents before, but never in the “main plot,” and never as a key incident in the life of a character this important to fans. I’m surprised: I used to use “no time travel in Star Wars” as an example of how franchises police themselves — though as I was saying on Twitter this morning the recent introduction of true time travel to both Star Wars and Harry Potter suggests it may in fact be what happens to long-running fantasy franchises when they grow decadent. Now Tolkien stands alone as the only major no-time-travel SF/F franchises, unless I’m forgetting something — and Tolkien considered a time travel plot for a long time, and actually promised CS Lewis he would write one, but abandoned it…
* Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Half of world’s oceans now fished industrially, maps reveal. North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists. What Land Will Be Underwater in 20 Years? Figuring It Out Could Be Lucrative. Scott Pruitt’s EPA.
* In order to do this I propose a test. A favorite trope among the administrative castes is accountability. People must be held accountable, they tell us, particularly professors. Well, let’s take them at their word and hold themaccountable. How have they done with the public trust since having assumed control of the university?
* Disaster Capitalism Hits Higher Education in Wisconsin.
* Anonymous faculty group threatens to take down Silent Sam.
* West Virginia Teachers Walk Out.
* Markelle Fultz — along with a slew of huge names and top college basketball programs — have been named in a bombshell report into NCAA hoops corruption involving illegal payouts to players. The Real Lesson of the Weekend’s NCAA Scandals Is That College Basketball Coaches Should Be Dumped in the Ocean.
* What directional school is the most directionally correct? A case study.
* The Yale student who secretly lived in a ventilation shaft.
* How the Activists Who Tore Down Durham’s Confederate Statue Got Away With It.
* Coming soon: Muppet Guys Talking.
* Disney’s Frozen musical opens on Broadway: ‘More nudity than expected.’
* Greenwald v. Risen re: Russia.
The year is 2020. All news is now just media outlets shouting “FAKE NEWS!!!” about every other news outlet. Meanwhile, working people have been enslaved by the sentient computer that now owns and runs Disney
— In-yer-face, DIY disco riposte (@The_Swole_Nerd) February 20, 2018
* Despite the NPR’s handwringing about threats and vulnerability, the United States already possesses the most responsive, versatile, and deadly nuclear strike forces on the planet. In essence, the Pentagon now proposes to embark upon an arms race, largely with itself, in order to preserve that status.
* The case against tipping culture.
* The Tipped Minimum Wage Is Fueling Sexual Harassment in Restaurants.
* Monica Lewinsky in the Age of #MeToo.
* Life Without Retirement Savings.
* Americans’ reliance on household debt ─ and poor people’s struggles to pay it off ─ has fueled a collection industry that forces many of them into jail, a practice that critics call a misuse of the criminal justice system.
* Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection.
* Gerrymandering a 28-0 New York.
* On Being a Woman in the Late-Night Boys’ Club.
* In the article, Sally Payne, a pediatric occupational therapist, explains that the nature of play has changed over the past decade. Instead of giving kids things to play with that build up their hand muscles, such as building blocks, or toys that need to be pushed or pulled along, parents have been handing them tablets and smartphones. Because of this, by the time they’re old enough to go to school, many children lack the hand strength and fine motor control required to correctly hold a pencil and write.
* Understand your user feedback.
* Switzerland makes it illegal to boil a live lobster.
* The U.S. Border Patrol’s violent, racist, and ineffectual policies have come to a head under Trump. What can be done? Mother and daughter are now at detention facilities 2,000 miles apart. Warning of ICE action, Oakland mayor takes Trump resistance to new level.
* The City & The City coming to TV in 2018 (again).
* BoJack Horseman and modern art.
* Let’s see what else is in the news. Wisconsin exceptionalism. Mister Sun, why do you wear sunglasses?
I think about this segment from Mister Rogers’ final show all the time. What a message. What a legacy. pic.twitter.com/X6SyM8AevY
— Erin Ruberry (@erinruberry) February 19, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
February 27, 2018 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, animals, apocalypse, art, Bill Clinton, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, Broadway, China Miéville, climate change, college basketball, college sports, comedy, cultural preservation, debt, decadence, Disney, Durham, dystopia, EPA, fake news, fascism, fish, franchises, Frozen, futurity, garbage, gerrymandering, Glenn Greenwald, guns, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, iPads, kids today, language, lobsters, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, MCU, minimum wage, Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Rogers, Muppets, NCAA, New York, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Omelas, retirement, Rick and Morty, Russia, savings, science fiction, Scott Pruitt, sea level rise, sexual harassment, Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels, statues, strikes, Switzerland, the Arctic, The City and the City, the Confederacy, The Lord of the Rings, the news, The Simpsons, The Sun, theater, time travel, tipping, Tolkien, unions, Utopia, Wakanda, West Virginia, Wisconsin, words, Yale
Friday Morning!
* Trump White House finding a new bottom, day after day after… whoa. Turning Point? They’re not even pretending. The Biggest Political Story in Decades. In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry. Inside Trump’s anger and impatience. Another inside story. Time to shut everything down. And then on the third day he threatened to blackmail Comey with secret White House tapes. Only the Rock can save us now.
* The primary takeaway of the last 18 months is that no one should ever use email for any reason.
DID YOU KNOW when Trump finally goes down in flames and brings half the country down with him your dad will say it was all Obama’s fault
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2017
A person who still supports Trump after this week probably can’t be reached. Sorry.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 11, 2017
COMEY (2041)
COMEY, PART TWO (2043)
COMEY: THE COMPLETE SAGA (chronological re-edit for TV, 2044)
COMEY, PART THREE (2057; regrettable)— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2017
* Huge relief after only 11 million people vote for a fascist.
* Trump’s attacking the Census.
* Journalist arrested for trying to ask HHS Secretary Tom Price a question.
* What if populism is not the problem, but the solution?
* By refusing to negotiate with recently unionized graduate workers, Yale president Peter Salovey has announced in writing that the university will defy US labor law.
* Meanwhile, at the greatest public university in the world: Also included in the itemized spending was a dinner tab worth more than a year of tuition.
[concert]
SINGER: hows everyone doin tonight
CROWD: woo
ME (from the back in a normal speaking voice): it's actually been a tough few months— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) May 9, 2017
* Locked Up for Being Poor. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county. All the money’s gone, nowhere to go.
* Kristen Gillibrand, for and against. All this for someone who already ruled it out!
* Despite the confidence that the backlash to the healthcare bill will benefit Democrats, this doesn’t seem like good politics to be gleefully cheering on something you think is going to literally kill people. Especially, when you’re just singing over the supposed political benefits.
* History Will Remember These 217 House Republicans for Their Inhumanity.
* The Democratic Party Is a Ghost. Losing West Virginia. Priorities in Delaware. The Resistance, but not just as a joke. Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.
* Trumpism is coming from the suburbs. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.
* A study at Demos says voter suppression flipped Wisconsin. Some Words of Caution.
* I’m sure no one could find this objectionable: A top government official overseeing detentions and deportations is heading to a private prison company at the end of the month, according to a source with firsthand knowledge.
* The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.
* Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused.
* How a Utah county silenced Native American voters — and how Navajos are fighting back.
* The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis.
* How Marquette Is Becoming More Diverse.
* Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong.
* This is how SETI plans to find alien life by 2037.
* Chicago Approves Plan To Block Trump’s Name on His Tower With Giant, Flying Pigs.
* A Defense of the Tuvel Open Letter, at the Chronicle. And on the other side.
'In the XKCDification of political protest the demand has been replaced by the in joke, the threat to power by the witty signal to peers'
— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) April 22, 2017
* How many Death Row prisoners are disabled? All of them.
* The length schools will go to cover up for bullies never ceases to amaze me.
* District: The Game of Gerrymandering for the Whole Family.
* Secret military space shuttle rattles Florida.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.
* HIV life expectancy ‘near normal’ thanks to new drugs.
* Another neurological disease unexpectedly linked to gut bacteria.
* U.S. to Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe, Officials Say.
* Stephen Fry is being investigated for blasphemy. Amazing.
* That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox.
* The Girls’ Soccer Team That Joined a Boys’ League, and Won It.
* Winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.
* Write the book you needed to read when you were a child. Troubled Wisconsin man goes on 50 state killing spree. Guns and Roses tones it down. Our future in space. They fucking killed him. Top ten book rebrands, all-time. I hacked into Mike Pence’s email. Maybe I should give the Yankees another look. A new favorite metaphor. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
* And I don’t care how pretty or enigmatic it is, nothing will ever make Blade Runner 2049 a good idea.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 12, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, actually existing media bias, aestivation, air travel, airport security, alcohol, alcoholism, aliens, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, bail, Big Brother, Black English, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, blasphemy, books, bullies, Chicago, class struggle, college admissions, Comeygate, comics, conspiracy theories, copyright, cultural preservation, death penalty, death row, Delaware, delicious Girl Scout cookies, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, diversity, email, fair use, fascism, FBI, Fermi paradox, film, Florida, France, freedom of the press, games, general election 2016, general election 2020, Georgetown, gerrymandering, girls' sports, graduate student movements, Guns and Roses, Haiti, health, health care, Hillary Clinton, HIV, How the University Works, ice, immigration, inequality, Ireland, James Comey, Jefferson Davis, Judy Blume, Kristen Gillibrand, laptops, life expectancy, M&Ms, Marquette, medicine, Mike Pence, millennials, mortgage interest deduction, NASA, Native American issues, neurology, New Orleans, New York, Nixon, normalcy, nuclear holocaust, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, Paul Ryan, pigs, politics, polls, populism, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, real wages, Rebecca Tuvel, Russia, salt, science fiction, segregation, SETI, slavery, slaves, soccer, statues, Stephen Fry, suburbs, the Census, the Confederacy, the courts, the law, the Left, The Rock, Tom Price, trans* issues, true crime, Trump, TSA, Twitter, unions, University of California, Utah, Watergate, Welcome to the Jungle, West Virginia, White House, white people, Wisconsin, writing, xkcd, Yale, Yankee
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
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
If the market does it, it isn’t systematic mass murder.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2017
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 7, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 4chan, A Colony in a Nation, academia, actually existing media bias, ADA, Adam Roberts, addiction, Afghanistan, Alan Moore, alumni, Angel, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, Berkeley, Black Mirror, Buffy, Bush, California, canon, children, Chris Hayes, cities, continuity, corruption, cyberwar, democracy, Democrats, demographics, disability, dolphins, Donald Trump, donations, drones, drugs, ecology, elections, endings, entrepeneurs in residence, Existential Comics, film, FiveThirtyEight, forever war, Franklin Roosevelt, futurity, games, Georgia, gerrymandering, Harvey Mudd College, health care, How the University Works, ice, immigration, immortality, innovation, Iraq, James Comey, Japanese internment, Jeff Sessions, Jerusalem, Joss Whedon, jury duty, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Logan, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, LSD, lunch debt, lynching, Mar-a-Lago, Marquette, Mars, mass murder, Milwaukee, moral panic, my teaching empire, NASA, Nate Silver, New York, New York 2140, panic, parenting, pedagogy, philosophy, poll aggregators, polls, pregnancy, protest, race, racism, refugees, Reince Preibus, Republicans, resistance, Russia, schools, science fiction, Seattle, sex, sickle cell anemia, Siri, Steve Bannon, student debt, suburbia, superheroes, terraforming, the Anthropocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the Left, The Silmarillion, the wisdom of markets, Tolkien, transgender issues, transhumanism, transition, Twilight Zone, Utopia, visas, war on education, West Virginia, white nationalism, white people, white supremacy, Wisconsin, World War II, X-Men, YouTube
Fall Break Links!
*record scratch*
*freeze frame*
"Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got in this situation…" pic.twitter.com/ATInPq8AGL— Emma Roller (@emmaroller) October 19, 2016
Happy birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." pic.twitter.com/c0Ku5nBu9G
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) October 21, 2016
* CFP: The Fourth Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, June 2017. CFP: The Marxist Reading Group 2017.
* Tolkien news! Beren and Lúthien coming in 2017. Elsewhere in things from my childhood that I’ll almost certainly repurchase: Inside the new D&D Monster Manual.
* “Whoa,” said the gangster/minotaur, awed at how close he’d just come to losing his forearm. He was beginning to understand that this wasn’t the relatively straightforward world of street-level dope dealing anymore; this was Dungeons and Dragons.
* I’m glad somebody finally paged KSR: “Why Elon Musk’s Mars Vision Needs ‘Some Real Imagination.'”
* Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies.
* “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions.
* TFW you cut down a 600-year-old tree.
* On translating Harry Potter. Harry Potter by the Numbers. And did you know Harry Potter was nearly a major cultural phenomenon?
* On The Strange Career of Steve Ditko.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Mistake on a Lake: In Michigan, privatization and free-market governance has left 100,000 people without water.
* One teaching artist sees it differently. “There will always be bad artists with a lot of money who want to go to art school,” she said. On the Future of the MFA.
* The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job.
* The Secret History of Leftist Board Games.
* There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: On Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning. Relatedly: The World’s Happiest Man Wishes You Wouldn’t Call Him That.
* Degree programs in French, geology, German, philosophy and women’s studies are suspended, effectively immediately. Eight additional majors within existing departments, six teaching programs and four graduate programs have been shut down. The university is planning a teach-out program for currently enrolled students. Tenured faculty members in affected programs will be reassigned to different departments. The future of the campus’s nursing, dental education and medical imaging programs is still under discussion. Degree programs in environmental geology and environmental policy were cut previously, in July.
* Advice for how to use Twitter as an academic. Of course, as everyone knows, the only winning move is not to play.
* From David M. Perry: “My non-verbal son communicates through ‘Hamilton.'”
* From Adam Kotsko: From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.
* Dylan, Christ, and Slow Train Coming. Teaching the controversy: Kurt Vonnegut in 1991: “Bob Dylan Is the Worst Poet Alive.” Imperialism-in-Artistry: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Win Is Proof Adichie Is Right about Beyonce. Local Boy Makes Good. But not too good: The Nobel Prize Committee Have Given Up on Trying to Get in Touch with Bob Dylan.
* Game of Thrones is even whiter than you think.
* The self-driving car, Baudrillard, and America.
* On the history of fantasy scholarship.
* David Letterman and his beard.
* The LSAT and class struggle.
* Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks. ‘What Kind of Mother Is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?’ No, There Are No Ninth Month Abortions.
* The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of “imaginative power,” and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.
* Another gerrymandering primer. I’m inclined to make a joke about Obama’s proceduralism even ruining his post-presidency but this really is a major issue worth throwing his weight against.
This note Jimmy Carter left for Ronald Reagan before Reagan took office says everything about how politics have changed. pic.twitter.com/OSNtZ2SIly
— CalmTomb (@CalmTomb) October 21, 2016
* Texas?
trump_firstnuclearwar
trump_secondnuclearwar
trump_ritual_demonbody
trump_clones
trump_mechatrump_mechatrump2.0 https://t.co/AIWspOgRjG— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 16, 2016
A non-tacky but equally scary Trump would have been in the coin-flip range, and maybe the favorite. https://t.co/FYkoiGXaki
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 20, 2016
I honestly think we could get some “the Constitution says the president has to be a he” cryptolegalism stuff. https://t.co/3btrsozsRe
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 20, 2016
* In The Hollow: The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race.
* The Anthropocene and Empire.
* How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers out of Millions in Retirement Savings.
* Atlas Obscura: The Land of Make Believe.
* A People’s History of John Stewart, Green Lantern.
* And then there’s this one: Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.
* Breastfeeding as captivity narrative.
* I’ll allow it, but know that you’re all on very thin ice.
* Thank god the Mac version isn’t ready yet: Civ VI is out.
* A dark, grittier Captain Planet: Leonardo DiCaprio wants to make a Captain Planet movie.
"DiCaprio announced that he will be playing both Ma-Ti and Kwame, while Gi will be played by Benedict Cumberbatch."https://t.co/F7tuLxU3h4
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) October 18, 2016
* Hungerford makes Infinite Jest represent how commercial publishers and their enablers in the mainstream media engineer a novel into a canonizable success. The market is corrupt, she says. But is it any more corrupt or distasteful than the publication and marketing of her university press book? “Post 45” is a scholarly association; Hungerford is one of nine Board members. Two other Board members are the series editors for the “Post 45” imprint. The “Advance Praise” for Making Literature Now includes effusive comments by two people whom Hungerford praises in the book, a blurb by a former colleague at Yale, and other comments so hyperbolic that they appear to have been written under the influence of laughing gas. Hungerford put out a misleading trailer for the book in the Chronicle, excising the misogyny charge that’s essential in her closing chapter, perhaps because she feared anyone who had read Infinite Jest would see through that charge and not order Making Literature Now. Her title is grandiose because her data is extremely limited. Rather than the survey that the title implies, Making Literature Now is literary tourism combined with two takedowns.
* Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference.
* Student writing in the digital age.
* Live long and trick or treat.
* I’m telling you, the simulation is crashing.
* And ours is truly a fallen world.
SOCIALIST: late capitalism has created a moral rot that pervades our entire society
NEOLIBERAL: but imagine if we monetized the rot— The Discourse Lover (@Trillburne) July 6, 2016
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Ya my wife said its irresponsible to spend $160 on baby sized Jordans. Just to clarify my baby is not dead
— the slim reaper (@radvilliany) October 17, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
October 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abortion, academia, administrative blight, alt-right, America, Amitav Ghosh, Amy Hungerford, apocalypse, Appalachia, artificial intelligence, autism, Barack Obama, Baudrillard, beards, Ben Robertson, Beren and Lúthien, bitherism, Bob Dylan, books, breastfeeding, Brittle Paper, Buffy, cancer, Candy Crush, Captain Planet, casinos, CFPs, Civilization VI, class struggle, climate change, comics, conferences, cryptolegalism, cyberterrorism, David Foster Wallace, David Letterman, DC Comics, Derek Black, Don't mention the war, Donald Glover, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dungeons & Dragons, Elon Musk, empire, existentialism, fantasy, fathers and sons, feminism, Flint, for sale baby shoes never worn, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, gerrymandering, gibberish, Green Lantern, Halloween, Hamilton, Han Solo, happiness, Harry Potter, Hemingway, Hillary Clinton, imperialism, Indiana Purdue Fort Worth, Infinite Jest, Islamophobia, Joe Piscopo, John Stewart, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lando Calrissian, late-term abortion, lead, lead poisoning, leftism, Leonardo DiCaprio, literary criticism, literature, London, Lord of the Rings, LSAT, magic, make believe, Man's Search for Meaning, maps, Mars, Marxism, Marxist Reading Group, MFAs, Michigan, military-industrial complex, millennials, misogyny, Monster Manual, music, New Jersey, Nnedi Okorafor, Nobel Prize, parentings, plastics, politics, pollution, prison, publishing, race, racism, reading, record scratch, Rent, rivers, science fiction, self-driving cars, spells, Spider-Man, Spike, Springsteen, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Ditko, Stormfront, students, television, Texas, the Anthropocene, the Devil, the Internet, the oceans, the Singularity, theory, Tolkien, trash, trees, Twitter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Viktor Frankl, Vonnegut, water, West Virginia, Wheaton College, white supremacy, writing, zunguzungu
Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic!
* Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose. Having done so, it now can leave. Whether it will, and how much it will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen. Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll.
* Virginia GOP Delegate Files Suit To Get Out Of Voting For Trump At Convention.
* All agree that we have entered an era in which “peace” coexists uncomfortably with interminable global violence (for those non-state actors that risk committing it or those state actors powerful enough to do so and avoid condemnation). All agree that executives have pushed the boundaries of national and international legality and redefined the scope and timeline of legal violence with little apparent constraint — except, theoretically, a wayward public, which has not done much to push back yet.
* “Protestors on both sides of the fray were stabbed.”
* I wouldn’t say this is great news, given the franchise’s recent experiments in that direction: The New Star Trek Series Can Feature All the Sex, Blood, and Profanity It Wants.
* Scremain, or Scoveto? I’m sticking with my gut: Brexit May Well Never Happen. “Bracksies.” All told, quite an achievement.
Truly British solution: never invoke Article 50, hope everyone else too polite ever to mention it.
— Alan Beattie (@alanbeattie) June 26, 2016
* How to Prep for Your PhD If You’re Poor.
* Study Links 6.5 Million Deaths Each Year to Air Pollution.
* This amount of rain in such a short time is likely a “one-in-a-thousand-year event,” the weather service said. A zunguzungu flashback.
* Texas Gun Rights Advocates Fatally Shoots Her Two Daughters.
* They call it the seagullypse.
* A New League Of ‘Barefoot Lawyers’ Will Transform Justice In The Next 15 Years.
* Strange days: The Icelandic translator of Stephen King will likely be the country’s next president.
* This tweet seems sweet but is actually ice cold. Truly chilling.
* And it Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean. Last one in is a rotten egg…
Speaking as a member of the Illuminati, I’d like to apologise for 2016 so far. We acknowledge it has not been our best work.
— MichaelMarshallSmith (@ememess) June 26, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
June 26, 2016 at 7:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with apocalypse, artificial intelligence, babies, blood, books, Brexit, Britain, brokered conventions, California, class struggle, cognition, conservatives, Cory Booker, disease, Donald Trump, ecology, England, environmentalism, European Union, flooding, forever war, general election 2016, graduate student life, guns, Hillary Clinton, Iceland, Ireland, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mars, Nazis, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, peace, Pluto, poetry, politics, polls, profanity, Republicans, Sacramento, Scotland, seagulls, sex, stabbings, Star Trek, Stephen King, stock market, Tea Party, the courts, the Illuminati, the law, translation, United Kingdom, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on terror, water, West Virginia, whiteness, zunguzungu
Saturday Morning’s All Right for Linking
* Bryan Fuller Reveals New ‘Star Trek’ Details, Says Series Will ‘Eventually’ Revisit Characters. Interesting interview that suggests a lot of what is circulating about this series is wrong.
* On the deep, abiding, and highly dispersed influence of Gordon Lish.
* West Virginia in the Anthropocene: At least 23 people have been killed after powerful storms swamped West Virginia on Thursday night, forcing high water rescues across the state and leaving thousands of customers without power through Friday evening, officials said.
#Flood water pushes a burning #home down a creek in #WestVirginia. #wvwx
🎬 Amanda Carper pic.twitter.com/zJSMe95nLk— AMHQ (@AMHQ) June 24, 2016
* CDC: Flint water crisis “entirely preventable.”
* Why Brexit Is Much Scarier Than You Think. Brexit: The Crisis Begins. The Sterling Depreciation of 2007-2008 and Its Implications for Brexit. A timeline of the coming slow-motion car-crash. “Clusterfuck.” We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. David Cameron Has Secured His Place as One of the Worst Prime Ministers Ever. Boris already flinching. Article 50 as Stalemate. No Takebacks. Brexit and the university. The A-Z of Brexit. Brexit Impact Will Be Felt in Wisconsin. The United Kingdom is the fourth-largest export market for Wisconsin goods, with $824.2 million worth of products shipped from the Badger State last year, or about 3.7% of the state’s exports. Morexit?
* “Worst ‘Zombie States’ in America ‘Deteriorate Faster, Further.’
* Oil Made Venezuela Rich, And Now It’s Making It Poor.
* The central problem is that employment policies that are gender-neutral on paper may not be gender-neutral in effect. After all, most women receive parental benefits only after bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities. Yet fathers usually receive the same benefits without bearing anything close to the same burden. Given this asymmetry, it’s little wonder some recently instituted benefits have given men an advantage.
* Six weeks before the Summer Olympics open in Rio de Janeiro, the laboratory that was set to handle drug testing at the Games has been suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency in a new escalation of the doping crisis in international sports.
* FBI Says There’s No Evidence Orlando Gunman Omar Mateen Had Messaged Men or Had Secret Gay Affairs.
* Can Daenerys Fly to Westeros on Her Dragons?
* What’s The Matter With Poetry?
* This is near my neighborhood, and I can confirm this intersection is singularly terrible.
* And I know things seem bad, but here’s a preview of Civilization 6‘s gameplay. Hang in there!
[breathing extremely heavily]
…Washingtoff
West Virginiain’t
Wisconout
WyomedARE YOU HAPPY NOW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
June 25, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, Anthropocene, apocalypse, Article 50, Boris Johnson, Brazil, Brexit, Britain, Bryan Fuller, catastrophe, CBS, Civilization 6, class struggle, crisis, Daenerys Targaryen, David Cameron, depression, drugs, ecology, England, European Union, fathers, FBI, Flint, flooding, Game of Thrones, games, George R. R. Martin, Gordon Lish, grit, guns, How the University Works, immigration, infrastructure, intelligence, intergenerational warfare, lead, lead poisoning, literature, mass panic, mass shootings, neoliberalism, oil, Olympics, Omar Mateen, Orlando, paternity leave, poetry, politics, poverty, race, recession, Rio de Janeiro, science fiction, Sid Meier, sports, Star Trek, talent, television, theft, trails, true crime, United Kingdom, Venezuela, water, West Virginia, Westeros, white people, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, writing, xkcd, zombie states
Wednesday Wega-Links!
* Ken Burns presents: The Humanities.
* My Pop Culture Series might have to be all Harry-Potter-themed this fall: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child comes out in July, then the Fantastic Beasts screenplay in November…
* I was hoping the other magic schools wouldn’t have four houses. But just tell me which one is Ravenclaw and get it over with.
* Something happens to you out there: Astronauts and the Overview Effect.
…administrators have effectively developed a hidden curriculum that they exclusively control to further sideline the faculty. Never mind that the courses offered in this hidden curriculum focus on life skills and various types of political indoctrination related to race, gender, and ethnicity, subjects that the deanlets and deanlings are hardly qualified to teach. Add to this, speech, civility and anti-harassment codes, which administrators use with great effectiveness to silence faculty and student critics who interfere with administrative designs. These same administrators often rely upon outside agencies and licensure groups to discipline the faculty with outside assessment measures, threatening the faculty with the school’s possible loss of accreditation. Administrators often interfere with well-running programs, attempting to change their structure to the point of ensuring their failure.
* Banned instructor sues Inver Hills Community College, saying he was defamed. Just incredible.
* Political science department chair Eric Schickler said in an email that there was no longer a bond of mutual trust between faculty and the administration. He added that there were concerns among faculty that major donors were being steered toward supporting the Berkeley Global Campus project in Richmond rather than core campus research and teaching missions. “Shared governance requires a shared vision and shared trust between faculty and those at the top,” Schickler said. “Many of us believe that the chancellor’s poor decisions have eroded that trust to the breaking point.”
* Call for Provocations: Stealing from the University – extended deadline.
This is our first call for provocations that demand we go beyond familiar complaints and challenge ourselves to organize. Recent student-led uprisings at Missouri, Ohio State, Duke, Appalachian State, and UC Davis, among many others, open up possibilities of re-purposing university-based resources for radical movements. How can we take the relay from these uprisings to expand insurgent practices of studying-in-movement?
* And it looks like it’s that time of the semester again: “Should I go to grad school in the humanities?”
* Dark Posthumanism: The Weird Template.
* When Teller directed The Tempest.
* Today in exciting political developments: Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader as a Delegate in California. At least nothing else incredibly dangerous and destabilizing is happening!
* West Virginia is neither a secret socialist stronghold nor a racist fever-dream. It is one of several bleeding edges of a sharply unequal country, where people who never had much are feeling as pressed as they can remember ever being. Some are bigots. Many are not. Some, no doubt, find that Trump’s cocktail of arrogance and disgust, grievance and triumphalism, reassuringly resembles their own psychic survival strategies, blown up into world-historical dimensions. Others are voting for the socialist for the same reason they voted for the Chicago community organizer: a desire for a more equal society, born out of the lived experience of inequality. Maybe future organizing and leadership, like the decades-long fight that first built the unions and the Democratic party in the coalfields, will show that they are not alone in that. What West Virginia Is Saying.
* Data visualization in the Anthropocene.
* One in five of world’s plant species at risk of extinction. Sea Level Rise Is Here, And Is Gobbling Up Islands.
* Sold in the room: Philip K. Dick Is Getting an Anthology Show, Courtesy of Bryan Cranston and Ronald D. Moore. Elsewhere in TV news: Locke & Key! Uh, Wheel of Time, I guess? Krypton, really?
* And elsewhere in PKD news: One of the TAs in an Artificial Intelligence Class Was Actually an A.I.
* How Do You Put Out A Subterranean Fire Beneath A Mountain Of Trash? Stop me if you’ve heard it.
* Oof.
* And oof.
* Our Awful Prisons: How They Can Be Changed.
* The one thing rich parents do for their kids that makes all the difference. The answer may shock you!
* This GIF of pre-CGI superhero jumps proves actors are just okay at jumping. The best thing on the Internet this year.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Poor People Don’t Stand A Chance In Court.
* Huge, if true: School principal: ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ cause brain damage.
* Someone’s been watching too much Game of Thrones: “Ultimately, There Is No Narrative without Death.”
* Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy.
* If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. A reply.
If those text reproduce ideology, and therefore reproduce empire’s projects of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism, then we can’t just say “nothing is intrinsically wrong.” We in fact have to be open to the notion that these texts are entangled in the most violent, destructive ideas in world history. That they are rooted in whiteness and what whiteness meant in those moments: the right to murder and steal and subjugate.
* Civilization 6 Has Been Announced And It’s Out This Year.
* The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Have Had Marvel Comics’ Most Fucked-Up Superhero Romance.
* And all hail the Childlike Empress.
the moment when you tell your daughter "mom was in a movie" #theneverendingstory #iamthechildlikeempress pic.twitter.com/8sIaYyuX7Y
— Tami Stronach (@NeverendingTami) May 11, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
May 11, 2016 at 2:59 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, astronauts, Avengers, Berkeley, brain damage, Bryan Cranston, California, CEOs, CFPs, CGI, Civil War, civilization, Civilization VI, class struggle, climate change, data visualization, death, diversity, Donald Trump, drama, ecology, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, film, Fred Moten, games, happiness, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hogwarts, hopelessness, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, intelligence, Inver Hills, Joe Hill, Justice League, Ken Burns, kids today, Krypton, Locke and Key, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, mass extinction, narrative, neoliberalism, outer space, Overview Effect, Penn and Teller, Philip K. Dick, philosophy, politics, pollution, pop culture, posthumanism, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, racism, Ravenclaw, rich people, Robert Jordon, Ronald D. Moore, Scarlet Witch, schools, science fiction, sea level rise, Shakespeare, shared governance, Should I go to grad school?, Sid Meier, Sorting Hat, sovereign default, superheroes, Superman, SyFy, SyFy Channel, TAs, television, the Anthropocene, the Childlike Empress, the courts, the debt, the humanities, the law, The Never-ending Story, the sublime, The Tempest, the university in ruins, The Vision, trash, Twitter, undercommons, unions, University of California, West Virginia, Western civilization diversity, Wheel of Time, white privilege, white supremacy, X-Men, X-Men: Apocalypse
Spring Break Forever Links
* Hey look! LARoB reviewed Green Planets.
* Another science fiction studies research opportunity: The 2016-2017 Le Guin Fellowship.
* Notes from ICFA roundtable on The Force Awakens, on cast, nostalgia, and franchise. This was a great panel; I’m so glad we did it.
* Will we ever learn George Lucas’s original Plan for Star Wars Episode 7?
* What a Funding Fracas Could Mean for the Future of CUNY.
* They’ve finally diagnosed my unusual condition.
* Snubbed again! Here Are 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman. Meanwhile:
But the movie itself is terrible, poorly made, dumb, and shockingly dull. Doomsday is trash. Lex stinks. The worst modern comic book film.
— Adonai (@devincf) March 22, 2016
* In other words, bad food becomes linked to good memories, and to our sense of who we are and where we come from. To give up that food would be to give up not only a piece of our childhood, but of ourselves. “When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility,” Wilson writes. “It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss.”
* In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false. It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck. Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves. Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.
* What a weird coincidence, ten straight record warm months in a row.
* Appalachia in the Anthropocene: When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years. Ice in the Anthropocene. Oil in the Anthropocene. Boulder-Hurling Megawaves in the Anthropocene. Cli-Fi in the Anthropocene.
* “There are no plausible scenarios in which climate stabilization is compatible with a pace of capital accumulation required for economic and political stability under a capitalist system.” Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.
* How are the political effects of “terrorism” produced?
* #altac
* A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* The Christians, the Soviets, and the Bible.
* It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
* Game theory and the GOP nomination. Can’t #StopTrump? Third parties: a beginner’s guide. Of course, there’s always Plan B. Or Plan C.
* I, Cthulhu, endorse Donald Trump.
* BART Social Media Intern ’16.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
* A Brief History of Sabotage.
* Twilight of Gawker: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit.
* Sea World Promises to Acquire No New Orcas. Why SeaWorld is ending its killer whale program, in one brutal chart.
New SeaWorld Show Just Elephant Drowning In Large Tank Of Water With No Explanation https://t.co/JfgnMqF5L4 pic.twitter.com/uFtvm3K65l
— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 18, 2016
* Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.
* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.
* A book length history of abolition.
* More from the death of psychology.
* Well, he tried: the Obama legacy.
* The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana.
* The stock market is a sucker’s bet.
* What we talk about when we talk about jobs.
* These measures seem harsh, but if Trump really is a sui generis evil, then unprecedented and difficult measures are called for. If we’re not willing to make and carry through with such threats, does that mean that we don’t really view him as a sui generis evil? That this is just the latest thing we’re willing to humor for the sake of family peace and avoiding social awkwardness?
* Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings. I’m currently in the process of filing a request with the chalk administration office so I can respond to this with the detail and attention it deserves.
* What if physical activity doesn’t help people lose weight?
* Duke’s non-tenure-track faculty have unionized.
* They found Himmler’s occult book stash.
* “Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms.”
* Inside the Crazy Back-Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship With Cuba.
* Hackers ‘could take over your dildo and make it go berserk’, expert warns.
* Reading Calvin and Hobbes in Korea.
* I’ll be 100% honest, you had me at hello.
* And the best fantasy series you’ve never heard of is getting a second chance at a film franchise. This time it will work for sure!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 23, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NeverTrump, #StopTrump, 1969, abolition, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, altac, Andrew Cuomo, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Appalachia, austerity, Barack Obama, BART, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Ben Robertson, Bernie Sanders, books, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, chalk, charter schools, Christianity, Chronicles of Pyrdain, class struggle, cli-fi, climate change, coal, colonialism, comics, conferences, Cthulhu, Cuba, CUNY, Daredevil, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, diabetes, dildoes, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, ecology, education, Emory, empire, endorsements, Episode 7, espionage, evil, exercise, fantasy, fascism, Federal Reserve, fellowships, feminism, film, food, free speech, game theory, games, Gandalf, Gawker, George Lucas, Green Planets, grief, hackers, Hamlet, Hillary Clinton, Himmler, history, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, humor, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, ideology, jobs, joke addiction, jokes, Junot Díaz, Kansas, kids today, Korea, legalize drugs, Lloyd Alexander, Lord of the Rings, Louisiana, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nixon, occultism, oil, orcas, Paradox, Playboy, politics, psychology, race, religion, Republican primary 2016, sabotage, San Francisco, Saruman, scams, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sea World, Shakespeare, slavery, snubs and flubs, Soviet Union, standardized testing, Star Wars, stock market, student movements, superheroes, Superman, Telltale Games, The Americans, the Anthropocene, The Force Awakens, the occult, The Walking Dead, third parties, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, Twitter, unions, war on drugs, West Virginia, zombies, Zootopia