A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

• Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.
• (There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter thread if you’re needing more.)
• I also have a harder-to-get piece in this handbook to comics and graphic narratives about why Jimmy Corrigan is (hear me out) just a really great comic. Cancel me if you must!
• The current issue of SFFTV, on sf and games, was really great — read the interview section for free!
• The current issue of Extrapolation is great too — but no freebies there.

this but for all of science fiction #SFRA21 https://t.co/lSf60ivJxP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2021

• I have a nice little cameo in this great Butler story at LARB: Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher. And I was interviewed for this piece on quantum mechanics and science fiction at The Quantum Daily.
• Hit me up Hollywood! Adaptations coming of Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Fledgling, joining Wild Seed and Dawn.
• In addition to having a ton of great stuff in it, SFRA Review 51.3 is a very important issue of SFRA Review, including candidate statements for the fall election and proposed revision of the bylaws.
• CFP – Strange Novel Worlds? Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture, 31 Aug 2021. Call for submissions: Just Utopias. CFP: Tabletop Teaching: Board Games and Social Justice. CFP: Dissenting Beliefs: Heresy and Heterodoxy in Fantasy. CFP: Religious Futurisms. CFP: Extrapolation: Special Issue on Speculative Fiction’s Intersections with Posthumanism and New Materialism. CFP: SFFTV, “Oversights.” New book series: Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture.
• A messy utopia is all we get. The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction. From the depths of the pandemic towards an ecosocialist utopia.
• Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. Dangerous Heat Wave Is Literally Melting Critical Infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest. 72% of the western US is currently in “severe” drought or worse. This is now the most extensive severe drought in recorded history. Six of California’s seven largest wildfires have erupted in the past year. Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle. Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse. The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. Drought deeps in Minnesota. By the mid-2030s even the moon won’t save us from regular floods as sea levels rise, says NASA. The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’. Joe Biden Is Already Failing on Climate Policy. There’s no going back, so what can be saved?

"Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year."https://t.co/C41QGnwWCi

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 29, 2021

"According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, tells the @latimes. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling." https://t.co/IbpzNgQrgB

— Michael Hawthorne (@scribeguy) July 12, 2021

Lots going on but for me the big story is the environment on which all human society depends is undergoing a collapse so staggeringly rapid there are now multiple climate disasters across the US every week and you still can’t get representative democracy to even pretend to care.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2021

do you ever think about how the proposition that the Earth should remain inhabitable is an absolutely fringe position in US politics, without representation in either political party and routinely mocked by essentially all mass media of any sort

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2021

"The Climate Change Review of Books" has a nice ring to it https://t.co/Ry4SkA8ElH

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2021

As meteorologist @EricHolthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 29, 2021

• The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
• I Am Supposed To Be Writing.
• DC11 becomes a site of acute thermodynamics, as server heat multiplies server heat. If anything, the true threat comes from within, not without, as unchecked servers would overheat themselves into oblivion. Put bluntly: the tech industry makes our planet hot in the service of keeping its computers cool. This, I suggest, is what makes DC11 a specifically atmospheric media object. DC11’s reliance on and manipulation of air contributes to the cloud’s formal tendencies toward displacement and (re)centralization. Air expedites the transformation of data centers into climate bunkers. Furthermore, the air’s perceived insubstantiability, compared with other subjects of environmental media study, such as rare earth metals or wastewater, makes its pollution that much more challenging to account. Faced with these atmospheric operations, media studies must develop analytical techniques that pierce through the data center’s security veil to reveal how the cloud now programs the atmosphere against itself.
• The humanities are shrinking, except at community colleges.
• IHE profiles my Greensboro pal Jillian Weise. And another Greensboro friend is hitting the big time with a great new memoir.
• Trees as more-than-human collectives.
• Let’s Rank Every Ted Chiang Story Ever Published.
• How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.
• A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.
• Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.
• You can now listen to “The Three Body Problem” as a serialized podcast.
• The Futuristic Stink of Amazon’s Science Fiction.
• 75 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi and Fantasy from African Authors.
• Doctor Who is Anglofuturism.
• The Anarres Project.
• Very cool things happening at ASU.

Time travel is always developed as society crumbles, prompting the rich to flee into the past. There they assume positions of power, which makes the timeline even worse, while also speeding up the development of time travel. Each loop is shorter and nastier than the one before.

— Micro Flash Fiction📖 (@MicroFlashFic) July 4, 2021

• Remembering Climate Change: A Message from the Year 2071.
• How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.
• Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents. Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings.

It’s very easy to imagine asking a room full of students “How is Frodo’s story like that of Beren?”, filling a white board with correspondences, asking, “Wait, if Frodo is like Beren, then who is his Luthien?” And then everyone’s eyes go wide as they realize the implications. 6/7

— Jason Tondro (@doctorcomics) July 1, 2021

• Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts.
• The Economic Recovery Is Here. It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Seen.
• Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear.
• The Clintons Had Slaves.
• California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter? How We’ll Know It’s Finally Time to Stop Masking.

Pretty damn impressive
Thanks Darren Lu @Reddit pic.twitter.com/ST6ueaaoY1

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Every piece of data from real-life shows the vaccines work very, very well— yes, even against Delta. Just checked US vaccine breakthrough hospitalizations. It's 6,587 people among the ~163,000,000 vaccinated: or 0.004%. Three fourths are elderly— as happens with other diseases. https://t.co/TmZkxRlETk pic.twitter.com/fUaTyXprey

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2021

• What this implies is that, while liberal democracy witnessed a struggle for recognition, neoliberalism converts this into a struggle for reputation. The cultural achievement of commercial society, according to Honneth, drawing on Hegel, was that it enabled individuals to confront one another on the principle of equality via exchange. The rise of criticism in the bourgeois public sphere saw artworks judged on a principle of aesthetic autonomy—that is, independent of status. The ideal critic resembled the ideal consumer in the spot market, determining the value of each product on its intrinsic merits. But if, as Feher argues, neoliberal capitalism reconfigures social relations around the template of financial investment, the public sphere becomes governed by a very different temporality. Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation. Every artefact, identity, moral action and political demand becomes viewed as an addition to an archive of prior behaviour, revealing a pattern to be projected into the future. The present is only ever a new data point. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media.
• Luxury Surveillance.
• Things of Beauty: The Politics of Postmillennial Nostalgia for Mid-century Design.
• Utopia of Quirk: Mystery Men (1999) and the Fate of the Nerd.
• Our World, Our People: Nationalism and Sovereign Power in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”
• Regulation as near-mystical abstraction.
• The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism. Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists.
• “Cat Person” and Me.
• Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn.’
• How Marvel conquered culture.
• WandaVision Not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen.
• The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk.”
• Time For The End Of The Teen Gymnast.

The decentring of the He-Man/Skeletor binary paves the way for the universalist ecological struggle to save Eternia’s magic; or the cultural logic of Mattel in the age of disaster capitalism… https://t.co/dht0sd9Wv6

— Historicizing Matt is Negating the Negation ⵄ ⭕️ (@MattFlisfeder) July 26, 2021

• Strange Plaque Piques Interest On North Farwell In Milwaukee.
• Still thinking about this tweet from Juneteeth.
• How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire. The Miseducation of White Children.
• Catholic colleges ignored faculty handbook provisions in layoffs, report alleges. Unlivable faculty wages put Catholic higher education in existential crisis.
• The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21. The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas.
• Academentia: the Organization Insanity of the Modern University. The Work of Culture: Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University.
• For College Finances, There’s No ‘Return to Normal.’
• The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did.
• What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money?
• Antiracism in the contemporary university.
• Betrayed by the Dream Factory. The Master’s Trap: What makes a graduate program predatory? ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.
• The end of the NCAA.
• The other freshman class.

Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet. pic.twitter.com/1lHiCfT8Vk

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) August 7, 2021

• So, most people are unaware that One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the novel, has a bonkers sequel called The Starlight Barking.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me.
• Amanda Knox: Who Owns My Name?
• The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick.
• The Green Imagination in Board Game Landscapes. Mother Lands is a tabletop role-playing game free of slavery and colonialism. Board games have a colonialism problem.
• One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets.
• 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
• Who will police Mars?

Every Gen Xer loves The Goonies, because we really wanted to believe there was some treasure or redemption or some kind of meaning in our abandonment

— The Actual, Real Cormac McCarthy (@_Shan_Martinez_) June 21, 2021

• Adjunct hell: the rise of the new campus novel.
• Generational politics is a socialism of fools.
• He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence.
• There will be blood: women on the shocking truth about periods and perimenopause.
• ​The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
• The beauty of Earth from orbit.
• Aliens could have spotted Earth cross the sun from more than 1,700 star systems. A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The new American religion of UFOs. What if the truth isn’t out there?
• With UFO report making headlines, Wisconsin has its own history with the paranormal.
• Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams.
• And don’t cry for me, I’m already dead.

pic.twitter.com/j2NWCkNdoy

— Against late capitalism ☭ Ⓐ (@Inhumansoflate1) June 26, 2021

Behold! Links!

* CFP: Forming the Future.

* CFP: The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces (Warsaw, December 2019).

* CFP: Decolonizing the Undead.

* CFP: Adaptation and Nostalgia.

* In Urging Faculty Not to Unionize, Marquette Cites Catholic Identity. Better doublecheck that citation.

* J.R.R. Tolkien fans — here’s your chance to become part of Marquette University’s oral history project.

* Attributed to “Mrs. F. C. Harris,” [“A Runaway World”] is the first American science-fiction story by a woman using her own name.

* 2019 Hugo Finalists.

* Wild Seed goes to series.

* I went on a little tear about Slaughterhouse Five some people seemed to like.

* Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures.

* Science fiction and the path back.

* What Western Media Got Wrong About China’s Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth.’

* My point in observing that atmospheric carbon levels have gone up about about 14% while Game of Thrones has been a thing is that geological time is now faster than pop-cultural time. This has only ever been true before of earthquakes and volcanoes.

* Counterpoint: Climate change should be the subject of every DNC debate.

* There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for a disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place. Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years. Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Housing policy is climate policy. Striking at the End of the World. Climate Change Drove Neanderthals to Cannibalism, New Research Suggests. Fascism and ecology. Fascism, ecology, and misogyny. Neoliberal catastrophism. The road to civilizational collapse. Sounds like a lovely place for the last 10,000 people alive to hold up. Now do I have your attention?

* It’s only going to get worse: Trump Just Purged DHS Because Its Leaders Weren’t Breaking the Law Enough. Trump told border agents to break U.S. law and defy judicial orders.They all belong in jail.

the cruelty is the point, yes, but it is also a means to an end: normalizing and legitimizing ever-greater cruelty as a sober and patriotic response to accelerated conditions of suffering which they and we all know are coming. it's a pedagogy in brutishness

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) April 5, 2019

I love how we're all just going about our 9-5 jobs and normal habits while the fact that–short of immediate, transformative action–a near-term mass die-off alongside the collapse of civilization is the most plausible scenario.

— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) March 25, 2019

once this deleuzian I knew shared a reading of The Matrix about how "resistance" was an electrical engineering pun that also described how the movie's human body batteries functioned to power the system that enslaved them and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think of this often

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 15, 2018

* Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats.’
* Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the “embarrassing” kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for “elites” from “elite” institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class.

* Just a few years ago, universities had a chance to make a quality education affordable for everyone. Here’s the little-known and absolutely infuriating history of what they did instead.

* Huge, if true: Assessment Is an Enormous Waste of Time.

* Exciting new horizons in making student evaluations even worse.

* Teaching in the time of Campus Reform.

* ‘I started dreading going to class’: Women speak out about sexual harassment experiences at Duke. Elsewhere on the Duke beat: Duke to Pay $112.5M Over Allegations of Falsified Research. Duke’s Nursing School Failed Them. They Say Their Race Played a Role.

On James B. Duke whose "true “innovation” came not in the 1880s, when the cigarette machine transformed the production process" but in the expansion of corporate power, partially through the manipulation of the 14th Amendment to protect corporate interests https://t.co/Sug2Vl8scf

— corinne blalock (@corinneblalock) April 5, 2019

* The death of an adjunct. This is how you kill a profession. How to talk to NTT faculty. There’s a lot of pain in academia today. So many workers/scholars are feeling left behind in the job market. If you are, too, you’re not alone. I talk to 8 working-class scholars who have been pushed out of the academy in this special Working episode.

* Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research. Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change.

* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated. What happens to faculty after a college closes?

* A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?

* The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend.

* The humanities: not so bad!

* I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?

niche tweet: I re-wrote the opening of Never Let Me Go for VAPs pic.twitter.com/Fzx9M4J55y

— Jacquelyn Ardam (@jaxwendy) April 4, 2019

* Amazing coincidences happen every day.

* Dear legislators: Harvard uses federal work study money to fund Dorm Crew, making low income students clean dorms of other students. It gets worse. Investigate.

* The digital humanities debacle.

* Unsilencing the writing workshop: creative writing heresy from Beth Nguyen.

* On Ungrading.

* Chinese schools are using facial recognition on students. But should they? I say teach the controversy.

* Start school later! This is the lowest hanging fruit for educational improvement there is.

* A Note From Your Colleagues With Hearing Loss: Just Use a Microphone Already.

* Love to live in an apartheid state: “GOP leaders criticize Gov. Tony Evers’ lead pipe replacement plan, raising concerns that too much money would go to Milwaukee.” And a flashback to October: As the tax dollars paid to the state rose 19% between 2009 and 2015, an increase of more than $400 million, the amount of revenue the state shared with the county did not grow, according to county officials.

Every urban area in America gets looted three times: first by city officials redirecting resources to wealthy white residents, then by county officials outflowing money to the white suburbs, then by state officials outflowing money to other, whiter regions of the state.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019

…which doesn’t even factor in the way the federal payments system loots densely populated Democratic regions for the benefit of tiny populated Republican regions.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019

* Buzzfeed returns to Baraboo, Wisconsin, site of the infamous Nazi prom photo.

* ‘Disgusted by it:’ Whitefish Bay High School students accused of using racist language.

* Make Milwaukee Socialist Again.

* Abigail Nussbaum’s Us link roundup.

* “Jordan Peele’s Mad TV contract stopped him from getting onto SNL so he started smoking weed and began plotting to take over Hollywood.”

* In the history of gaming there are just 14 playable black female characters.

* That on a long enough MCU timetable (at least some) Skrulls are going to turn out to be evil after all is the icing on the cake.

* Real Native history in a video game: An Indigenous take on The Oregon Trail.

* After the Paradise Fire.

* The Suprising History of the Ball Pit.

* All the absolute worst people in the world, working together and on the same page.

* Bidenwatch: when the cool uncle becomes the creepy uncle.

* Gravelmentum.

* Buttigiegmageddon.

the real stakes of the Democratic primary are not about policy or about winning the election but about which group of crooks, scammers, and amoral hangers-on get cushy jobs with a tremendous amount of power and influence for the next decade, so you can see why people care so much

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2019

* Twilight of Rachel Maddow.

* The Senate having another extremely normal one.

actual quote from the Senate floor today: "You'll notice … important features here: First of all, the rocket launcher strapped to Pres. Reagan's back & then the stirring, unmistakeable patriotism of the velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag." https://t.co/mv4h6oSKd0

— Rex Santus (@rexsantus) March 26, 2019

* Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to dril. Give it to Bill Watterson, too!

* Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. ‘Think of the mothers of sons’: Notre Dame mom begs female students to stop wearing leggings, sparking protests. Sports-Bra Outrage.

* “New bills would ban pelvic exams without consent.” You mean they aren’t already — what?

on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed- pic.twitter.com/rbYadoG4Dn

— matt lubchansky (@Lubchansky) March 29, 2019

* The US government is holding Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement again. It’s a vindictive, unconscionable attack on a brave truth teller.

* The changing face of homelessness in America in 2019.

* The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century.

* Minimum wage increases are associated with reduced numbers of suicide deaths.

* Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths.

* Chronic, passive suicidal ideation is like living in the ocean. Let’s start talking about how to tread water.

* 13% of the world’s companies are ‘zombies.’ That’s not healthy.

* Today in the richest society in human history: Why I Am Stockpiling Insulin in My Fridge. The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.

* Epilepsy patient refuses to leave Vancouver hospital until her health needs are met.

we write "Millenials Are Killing The [X] Industry" because when you write "Unsustainable Profit-Driven Systems Are Crumbling Around A Wage-Suppressed Global Populace Serving Roughly 2000 Aging Billionaires" people get too depressed to click through & watch our hair cream ads

— regular gem (@Choplogik) April 5, 2019

* The keeper of the secret: one man’s devotion to uncovering the details of a single lynching case from the 1920s.

* A majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds.

* The end of Subway.

* They tried to warn us: Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries.

* The Joker trailer legitimately seems like an SNL digital short about trying to make a prestige, Oscar-bait comic book movie. I can’t believe it’s real.

* The Deep Space Nine Anniversary Documentary Is Hitting Theaters for One Day Only.

* Fossil found from the day the dinosaurs died? Seems hard to believe, but wow.

* Click this link if you dare, but remember that some things that are learned cannot be unlearned.

* Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped.

* It’s Rupert Murdoch’s world, we’re just all going to die in it. I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.

* The rent is still too damn high.

* Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won’t Heal. This week in Hell World. 

Nearly 20 years after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, students there are putting stickers on their ID & cellphones to indicate their desire for images of their bodies to be publicized & shared if they are killed by gun violence.https://t.co/Ynvy1oA0ml via @CNN

— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) April 1, 2019

* First photo of a black hole. An informative Twitter thread.

* How Animators Created the Spider-Verse.

* That’s me in the corner. Atheism and democracy.

* How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care.

* A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.

* Depressing, yes, but also sort of comforting.

* Just going to go ahead and green-light this Goodfellas sequel.

* This road trip movie, too.

* I assume this is already a CBS procedural.

* It’s hard to imagine a more egregious betrayal of Tolkien’s moral and philosophical worldview than a Gollum video game, at least until the Amazon series comes out.

* Putting academic knowledge to real world use: Experts Determine Whether Tyrion And Sansa Are Still Married On ‘Game Of Thrones.’

In the 1960s a woman lived in a house with a dolphin, tried to teach him English, and jerked him off daily. The experiment failed because the lead scientist was obsessed with giving the dolphins LSD. The experiment shut down and the dolphin killed himself https://t.co/VgikyScg4c

— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) April 4, 2019

Phew! Almost to the end now!

* The Matrix at 20.

* About ten years too late, it’s a start: How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?

* The Avengers: Endgame theory that Ant-Man kills Thanos by expanding inside his butt, explained.

* Miracles and wonders: Unless I’m mistaken this is the first time gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has ever gone to human trials.

* It is amusing the Dungeons and Dragons- a game for small children- has a more accurate model of intelligence than the Quilette people do: it’s a minor bonus to an extremely noisy stochastic process that is easily swamped by situational advantage modifiers.

* Support your local library.

* Meet Leigh Cordner, Medieval Times’ creative director.

* Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex.

* RIP Vonda McIntyre.

* The unexpected philosophical depths of the clicker game Universal Paperclips.

* Just kidding! There’s no plan for either problem.

* Great news from the elite world of comics podcasting.

* Coming Spring 2026: Fatigue: A Star Wars Story.

* Isn’t it pretty to think so?

* And the kids are all right.

Fall Syllabus #1: Afrofuturism!

By luck, I’m able to teach the Africana literatures class this semester — a class I’ve always wanted to do but would be four or five back in the priority list in a normal semester. The theme (of course) is “Afrofuturism,” and spends about a third of its time in America, about a third of its time in America thinking about Africa, and about a third of its time in Africa. I’m excited! Here’s the description and schedule; full syllabus with policies and assignments here…

Greg Tate has said that “Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.” This course takes up the nexus of intersections between black history and the radical black imagination that is commonly called Afrofuturism, focusing in particular of figurations of Africa as a space of science fictional possibility from both sides of the Atlantic. If Afrofuturism has been, as Kodwo Eshun has said, “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection,” how does the rise of Africa as a global economic powerhouse in the twenty-first-century transform our understanding of black futurity? 2018’s smash hit Black Panther is only the most vivid registration of the ongoing global importance of the Afrofuturist imagination; from comics to film and television to literature to music videos to social media we will trace Afrofuturism across the twenty-first century cultural landscape.

T	Aug 28	FIRST DAY OF CLASS What Is Afrofuturism? film (in class): Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1974) (excerpts)
Th	Aug 30	Mark Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago” [D2L] film (in class): John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History(1996)
T	Sep 4	Sable Elyse Smith, “Ordinary Violence” [museum] MEET AT THE HAGGERTY
Th	Sep 6	film (in-class): Get Out(2017)
T	Sep 11	film: Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017) (discussion)
Th	Sep 13	Get Out (2017)(discussion continues) Steven Thrasher, Get Out thinkpiece #1 [Web] Aisha Harris, Get Out thinkpiece #2 [Web]
T	Sep 18	Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018) (viewing and initial thoughts)
Th	Sep 20	Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018) (extended discussion) Aja Romano, “Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction” [Web] Brittany Spanos, “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself” [Web] Christopher Lebron, “Janelle Monáe for President” [Web]
T	Sep 25	film: Ryan Coogler, Black Panther (2018) (discussion)
Th	Sep 27	Black Panther (2018) (discussion continues) Gerry Canavan, “The Limits of Black Panther’sAfrofuturism” [Web] FIRST PAPER MINI-WORKSHOP
T	Oct 2	Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, vol. 1 Evan Narcisse, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Explains How He’s Turning Black Panther into a Superhero Again” [web]
Th	Oct 4	Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther, A Nation Under Our Feet, vol. 2 FIRST PAPER DUE
T	Oct 9	Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther, A Nation Under Our Feet, vol. 3 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” [D2L]
Th	Oct 11	Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed, Book I (“Covenant, 1690”)
T	Oct 16	Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed, Book II (“Lot’s Children, 1741”)
Th	Oct 18	FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
T	Oct 23	Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed, Book III (“Canaan, 1840”)
Th	Oct 25	film: Wanuri Kahiu, “Pumzi” (2009) (in-class viewing and discussion) SECOND PAPER MINI-WORKSHOP
T	Oct 30	film (in class): District 9 (2009)
Th	Nov 1	film: Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (2009) (in-class viewing continues and discussion) SECOND PAPER DUE
T	Nov 6	District 9 (2009) discussion continues District 10 (forthcoming eventually?) discussion Octavia E. Butler, “The Monophobic Response” [D2L]
Th	Nov 8	Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Act I, first half)
T	Nov 13	Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Act I, second half)
Th	Nov 15	Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Act II)
T	Nov 20	Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Act III)
Th	Nov 22	THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS
T	Nov 27	Abdourahman Waberi, In the United States of Africa (part one)
Th	Nov 29	Abdourahman Waberi, In the United States of Africa (whole book) FINAL PROJECTS/PAPERS MINI-WORKSHOP
T	Dec 4	Film: Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You(2018) Chip Gibbons, “In the World of Film, We’ve Edited Out All Rebellion: An Interview with Boots Riley” [Web] LAST DAY OF CLASS
Th	Dec 6	CLASS CANCELLED DUE TO INSTRUCTOR TRAVEL
F	Dec 14	FINAL PAPERS/PROJECTS DUE BY 5:30 PM VIA D2L DROPBOX