Posts Tagged ‘Wikipedia’
Fall Break Links? In This Economy?
I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...
- A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
- I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
- A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
- Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
- CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
- The CoFutures Prizes.
- Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
- Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
- Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
- How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
- Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
- From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
- Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
- Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
- Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
- Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
- Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
- The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
- Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
- Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
- Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
- The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
- To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
- ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.
- What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
- U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.
- All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
- Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
- Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
- Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
- Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
- The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
- Legally defining Peter Parker.
- Marvel adjective chart.
- Art Is Not Therapy.
- The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
- Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
- A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
- Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
- Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.
- Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
- At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
- This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
- Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
- Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
- If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
- Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
- Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
- Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
- The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
- The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
- Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
- Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…
- “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
- Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
- Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
- Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
- What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
- Equal population mapper.
- The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
- Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
- Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”
- A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
- The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
- War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
- When Chess Gets Weird.
- Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
- America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
- From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
- The United States of Abandoned Places.
- A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
- An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
- An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
- The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
- Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
- Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
- New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
- The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
- In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
- How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
- Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
- We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
- By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
- Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
- Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
- Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
- The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
- Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
- An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
- As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
- As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
- Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
- Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
- Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
- Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
- The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
- The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
- More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
- Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
- Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
- Anthropocene Gothic.
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
- Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
- Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
- It can always get worse.
- They say time is the fire in which we burn.
- How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
- And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”
* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* Actually existing media bias.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.
* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.
Wednesday Links!
* How the US built the world’s largest immigrant detention system. A list of companies that contract with ICE.
* Checking in on Duke and UNC under siege.
* 2019 Genius Grant awardees, including Lynda F’ing Barry.
* Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group. The Whitesplaining of History Is Over.
* The kids are all right: Students protest demonstration policy, deliver letter to Zilber.
* Wisconsin students make up smallest share of UW-Madison freshman class in at least 25 years. The Great Decline.
* And on the China and college beat: US universities see decline in students from China. China’s Higher-Ed Ambitions Are at Odds With Its Tightening Grip on Academic Freedom.
* Impacts ‘accelerating’ as leaders gather for UN talks. Earth’s Oceans Are Getting Hotter And Higher, And It’s Accelerating. ‘Unprecedented Conditions’ Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The African Congo Is Quietly Being Deforested As The Amazon Rainforest Burns. Scientists Set Out to Drift With Arctic Ice for a Year to Study Climate Change. On white supremacy and green living. The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History. This is daytime. Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End. “You’re So Accustomed to the Erasure and the Normalization of Catastrophism.”
* Can a burger help solve climate change?
* The Bible may have a naming discrepancy, and a Duke researcher plans to correct it.
* I might have done this one already, but what the hell: Le Guin’s work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living.
* A real “hold my beer” moment for neoliberalism: A doctor and medical ethicist, who happens to be Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, argues life after 75 is not worth living.
* Chris Ware, whose Rusty Brown is finally out, about which I am very excited, celebrates Peanuts.
* Epic Disasters: Revisiting Marvel & DC’s 1980s Famine Relief Comics.
* What Ad Astra Gets Wrong About Space Travel, Astronomy, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
* Normal society that is definitely normal and good.
* Die a villain, or live long enough to rebound as a hero.
* Will Google’s quantum computing breakthrough change everything?
* The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century. Surprisingly solid #1 and #2 picks.
* And I’d like to see Ol Donny Trump wriggle out of this jam! Impeachment step by step.
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* CFP: ASLE 2019: Paradise on Fire. CFP: Trans Futures. CFP: Superheroes and Disability: Unmasking Ableism in the Media.
* The return of the MA in SF at Liverpool.
* American Literature 90.2: “Queer about Comics.”
* ‘Mothers could not stop crying’: Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants. Immigrant moms in SeaTac prison ‘could hear their children screaming.’ Asylum seekers are being sexually assaulted in U.S. detention. A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants. Morristown, TN. Jeff Sessions is an evil man. There is no bottom. More denaturalization. More surveillance. ‘Again’ is happening right now on America’s border. What will you do?
* Meanwhile. By Trump’s own yardstick, NKorea pact falls flat.
* Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together.
* It’s hard to imagine a shift that better embodies a sound public health response to the opioid epidemic, and yet it’s the result—one among many—of a process initiated by Burlington’s mayor and chief of police, neither of whom have a background in health. What’s happening in Burlington suggests how a small city can begin to confront a monster epidemic and, in the process, stretch ideas about the role of a small-city police department.
* The World Cup of Disputed Nations.
* n+1’s patented World Cup Preview 2018.
* The New York Times is bad, exhibit 657. 658.
* Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House. The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence.
* Computer assistance for the modern novelist.
* Vanity Fair revisits The Staircase.
* Researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) say the obesity gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. An explosive U.N. report shows America’s safety net was failing before Trump’s election. Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together. Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.
* A Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protector Is Sentenced to Prison in North Dakota.
* Sadly The NRA is immune from prosecution no matter how flagrantly it broke the law here. Them’s the rules.
* Moving Animals to Safe Havens Can Unexpectedly Doom Them.
* Oil companies struggling to drill in the permafrost the oil they burn is melting.
* Puerto Rico’s morgue is overflowing with unclaimed dead bodies after a storm nine months ago.
* A Review of the ‘Hereditary’ Wikipedia Page, by Someone Who Is Too Afraid to See ‘Hereditary.’
* Of course: Bill Clinton comes to Al Franken’s defense.
* My petard — it seems to have somehow hoisted… me?
* What Happens When an Adjunct Instructor Wants to Retire?
* New Study on Rising Suicide Rates Suggests Capitalism Is Quite Literally Killing Us.
* Days Before Murder Trial, Prosecutors Reveal a Missing Confession. Dozens claim a Chicago detective beat them into confessions. A pattern of abuse or a pattern of lies?
* Marine Veteran Trains White Supremacists in Military Tactics.
* The best Mario Kart character, according to data science.
* Another military-industrial nightmare stealing its branding from Tolkien.
* The World Can’t Afford High-Tech Insulin.
* We Aren’t Teaching What Students Need to Know About Climate Science.
* Job Satisfaction of Humanities Master’s Degree Recipients.
* Building the Dream: LEGO Friends and the Construction of Human Capital.
* What the world would be like if land and sea were inverted.
* Talk. Talk or suffer the consequences. The state of our union is typical. Quantum computers. Herman Melville. Screenwriting. Dreams of flight.
* Infinity War crosses $2B. That this set of characters has revolutions both comics and film, fifty years apart, is pretty incredible.
* Map of North America, c. 2024 (start of Trump’s third term).
* On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.
* And giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years. Seems fine!
Monday Morning Links!
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here’s a Storify of the weekend’s #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* ‘Seat 14C’ short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington’s Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump’s CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it’s much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a “bipartisan” patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There’s no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the “Xennial” label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It’s a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Iran’s temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson’s widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* McConnell’s nearing a deal. Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes.
* ‘Terrorism’ misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I’m like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane’s backstory.
Weekend Links!
* My upcoming Studies in Genre course has been cancelled because it has been rendered superfluous.
* I realized I’d never gotten around to adding Paradoxa 28 to the sidebar. Check it out, if you haven’t yet!
* Cuban highlighted English, philosophy, and foreign language majors as just some of the majors that will do well in the future job market. “The nature of jobs is changing,” Cuban said.
* Love as Political Resistance: Lessons of Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler. Parable Of The Sower – Not 1984 – Is The Dystopia For Our Age.
* Wikipedia vs. the deletionists.
* Style guide: the look of white supremacy.
* This was beautiful: Coed CYO hoops team defies archdiocese order to kick girls out, forfeits season.
“Is your decision to play the game without the two young ladies on the team, or do you want to stay as a team as you have all year?” asked parent Matthew Dohn. “Show of hands for play as a team?”
Eleven hands shot up in unison. No one raised a hand when asked the alternative.
Assistant coach Keisha Martel, who is also the mom of one of the girls, Kayla Martel, reminded the team of the consequences. They had been told that playing the girls would mean the rest of the season would be forfeited.
“But if the girls play, this will be the end of your season. You won’t play in the playoffs,” she warned.
“It doesn’t matter,” one boy replied and others echoed, before the team began to chant, “Unity!”
In the crowd, supporters cheered along. Several parents began to cry.
* Scenes from the Day without Latinos in Milwaukee.
* What It Feels Like When Your World Ends: Rebecca Evans on Black Wave.
* How many pounds do you need to be able to life to teach a literature class?
* The Trump White House Is Screwed, Big League. Justice Department warned White House that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, officials say. Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence. Warren v. Flynn. Taking a Step Back. The Fog of Trump. What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like. Republicans Won’t Stand Up and Stop President Trump. So you want to brief the president. That’s a hell of an act. Democrats Demand Mar-A-Lago Membership List. As Presidents Live Longer, Doctors Debate Whether To Test For Dementia. Authoritarian government watch: 6/10. The Great Government Breakdown Has Begun. A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon.” Trump Official Obsessed Over Nuclear Apocalypse, Men’s Style, Fine Wines in 40,000 Posts on Fashion Style. The press conference from Hell. Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill? Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve. ‘President Supervillain’ Puts Trump’s Quotes in Red Skull’s Mouth, and It’s Disturbingly Perfect.
* Pitting class against race in the Age of Trump. Shadow of the Plantation.
* Before the Flood: Karel Čapek and the Destructive Drift of History.
* Fantasies of the deep state.
* Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade.
* Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile that American officials say violates a landmark arms control treaty, posing a major test for President Trump as his administration is facing a crisis over its ties to Moscow.
* ICE detains a woman at a courthouse receiving an order of protection, likely after receiving a tip from her alleged abuser. ICE shows up at a women’s shelter. ICE Agents Arrest Men Leaving Alexandria Church Shelter. Why Did ICE Arrest & Imprison a 23-Year-Old DREAMer and DACA Recipient Living Legally in the U.S.? Trump Considering Using National Guard for Immigration Raids. How new is this? Is ICE Out of Control?
* Well this all seems in order: EPA nominee Scott Pruitt won’t say if he would recuse himself from his own lawsuits against the agency. He’s since been confirmed, of course.
* Shocked, shocked to find gambling in the casino: Maybe College Isn’t the Great Equalizer. (More here.)
* Same joke but new study confirms that voter ID laws are very racist.
* Academics, your moment is here: Depression Is an Unlikely Advantage in the Fight Against Fascism.
* The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* I’ll allow it: There’s Going to Be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Comic Book.
* So preoccupied with whether they could, etc: Woolly mammoth on the verge of resurrection, scientists say.
* Though this one is pretty good too.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About a Women’s Strike.
* What if we pretended something that was obviously an effect of wealth were biological? I think it might look a little something like…
* Obamacare Repeal Could Cripple Efforts To Combat The Opioid Epidemic. Paul Ryan wants to bring back lifetime limits. Millions now rely on these plans, and we should defend them until we can win something better. But we also shouldn’t entertain any illusions: the ACA marketplaces rest on a flawed health care ideology that tellingly attracts many adherents on the Right, including Ryan.
* News you can use: The 8 Most Inaccurate Depictions of Mars Ever Put on Film.
* The surgeon who wants to perform a head transplant by 2017.
* Marquette in the news! Marquette Law alum chosen as the first black Bachelorette.
* Lost Essay Reveals Winston Churchill Was Almost Certain Aliens Exist. He met the Daleks! It’s canon.
* Is it really time to teach 1984?
* “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”
* Another apocalypse: The oceans are losing oxygen.
* The New Star Wars: Aftermath Novel Reveals the Pitiful Fate of Jar Jar Binks. This bummed me out a lot, actually.
* Incredible: Suspect in North Korea killing ‘thought she was taking part in TV prank.’
* Of course you had me at “Squid Communicate with a Secret, Skin-Powered Alphabet.”
Surprise Sunday Links! Watch Out!
* The route Google Maps recommends if you’re headed to Ferrum College from the west involves what may be the loneliest and most roller-coaster-like stretch of roadway ever to earn a state route number from Virginia. It’s a narrow ribbon of pavement with no center line, a twisting trail you drive imagining that if you go over the edge, weeks could pass before anyone found the wreckage. Only at the other end do you spot a yellow sign that reads, “GPS Routing Not Advised.” Small, Rural Colleges Grapple With Their Geography.
* A friend recommended the short Cuban SF novel Super Extra Grande to me, which I liked a lot. Some profiles on the author: 1, 2.
* Horrific terror attack at historic Orlando gay night club leaves 20 dead.
* Scientists think they’ve figured out the Antikythera Mechanism.
* In search of Cervantes’s grave.
* Old and busted: AI. New hotness: IA.
* Landscaping in the Anthropocene.
* As an added experiment, the researchers applied their model to the current distribution of human populations on Earth. They found that, under all the same assumptions, 12.5 percent of the global population would be forced to migrate at least 1,000 kilometers, and up to a third of the population would have to move more than 500 kilometers.
* In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history.
…what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.
* Twitter must fix this. Its brand is increasingly defined by excessive harassment.
* More on The 7-1/2-Hour O.J. Simpson Doc Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer.
* Because poetry is considered so small, so irrelevant, it’s tempting for poetry critics to look for the BIG themes in poems to demonstrate that poetry matters. I continue to learn from critics who take on this labor. However, because ALL African literary criticism is assumed to matter the more it focuses on the BIG SOCIOPOLITICOECONOMICDISASTERTHATISAFRICA, I am inclined to turn to quieter moments—spaces for the intimate, the friendly, the quiet, the loving, the depressed, the depressing, grief, and melancholy. I’m drawn to the register that is not the shout, and never the headline. I linger at the quotidian to insist that the African imagination considers livability and shareability.
* For everyone, he claims, is shortchanged when the guiding principle and “key driver” of the institution is no longer thought, but money (ix). Faculty are silenced, yes, by the drive to conformity and homogeneity. But students are also cheated when they are treated simply as “human capital”: “When the university is reduced to the function of preparation for jobs and not for life, life itself gets lost under the jobs” (85). Most broadly and seriously of all, society as a whole suffers as the university abandons its traditional role as “that institution that has a responsibility to counter the incipient violence of natural force” (40). The fate of the university is bound up with the fate of democracy and citizenship at large. If society is to change, and injustice and inequality challenged, we need now more than ever an institution whose role is to be “’critical’ of the existing world state of affairs, dissident with respect to it” (6).
* I sometimes wish tenure were what its enemies believe it is.
* White supremacist PACs and Trump. The stain of Trump. “A GOP senator might vote for Hillary Clinton. Here’s how rare that is.” Trump has underperformed the real estate market by a mere 57% since 1976. Alas, Mitt.
* I’m calling it: Trump will drop out of the race by July 5 at the latest. He will blame the unfair media and political correctness, allude to some wack-ass conspiracy involving Black Lives Matter and/or Hezbollah, and go to his grave telling everyone he knows that if he had stayed in the race, he would’ve beaten Clinton.
* You may be done with your quasi-legal homebrew server, but your quasi-legal homebrew server is not done with you: The FBI has been conducting a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information for months.
* We narrowed Clinton’s vice-presidential possibilities to 27. Now you pick one. For a long time I’ve thought it definitely be one of the Castro brothers, probably Julian, but Elizabeth Warren has made such a push lately I’ve started to think it could actually be her. Of course you can pick Trump’s too, from such a weak field it includes his own daughter.
* Let me close with a broad statement. In the news you will see some rather hysterical statements about how all bets are off this year. That is true to an extent: on the Republican side, the national party’s positions and their rank-and-file voters’ preferences are far out of whack. In a deep sense, their decision process in 2016 became broken. But that does not mean that opinion is unmeasurable. Far from it. In the aggregate, pollsters still do a good job reaching voters. And voters are still people whose opinions move at a certain speed. To my thinking, polls may be the best remaining way to assess what is happening.
* But just in case: I Spent the 90s Fighting Fascists on the Streets of Warsaw.
* If you’re not sick of these yet: What Hamilton Forgets About Hamilton.
* The gentrification of Sesame Street.
* Review: Warcraft Is The Battlefield Earth Of The 21st Century. Warcraft, Hollywood, And The Growing Importance Of China’s Box Office.
* Because you demanded it! Kevin Smith Says That His Mallrats Sequel Will Be a 10-Part TV Series.
* Same joke but for The Passion of the Christ 2.
* Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Air Bag Crisis: How the company’s failures led to lethal products and the biggest auto recall in history.
* The case for Lady Stoneheart showing up in season six of Game of Thrones. Let me say I have my doubts.
* What to do if you find a goose than lays golden eggs. Machine Learning: A Flowchart. If you read Kafka’s stories backwards, they all make great kids’ movies.
* And the moral cowards at Wikipedia have moved to suppress my work again.
Weekend Links!
* Good news, everyone! “A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.
* What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny of the Impression.
* U. of New Hampshire Concedes It Shouldn’t Have Bought $17,000 Table.
* Chicago State lays off a third of its staff.
* RiffTrax tackles The Force Awakens.
* The legally and ethically fraught world of post-mortem sperm donation.
* Raising a Child With Grit Can Mean Letting Her Quit.
* Yale Watch: Neither retaining Calhoun nor adding Franklin makes a lick of sense.
* Elisabeth Moss to Star in Hulu Straight-to-Series Drama Handmaid’s Tale.
* Heroic time-traveling weasel shuts down Large Hadron Collider to protect the weasel future.
* “Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.” Meanwhile: Susan Sarandon: I’m more afraid of Hillary’s war record than Trump’s wall.
* And he’s will have had always had my vote: This Candidate for President Claims He’s Traveled Through Time.
Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost
* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.
* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.
* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.
* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.
* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.
* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.
* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.
* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.
* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.
* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.
* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.
* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.
* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.
* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.
* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.
* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!
* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.
* Coca-Cola and the denialists.
* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.
* What If Stalin Had Computers?
* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.
* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.
* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.
* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.
* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”
* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.
* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”
* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”
* Understanding Neal Stephenson.
* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.
* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.
* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.
* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.
* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?
* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?
* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.
* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.
* An oral history of Six Feet Under.
* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.
* The new Cold War is a Corn War.
* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.
* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.
* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.
* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.
* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?
* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.
* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.
* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.
* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.
* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!
* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.
* Hell, with same-day delivery.
* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.
* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.
* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.
* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.
In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”
* Science proves the universe is slowly dying
* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.
* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.
* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.
* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”
* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.
* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.
* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.
* Don’t bring your dogs to work.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.
* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.
* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.
* Don’t say it unless you mean it.
* And we shall Truffle Shuffle no more forever.
Spring Break Is Over and All Our Accomplishments Turn to Ash Links
* The best news: Jaimee’s book has won the Anthony Hecht Prize at Waywiser Press.
* Median Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges, 2014-15.
* Russian Witch Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.
* Get ready for Margaret Atwood’s next.
* Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won’t Be As Easy As He Thought. But it’s not all bad news: Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System.
* Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation.
* They found Cervantes’s tomb.
* * The Concussion Crisis Reaches a New Level.
* Choctaws helped starving Irish in 1847.
* Ian Bogost: Video Games Are Better Without Characters.
* But in 2014, the financial year that appears to have been the final straw for Sweet Briar, total operating revenues were $34.8 million and total operating expenditures were $35.4 million, which means that the deficit the school is running is actually smaller than the cost of any of the bad deals it’s gotten itself into with banks.
* The United Arab Emirates, where New York University opened a new campus last year, has barred an N.Y.U. professor from traveling to the monarchy after his criticism of the exploitation of migrant construction workers there.
* If one arbitrary, designed-by-committee college ranking system is good, two must be…
* What is Star Trek’s vision of politics?
* The Uncensored, Epic, Never-Told Story Behind ‘Mad Men.’
* The Secret History of the Hardy Boys.
* A household name to black audiences yet completely unknown to white audiences, Gary Owen, a blond, blue-eyed stand-up from Ohio, has a career wholly unlike that of any comedian before him.
* Almost seven years ago, a troubled 11-year-old girl reported that she had been raped — twice — in her Northwest Washington neighborhood. Despite medical evidence of sexual assault, records show that no suspects were arrested and the cases were given only sporadic attention by the police . Instead, in the second case, the police had the girl, Danielle Hicks-Best, charged with filing a false report.
* People who lose their jobs are less willing to trust others for up to a decade after being laid-off, according to new research from The University of Manchester.
* Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List: 28 Favorite Books That Shaped His Mind and Music.
* The Disturbing Puzzle Game That Nobody Can Solve.
* What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?
* The two Wisconsin tween girls accused of stabbing a friend 19 times and leaving her in a park—because they believed doing so would protect their families from the mythical internet horror known as Slender Man—will be tried as adults for first-degree attempted homicide, a judge ruled Friday.
* Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has been on a mission to weed out purported voter fraud in the state since he took office in 2011. After launching an investigation into what he called an “expanding loophole” allowing non-citizens to vote in Ohio and potentially decide elections, he announced Thursday that 145 non-citizens were registered to vote illegally in 2014, amounting to just .0002 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in the state.
* Nihilism watch, Washington Post edition.
* How to Build a $400 Billion F-35 that Doesn’t Fly.
* This is the best version of Star Wars — and watching it is a crime.
* Before Star Wars: Rogue One Takes Off, a History of the X-Wing Series.
* What could possibly go wrong? In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Mutant Animals to Be Hunted. Have to say I’m really pulling for the mutant animals here.
* And now comes another, increasingly prevalent way to show appreciation for those who’ve served in the military: exempting them from taxes. Would you like to know more?
* Guess Who’s Editing the Wiki Pages of Police Brutality Victims.
* California has about one year of water left.
* That gum you like may actually not be coming back into style.
* How did they manage to screw up Powers?
* Four years after Fukushima, just one man lives in the exclusion zone – to look after the animals.
Monday, Monday
* The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
* The exciting return of “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional,” and friends, this one could be a doozy. Here Is What Will Happen If The Supreme Court Strikes Down Obamacare’s Subsidies. And from the archives: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.
* It’s baaaaack: A totally legal, totally shady way that Republicans could ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
* The Quest for Restoration, or, Gone Girl and Interstellar Considered as the Same Film.
* As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying – from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola, or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we’re less accustomed to consider the risks of living long – of outliving our retirement savings.
* Is Serial problematic? Serial: listeners of podcast phenomenon turn detectives – with troubling results. What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much. Alas, I listened to this this weekend and got hooked despite all my critical detachment.
* Doritos-Flavored Mountain Dew Is Real, PepsiCo Confirms. This is unfathomable. There are some lines never meant to be crossed.
* Can anyone even remember postmodernism?
* World Cup Watch: North Koreans working as ‘state-sponsored slaves’ in Qatar.
* Against spoiler alerts, in the LARoB.
The rise of spoiler-free criticism seems like a move away from criticism as art — and a move toward criticism as an arm of fandom marketing. It’s fine to not want spoilers in your criticism. But there is something distasteful about the assumption that providing spoilers is some sort of lapse in ethics or etiquette. If you don’t treat art first as a consumer product, the spoiler-free doctrine seems to suggest, you’re being cruel and unfair. But critics really are not under any obligation to like what you like or to treat art with one particular kind of reverence. In the name of preserving suspense, the command to remain spoiler-free threatens to make criticism and art more blandly uniform, and less surprising.
* On artificial intelligence in board games.
* Wikipedia’s list of deleted articles with freaky or inappropriate titles.
* Tig Notaro, national treasure.
* For example, research in economics has shown that the wage gap between lighter- and darker-skinned African Americans is nearly as large as the gap between African Americans and whites. In our analysis of data from theNational Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we found that the darkest-skinned African American girls were three times more likely to be suspended at school than their lighter-skinned counterparts — a disparity that is again roughly equal to the gap between blacks and whites. Alternatively put, while African American girls are three times more likely to be suspended than white girls, the darkest-skinned African American girls are several times more likely to experience suspension.
* A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
* Frenzied Financialization: Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer. Finance as a New Terrain for Progressive Urban Politics.
* Former Football Player Sues UNC Over Fake Courses. A University President’s Comments on Rape. Brown University Student Tests Positive For Date-Rape Drug at Frat Party.
* Occasion #7 is all about debt.
* Cloud computing: the race to zero.
* Telepathy is now possible using current technology.
* Let me pause and say here: of course I love many literary dudes. They are not, all of them, smug and condescending. But let me say something else: I thought for a while that the really terrible ones were time limited — that they were products of the 1950s, of a particular time period, and that it really was a viable strategy to just talk about snacks until they all retired. But I have now realized this is not true; new terrible smug dudes are coming up through the ranks. Hydra-like, smug dude attitude keeps springing forth from itself.
* The corals that came back from the dead.
* Billboard ads are expensive to construct, maintain and rent, but they don’t serve any functional purposes — so Michal Polacek redesigned them to house the homeless. The next best thing to just abolishing homelessness.
* In 2012, DiMaggio released the results of his own Safe Routes to School program. Child pedestrian injury rates had plummeted, falling to half their original numbers. “We showed that kids can still be kids,” says DiMaggio. “They can walk and bike to school and be safe.” The project’s federal funding expired last year, however, and no plans exist to extend the initiative to areas beyond the immediate vicinity of the selected schools.
* Obama endorses net neutrality.
* Incredibly misleading ad placement at Amazon inside the book description makes every book seem like it was an Amazon Editors’ Favorite Book of the Year.
* “But a deep look at Mars One’s plan and its finances reveals that not only is the goal a longshot, it might be a scam.” No! No! I won’t believe it!
* How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in 2014’s Close Races?
For His Unwavering Devotion to Weekend Links, Gerry Canavan Has Been Awarded the Nobel Prize for Linkblogging
* Every so often the Nobel Committee accidentally picks a genuinely deserving, genuinely inspiring recipient of the Peace Prize. This year was one. A 2013 profile of Malala Yousafzai. A speech to Pakistani Marxists. What did one Nobel laureate say to the other?
* Every so often the Supreme Court accidentally makes a good decision. Last night’s overturning of Wisconsin’s voter suppression law was one.
* What would the twentieth-century history of English studies look like if we had thought to preserve the records of our teaching? How could that history be different if we had institutional archives of syllabi, student notes, lecture drafts, handouts and seminar papers, just as we have archives of journal articles, drafts of novels, recordings of performances, and committee meeting minutes? What if universities had collected classroom documents alongside other records and traces of the knowledge they create and culture that they value?
* Another lovely Chomsky rant on the university.
So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
* Recent cuts have unfortunately made future cuts inevitable: The University of Wisconsin System is about to do some wholesale, strategic belt-tightening, according to its president. But it’s not all absolutely miserable news:
Regent Janice Mueller noted that of the $1.6 billion total paid to unclassified staff on UW campuses, faculty accounted for $550 million, leaving more than $1 billion going to non-faculty. “That seemed a little out of whack to me,” Mueller said. “I would think faculty salaries would be the larger share.”
I didn’t think Regents were allowed to notice things that like.
* The Excessive Political Power Of White Men In The United States, In One Chart.
* Phil Maciak on the greatness of Transparent.
* Why we need academic freedom: On Being Sued.
* Neoliberalism is the triumph of the state, not its retreat. The case of Mexico.
* On the cultural ideology of Big Data.
* It Would Actually Be Very Simple To End Homelessness Forever.
* It seems that all of Pearson’s critical foundational research and proven classroom results in the world couldn’t get the question 3 x 7 x 26 correct.
* Federal spending was lower this year than Paul Ryan originally asked for. Ha, take that Republicans! Another Obama-led triumph for the left!
* But things will be different once Obama finally becomes president. Obama Plans to Close Guantanamo Whether Congress Likes It Or Not.
* Nightmares: Could Enterovirus D68 Be Causing Polio-Like Paralysis in Kids?
* NYC airport workers walk off job, protesting lack of protection from Ebola risks.
* SF in everything: Malware needs to know if it’s in the Matrix.
* Lady Ghostbusters will be a reboot, almost assuredly a terrible one.
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
* It’s happening again: Vastly Different Stories Emerging In Police Shooting Of St. Louis Teen. The Associated Press is On It:
* Teenagers in prison have a shockingly high suicide rate.
* Roger Ebert: The Collected Wikipedia Edits.
* The many faces of capitalism.
* The University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department issued an apology Wednesday after a list of safety tips posted to the department’s website was criticized for appearing to blame victims of campus crimes, particularly survivors of sexual assault.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings.
* Today in theology: Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church decided Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control.
By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.
* Two Bad Tastes That Taste Bad Together: The US Doesn’t Have Enough Railroads to Keep Up With the Oil Boom.
* For some unfathomable reason somebody handed Cary Nelson another shovel: A Civility Manifesto.
* Another piece on the law and Tommy the Chimp.
* And maybe there are some doors we just shouldn’t open: I’m Slavoj Žižek, AMA.
Gerry Canavan 