Posts Tagged ‘wildfires’
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.
That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2021
Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY
— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022
another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI
— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022
- 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.
I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022
- 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’.
I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 30, 2022
look I don’t think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022
- 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.
Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler’s old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel
— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022
- 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.
this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022
The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of “fantasy,” “adventure,” “frontier,” and “tomorrow,” with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you’ll find anywhere.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022
science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 20, 2022
- 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.
🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.
— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022
For one: more sequels & comic book movies.
In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu
- 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…
good morning
— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F
oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 27, 2022
- “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.”
This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022
The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2022
the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD
— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022
- 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.
I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022
It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022
We're a modest company with modest goals:
— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god
- 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.
if you don’t oppose nuclear war when you’re 25, you have no heart. if you’re not in favor of nuclear war by the time you’re 35, you have no head
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2022
This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D
— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022
The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels
— ᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟ (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022
from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022

Written by gerrycanavan
October 24, 2022 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, Adam West, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alan Moore, aliens, Alzheimer's, Amazon, America, animals, Anthropocene, anticapitalism, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Asimov, autism, Baby Boomers, basketball, Batman, Bojack Horseman, boycotts, cancer, cars, cartoons, CFPs, Chaucer, chess, child poverty, child tax credit, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, Choose Your Own Adventure, civilization, Cixin Liu, climate change, CoFutures, college rankings, colonialism, comics, conferences, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, cosmic horrors, COVID-19, Dan Harmon, Davarian Baldwin, democracy, Democrats, depression, Disney, diversity, droughts, Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, English departments, English majors, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Extrapolation, fantasy, fascism, Father Marquette, floods, fraud, Game of Thrones, games, God, grading, graduate student life, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, H.P. Lovecraft, homelessness, House of the Dragon, How the University Works, hydrofracking, intelligence, Isaac Asimov, Italy, Jackson, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, Jordan Peele, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kindred, lead, literature, longtermism, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, Mark Bould, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, Matrix Resurrections, MCU, memory, Mickey7, Milwaukee, Mississippi, my publishing empire, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, Nope, nuclear war, NYU, Octavia Butler, Ohio State, pandemics, pedagogy, peer review, Peter Parker, PhDs, Phoenix, Picard, Pixar, politics, pregnancy, quit lit, race, racism, rich people, Rick and Morty, Rings of Power, Rotterdam, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, sequels, Severance, sheriffs, Sony, Soviet Union, Star Trek, story circle, student debt, suicide, syllabi, teaching, The Batman, the Gothic, the humanities, the law, The Man of the Hole, the Senate, the Sims, The Sopranos, The Three-Body Problem, the Universe, therapy, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, Tolkien, trademarks, trains, Trump, UFOs, US News, USSR, Utopia, video games, violence, voting, Wakanda, Wes Anderson, Wikipedia, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing, yachts, Yellowstone
Monday Morning Links!
* The era of high fertility is ending. Every child on their own trampoline. Police-Free Childhoods. The Seismic Generational Shift in Worldview: Millennials Seek a Nation Without God, Bible and Churches.
* Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic.
* The empty brain. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
* My theory, Philip K. Dick style, is that we didn’t survive the Cold War. All the evidence points that way.
* We still know basically knowing about COVID policy.
* Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.
* An interview with Emily Wilder, recent Stanford grad fired from AP job over criticisms of Israel.
* Science Fiction and Fantasy by Palestinian Authors.
* They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy. 27 possible voter fraud cases in 3 million Wisconsin ballots. What if the Renegade Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won? Republicans Want You To Forget January 6 Ever Happened.
* Some Republicans may talk the talk, but this one walks the walk.
an entire social movement relentlessly opposed to *vaccination* is just the bleakest possible shit https://t.co/GW20bAAjgY
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2021
This is an interesting point. In retrospect, an early harbinger of GOP radicalization was the refusal to raise the debt limit as a point of leverage against Obama. We also see this tendency now in the refusal to seat Dems who win elections. And the debt limit is coming up again. https://t.co/a3tN1twPtl
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 22, 2021
* How UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington. How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers.
* California climate refugees. Indigenous Land Management Is The Solution to the Wildfire Crisis. World’s largest iceberg, nearly four times size of New York City, forms in Antarctica. If these trends continue…
Occupied bald eagle nests in Wisconsin. 1974 vs 2019. Growth credited to the Clean Water Act pic.twitter.com/nKOiwMTjpM
— Epic Maps 🗺️ (@Locati0ns) May 19, 2021
* Indigenous Cinema and the Limits of Auteurism.
* How could anyone doubt it? “Generous” Billionaires Are Part of the Problem.
* Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge. For Colleges, Vaccine Mandates Often Depend on Which Party Is in Power. Why Did a University Suspend Its Mandatory Diversity Course? Conservatives Control Public Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill Edition. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure. The Real Reason UNC–Chapel Hill Is Withholding Tenure From Nikole Hannah-Jones. A Statement from the UNC AAUP. Guess Who’s Coming to the Lecture?
This morning I am trying to understand how the humanities can be irrelevant and obsolete and also simultaneously a recurring and seemingly irresistible site for partisan intervention by donors, politicians, pundits, and boards of trustees.
— Matthew Kirschenbaum (@mkirschenbaum) May 21, 2021
* ‘I am seeking justice’: Tulsa massacre survivor, 107, testifies to US Congress.
* Decolonizing Education: A Conversation with Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
* #ReleaseTheSteinbeckWerewolfThing.
* Has science fiction become too serious? Apocalypse movies need to imagine climate solutions, too.
* Bring on the Forgotten Realms!
* Bring on the Summer Slowdown!
* And I think I linked this one before, but we’re in the endgame now.

Written by gerrycanavan
May 24, 2021 at 10:45 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic bias, actually existing media bias, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, apocalypse, bald eagles, billionaires, biography, body dysmorpgia, bullshit jobs, California, childhood, China, cinema, civilization, class struggle, climate chjange, climate refugees, comics, coronavirus, COVID-19, decolonize everything, Dungeons and Dragons, Endgame, English departments, film, Forgotten Realms, games, graphic novels, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, indigeneity, Israel, John Steinbeck, kids today, Kool-Aid Guy, linkrot, literature, nuclear war, nuclearity, only the super-rich can save us now, our brains don't work, Palestine, pandemic, Paradoxa, parenting, philanthropy, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, politics, Rand Paul, Republicans, science fiction, sex crimes, summer slowdown, Tawain, Texas, the Cold War, the humanities, the Internet, the truth is out there, Tulsa massacre, UFOs, UNC, Vermont, voting, Watchmen, werewolves, wildfires, Wisconsin
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I’ve been doing:
- I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
- I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
- I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
- We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
- I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
- I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
- My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
- I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
- I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
- And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…
“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021
“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021
- SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
- Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
- Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
- Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
- CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
- The war on critical race theory.
- The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
- The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
- Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
- Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
- Ground operations.
- Reflections on the Market.
I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.
— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021
- Dark academia.
- How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
- The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
- The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
- Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
- Firsting in Research.
- A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
- “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
- Reagan broke everything.
- The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
- Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
- Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
- All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
- A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
- University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
- The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
- ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
- Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
- Every day a new sadness.
- Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
- How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
- Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
- Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ
— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021
if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021
- How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
- Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
- We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
- Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
- The Airline Safety Revolution.
- Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
- Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
- Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
- It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
- No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
- A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
- Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
- Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
- The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
- The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
- Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
- The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
- How much money does a writer need?
- Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
- The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
- Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
- The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
- It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.
My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."
— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021
- Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
- So you want to acknowledge the land?
- Decolonize Oregon Trail.
- Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
- Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
- Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
- How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
- There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
- Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.
https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC
— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021
- We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
- How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
- Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
- America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
- A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
- What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
- Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
- 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
- The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
- The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
- I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
- How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
- Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
- “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
- ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- Two from Ted Chiang: “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
- Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
- Sertãopunk.
- The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
- Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
- Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
- The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
- The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
- The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
- Top 20 Irishisms.
- Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
- 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.
it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities
— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Written by gerrycanavan
May 11, 2021 at 1:41 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic job market, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Adorno, Afrofuturism, airplanes, Alan Moore, Amazon, America, animal studies, animals, apocalypse, arigata-meiwaku, artificial intelligence, austerity, Brazil, cancel culture, capitalism, Carl Sagan, CFPs, Chen Qiufan, chess, Chronicles of Pyrdain, civilization, climate change, college sports, conferences, course evaluations, COVID-19, Deadpool, democracy, digital immortality, disability, Disney, dissertations, dolphin intelligence, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Said, existentialism, fascism, Fermi paradox, financialization, Fledgling, futurity, games, glitches, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, gymnastics, Hawaii, Hayao Miyazaki, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, indigeneity, indigenous issues, Irenosen Okojie, Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, Kameron Hurley, Karate Kid, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, land acknowledgment, late style, LEGOs, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, malaria, McCarthyism, meritocracy, millennials, Milwaukee, mRNA, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nebula Award, neofeudalism, NFTs, Nisi Shawl, novels, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, orcs, pandemic, perimenopause, podcasts, pollution, race, racism, Random Trek, reparations, Republicans, research, rich people, Romania, Ronald Reagan, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sertãopunk, SFRA, Sherryl Vint, slavery, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, student debt, Ted Chiang, tenure, the Antarctic, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Muppets, The Outer Wilds, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UCR, unions, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, WandaVision, water, wealth, white supremacy, Wikifeet, wildfires, Wisconsin, wokeness, words, writing
Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?
This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:
- ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
- American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
- A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
- I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
- You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
- Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
- I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
- The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
- Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
- CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
- Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.
nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020
- A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
- Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
- Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
- Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
- 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.
Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du
— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020
have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t
— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020
Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020
- Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
- Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
- Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
- Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
- “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
- How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
- How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
- Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
- Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
- We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
- Glücky!
- RIP, Duke TIP.
The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020
- Miracles and wonders.
- The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
- Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
- Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
- Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
- He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
- DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
- Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
- idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
- AOC, streamer.
- Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
- Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
- Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
- Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
- Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
- Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
- What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
- “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
- The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
- The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
- The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
- Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
- How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
- Revisiting Nabokov.
- Always look on the bright side of life.
- How will 2020 end?
- And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
- Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!
the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists
— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020
— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
October 30, 2020 at 4:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, AAUP, abolish the Senate, academia, academic jobs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Am I the Asshole?, America, Among Us, animation, art, autism, Baltimore, Berkeley, birds, California, capitalism, car seats, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, conspiracy theory, contraception, Cornell, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, creative writing, deaccessioning, Diplomacy, disaster nationalism, diversity, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, Duke TIP, dystopia, ecology, Ecuador, English departments, exoplanets, fan fiction, fascism, franchies, franchise fiction, futurity, games, grading, Harvard, HBO, hybridity, indigenous futurism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR, labor, libertarians, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Louise Glück, Marquette, medicine, Mormonism, museums, N.K. Jemisin, Nabokov, NCAA, neoliberalism, neurodiversity, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, nostalgia, organizing, Pale FIre, pandemic, paranoia, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, prosperity theology, public universities, QAnon, race, racism, rewind the globe, rich people, schools, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Sierra, socialism, student movements, television, the Amazon, The Fifth Season, the flu, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, trolls, truth and reconciliation, UFOs, unions, Utopia, white supremacy, wildfires, Wilmington, Wisconsin, young adult literature, Zoom
Thursday Morning Links!
* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.
* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.
* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.
* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.
* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.
* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.
To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp
— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020
Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.
— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020
When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020
1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020
* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.
One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020
you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire
— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020
* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.
It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu
— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020
I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020
so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020
* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.
* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.
* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.
* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.
robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.
* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.
* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.
* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.
* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.
* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.
* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.
* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.
https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705
TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law
DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020
* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.
"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD
— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020
* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.
* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.
* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
* New York’s homeless students.
* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.
* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.
* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.
* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’
* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!
* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?
* When does a model own her own image?
* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.
* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.
Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020
someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020
* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”
* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.
* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.
* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.
* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.
* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.
* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.
Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing
It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?
Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL
Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU
— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019
* We stan.
* Time Travel as White Privilege.
* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.
* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.
* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?
* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.
* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, America, Ancillary Review of Books, animals, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Black Lives Matter, Bob Barr, California, capitalism, Caster Semenya, children, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, college, college football, college sports, Colorado, concentration camps, copyright, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darko Suvin, David Graeber, democracy, deportation, depression, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dune, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, education, epidemic, eugenics, Evo Morales, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, film, floods, food, Fort Hood, games, gender, Georgia, guns, heat ray, HHS, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Krug, Joe Biden, John Cage, Journal of Science Fiction, kids today, Legend of Zelda, liberalism, Louis DeJoy, Marquette, Michigan, movies, Muppets, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, necroliberalism, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Orlando, outer space, pandemic, paranoia, parents, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, photography, podcasts, politics, presidential election 2020, protest, QAnon, race, racism, reality TV, Rice, Robert's Rules of Order, science fiction, Scott Pilgrim, screen time, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, self-driving cars, serial killers, sperm donation, sports, teaching, Tenet, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, the Senate, the truth is out there, this is fine, time travel, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unemployment, universal basic income, Utopia, Venezuela, Venus, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Washington, West Coast, whistleblowers, White House, white privilege, white saviors, wildfires, Won't somebody think of the children?, wormholes, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, Zoom
Monday Links!
I’m pretty deep into the procrastination cycle of shame so don’t miss these still-perfectly-fresh Sunday Morning Links.
* Protests and state of emergency declared in Kenosha after a black man is shot seven times in front of his children after breaking up a fight. Despite erroneous social media reports, Jacob Blake remains alive and will hopefully survive this attack.
* The Pandemic Recession Is Approaching a Dire Tipping Point. ‘Not just a low-wage recession’: White-collar workers feel coronavirus squeeze. Goldman Sachs Confirms Roughly 4 Million Employees to Remain Unemployed Into 2022.
It’s Sunday so you should know that if the minimum wage had increased at the rate of productivity since 1960, it would be $22.50. Instead, it’s just $7.25. Meanwhile tens of millions of Americans today head to a second or third job because they can’t afford life’s basic needs.
— Joe Sanberg (@JosephNSanberg) August 23, 2020
* Chinese government releases new guidelines for science fiction.
* How Can We Plan for the Future in California? An extremely dire description of the situation.
1. This year, there will be no way to make even a dent in the fires with our tools. There is no small chance that vast swaths of major cities there will burn. I know, because I've fought wildfires, and everyone on my crew agrees: this month is the beginning of the end.
— Daniel Boguslaw (@DRBoguslaw) August 22, 2020
And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
“We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020
* Zoom Is Down at the Worst Possible Time wheeeeeeeee
* The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into. Blame Game.
* William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt.
* Seven missing Doctor Who episodes identified, in negotiations to be returned to the UK.
* Progressives have gotten all they can out of the election season. After November, they will have to raise a ruckus to secure victory. The Biden Era Will Put the New Left to the Test.
On balance I think things are so messed up that Biden will probably win but if not I want to lay down my marker that I think “Granddad likes ice cream” was the wrong message for four straight days of the DNC convention
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
I think we’ll see the US break up within my lifetime. Just don’t know if I’ll live fifty years or five. https://t.co/oxmSYSKOYq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
* 27 GOP ex-lawmakers back Biden on first day of Republican National Convention. No Sitting President Was As Far Behind As Trump Going Into The Conventions. Can Biden’s Center Hold?
* Un-Adopted: YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their parenting journey. Except the last.
* Job insecurity, low pay, working from home: we’re all millennials now.
* Neopets: A True Crime Story.
* 2020’s got my head so turned around Chuck Schumer made me laugh.
* And finally, some is making sense: Could We Force the Universe to Crash?
Written by gerrycanavan
August 24, 2020 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, adoption, America, Are we living in a simulation?, asteroids, California, capitalism, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, college, coronavirus, COVID-19, disability, Doctor Who, epidemic, Faulkner, general election 2020, How the University Works, Jacob Blake, Joe Biden, Kenosha, millennials, minimum wage, neopets, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, police brutality, police violence, politics, race, racism, Republican National Convention, science fiction, Second Great Depression?, teaching, true crime, unemployment, wildfires, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
Sunday Morning Links!
* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…
As @zunguzungu’s enthusiasm for the podcast wanes, the randomizer heroically gives us… JAILBIRD followed by DEADEYE DICK. 😢 #RIP
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020
* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.
* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.
* USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.
* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.
I think the fundamental thing Democrats don’t understand about Trump is that he isn’t an aberration and isn’t even really the final Big Bad — he is a stress test for a corrupt system that collapsed into completely lawless authoritarianism the first time someone tried it.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2020
* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.
* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.
* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.
There are three types of Democratic presidential candidates: I’m the Messiah (Obama); stay the course (HRC, Gore); I’m a Republican (Bill Clinton). Biden is the rare stay-the-course Messiah who is also a Republican.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 21, 2020
* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.
* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.
* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.
As I keep saying: the administrators who made the decision to reopen put students, faculty, staff, and everyone connected to these people at risk of death. They should resign or be fired, and the board of governors dissolved. #CovidCampusOutbreak https://t.co/TBxkqUPvIk
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) August 22, 2020
And if the only way you can enforce compliance with your plan is by draconian punitive measures against the community you're ostensibly trying to serve, well, that's not good, either. https://t.co/DGKDLePKVs
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) August 21, 2020
Wellness check: My students are hurting following UNC’s experiment in pandemic f2f learning. As of 8/20, 6% have COVID. 31% have a known exposure. 83% are being forced to find a new housing situation. 78% report elevated stress & anxiety. I’m so sorry they are living this. pic.twitter.com/DvUWbUb9TN
— Angela Stuesse (@astuesse) August 21, 2020
every academic i know: *is unprecedentedly burnt out and anxiety-ridden*
universities: good morning fam 🤪 we trust you’ve been productive 🤓 and relaxed 🧘♀️ this summer ☀️ we’re pumped 💯 to get you back on campus 🏛 don’t forget to write your will 📃🙌
— Annabel LaBrecque (@labrcq) August 18, 2020
A bit lost in the great student enrollment debate of fall 2020 is the fact that their loans come due in sixth months if they disenroll.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2020
Negligent college administrators, who live in the towns where they make six-figure salaries and who don’t need to go into classrooms or even onto campus at all, are inflicting massive harm on the parents and students who placed trust in them. https://t.co/QkE0vfdtOk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 19, 2020
spotted on facebook, a poem by elise hu pic.twitter.com/4BA7hjBuXV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2020
* Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.
* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.
* 9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.
* Are You Overpraising Your Child?
* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.
* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.
* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?
* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”
* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.
* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.
* Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.
Bleak shit in California pic.twitter.com/yXnpRvNrSE
— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) August 20, 2020
And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
“We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020
* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.
* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.
* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.
* The Evolution of Ransomware.
* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.
* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.
* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.
* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.
* How UFO culture took over America.
* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.
* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!
* (Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.
* What about the bad job offers?
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.
* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’
* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.
* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.
* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.
* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.
I had A LOT of requests for this one! X-Men: The Animated Series pic.twitter.com/D1W5TAAs0I
— Samara Ginsberg (@samaracello) August 18, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2020 at 9:55 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic jobs, algorithms, America, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, art, austerity, birds, Bombadil, books, Bush, California, Cat's Cradle, cello, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, comics, conspiracy theory, Cord Jefferson, coronavirus, COVID-19, custard, DC Comics, Democrats, domestic violence, Donald Trump, dystopia, epidemic, evictions, friendship, games, general election 2020, ghouls, grad school, Grad School Vonnegut, historical fantasy, How the University Works, incarceration, Internet, J.G. Ballard, Joe Biden, K-shaped recovery, kids today, long-haulers, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, medicine, Milestone Comics, millennials, Milwaukee, Miri, MLA, mutants, my media empire, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, neoliberalism, New York, nursing homes, oil, pandemic, parenting, Peak Demand, Peak Oil, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, Polygraph, posthumanism, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, QAnon, race, racism, ransomware, remote learning, Republicans, Roanoke, rule of law, school, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Should I go to grad school?, social media, solace, solidarity, Star Trek, the Census, the courts, the economy, the law, The Sheep Look Up, The Vision, Tolkien, TOS, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, unemployment, Untitled Goose Game, USPS, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, Watchmen, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, X-Men, X-Men: The Animated Series
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK
— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020
This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2020 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, a man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life, ADA, after America, air travel, Airbnb, Amazon, America, Animal Crossing, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, billionaires, Black Mirror, Bong Joon-ho, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Captain Pike, captalism, carbon, CFPs, Charlie Brooker, child abuse, class struggle, Cleveleand, climate change, coal, comics, commuting, coronavirus, COVID-19, cruises, democracy, disability, disease, Disney, Donald Trump, DoorDash, eating meat, education, Elizabeth Warren, environmentalism racism, essential workers, evil, Extrapolation, family, floods, games, Gargoyles, general strike, Georgia, grief, Hemingway, Huntington's disease, ice sheet collapse, Iron Man, Jaimee Hills, Joe Biden, John Brown, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Mother Nature, Muppets, murder hornets, my misspent youth, Nancy Pelosi, NASA, neural nets, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, organ donation, pandemic, Pentagon, Plain Dealer, podcasts, poetry, police dogs, politics, pollution, private prisons, psychology, quarantine, race, racism, remote learning, Republicans, resilience, restaurants, rich people, Rube Goldberg, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, seagulls, Seattle, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, SimRefinery, six-word stories, soccer, Sopranos, Spanish flu, sports, Star Trek, STEM, Strange New Worlds, strikes, submarines, the Arctic, the Constitution, the economy, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, The Onion, therapy, Uber, unemployment, unions, USPS, vaccines, Wall Street, war on education, wealth, wildfires, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, X-Men, Zoom
Wednesday Night Links!
* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.
* Shoot this post into my veins.
Shoot this post into my veins. pic.twitter.com/YNsOgnRAM3
— Detective Pikajew (@clapifyoulikeme) January 22, 2020
* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.
* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.
* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!
* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.
* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.
* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.
* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!
* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.
* When rich people can’t get along.
* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.
* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.
* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.
* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.
* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.
* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).
* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.
* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.
* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!
* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’
* The things you learn on Twitter.
Makes sense. Google used Enron emails to train its autocomplete. The dead ghosts of corporate malfeasance speak through us all now: https://t.co/fSzqQ5HCYO
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 21, 2020
* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.
* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.
* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’
Written by gerrycanavan
January 22, 2020 at 4:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, accessibility, administrative blight, affordability, Amazon, artificial intelligence, Australia, autocomplete, Bernie Sanders, Brazil, canon, canonicity, carbon, CBP, CFPs, child labor, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, coal, comics, Cops, Davos, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emails, endorsements, English, English departments, Enron, eviction, fascism, games, Glenn Greenwald, Google, Greta Thunberg, Hillary Clinton, hostages, Houston, How the University Works, ice, immigration, impeachment, internet of beefs, Iran, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, John Kerry, journalism, laptops, LEGO, memes, Microsoft, millionaires, Mitt Romney, Monopoly, Mr. Peanut, N.K. Jemisin, nature, New York, New Yorker, Oakland, October Surprise, pedagogy, philosophy, Picard, plastic, politics, rich people, robots, Ronald Reagan, rule of law, Saudi Arabia, science, science fiction, sex, single payer, social credit, social media, Star Trek, status, teaching, the courts, the law, the rent is too damn high, the truth is out there, treason, Twitter, UFOs, Untitled Goose Game, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wendy's, wildfires, Žižek
2020 Links for 2020
* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”
* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!
* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.
* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.
FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’
* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.
* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.
* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.
* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.
Thinking about @adamkotsko’s TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.
* The problem with bringing back blogs is.
* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.
* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.
300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020
* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.
* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.
* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.
* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.
* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.
* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.
* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.
* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.
* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.
* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.
* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.
* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.
* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.
* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.
they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020
* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.
* The rise of the permanent protest.
* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.
* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.
* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.
* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?
Star Wars’ insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will
— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020
* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.
* When AI runs the entertainment industry.
* When business people run the Olympics.
* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).
* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.
* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.
OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s
— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020
* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.
* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!
* The decolonization of Miles Morales.
* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.
* ‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.
* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.
* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 16, 2020 at 2:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Airbnb, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, America, artificial intelligence, Australia, Baby Boomers, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Binti, blogs, boondoggles, capitalism, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Ware, Christopher Tolkien, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, climate fiction, coffee, college football, college sports, comics, Curb Your Enthusiasm, DC, deportation, depression, domestic violence, Donald Trump, ecology, ed tech, empire, English departments, Episode 9, eugenics, F-Stop, fascism, film, Finland, fraud, futurity, games, Generation Z, graphic novels, HBO, health care, Hollywood, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, Iceland, immigration, intergenerational struggle, Iran, Isaac Asimov, Jack Kirby, Larry David, Lord Byron, Lord of the Rings, malls, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, MCU, medicine, memory, Middle-Earth, Miles Morales, millennials, misogyny, MIT, MLA, money, my media empire, my scholarly empire, negativity, Nnedi Okorafor, nostalgia, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organized crime, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, Picard, poetry, police, politics, Portal, post-truth, protest, public domain, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, relationships, retirement, Rusty Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Scrabble, sexism, sexual harassment, single pager, Slaughterhouse Five, small liberal arts colleges, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, superheroes, syllabi, Taiwan, Tarantino, teaching, television, the 2010s, the 2020s, the Arctic, the Catholic Church, the humanities, the long now, the Olympics, The Rise of Skywalker, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, The Wonder Years, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, truth, Twitter, UFOs, ultracrepidarians, Unexpected Stories, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vermont, Vonnegut, walking simulators, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Watchmen, Westworld, wildfires, William Wordsworth, World Science Fiction Studies, zunguzungu
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j
— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."
— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.
Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm
— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT
— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
Written by gerrycanavan
November 26, 2019 at 12:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23 and me, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, Africa, airplanes, airships, Alan Moore, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Appalachia, Australia, autism, backlash effect, bananas, Barack Obama, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, Big Calculator, Bowie, Brainiac, Brazil, centrism, CFPs, changelings, Charlie Stross, child abuse, childhood, climate change, college closures, colleges, comics, conspiracy theorists, cybertruck, David Bowie, David Graeber, death, decolonization, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, Disney, DNA, Dungeons and Dragons, earthquakes, ecology, economics, Egypt, Elon Musk, emotional labor, English majors, equality, EVE Online, Facebook, fandom, fans, fantasy, fascism, film, Florida, free speech, Frozen, Frozen II, futurity, games, gay rights, Greta Thunberg, grief, Harriet Tubman, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, hopepunk, hot takes, How Did This Get Played?, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice, Illinois, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana University, indigenous peoples, internationalism, isolation rooms, Joe Biden, Joker, Joker 2, Julia Roberts, justice, Keystone Pipeline, kids today, labor, lawyers, liberalism, lithium, Lord of the Rings, marriage equality, Marvel, mass shooters, medicine, Milwaukee River, MLA, mortality, Mr. Rogers, mugshots, Nate Silver, Native American issues, Nazis, Netflix, New York, nostalgia, OK Boomer, pensions, Pete Buttigieg, physics, pipelines, Pokémon, police brutality, police corruption, police state, postdocs, poverty, prison-industrial complex, punkpunk, pyramids, race, rape, rape culture, recession, rent loans, reparations, Republicans, rich people, rising sea levels, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, saving money, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Scott Warren, SFRA, Siberia, solar power, solarpunk, speculation, spoilers, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, strikes, student evaluations, stuttering, superheroes, swastikas, tenure, Terminator, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, The Mandalorian, The Price Is Right, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, TI-85s, time, Title IX, tokenism, Tolkien, Tony Evers, transgender issues, true crime, turning 40, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccinations, Watchmen, web comics, WeWork, whale watching, whale-hunting, whales, whistleblowers, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, woolly mammoths, Yoda, zeppelins
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
wishing I could make content this sublime pic.twitter.com/UYPNVI2m1C
— Slavoj “Claire’s Trophy Wife” Vibecheck (@zizekthottie) November 15, 2019
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
Venn diagram of people saying “the state is too technically incompetent to install a broadband connection” and people who say “the state should build and maintain a thermonuclear arsenal”
— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) November 15, 2019
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
— mugrimm 🦃 (@unabanned) November 14, 2019
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
"This wonderful economic system [in which] all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least."
— Iain M. Banks, describing capitalism in "The State of the Art"
— Michael Oman-Reagan (@OmanReagan) November 10, 2019
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
Peter Pan has a song called “What Makes the Red Man Red?” where what makes them “red” is being super horny. It’s absolutely astounding that this has not been memory-holed. https://t.co/Rewnfj59JL
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 13, 2019
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
You've heard of "Garfield Minus Garfield."
You've seen "Garfield minus the last panel,"
You liked "Garfield but the last panel is him smoking,"
Now prepare your ass for…
"GARFIELD BUT THE MIDDLE PANEL IS CENSORED!" pic.twitter.com/RK6OsmGhhk— Connor 64 (@Superbconnor64) November 10, 2019
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 16, 2019 at 5:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, autotheory, Baby Boomers, banks, baseball, California, cancel culture, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, cheating, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, climate realism, comics, common core, deportation, digital feudalism, Disney, divorce, Donald Trump, electric cars, English majors, environmentalism, fascism, floods, games, Garfield, Google, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ice, immigration, impeachment, Italy, Jameson, John M. Ford, kids today, labor, literature, lunch debt, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, medical debt, Mexico, migrants, Milwaukee, minimum wage, Minnesota, mortgages, Naomi Klein, NASA, Netflix, New Jersey, Nickelodeon, Nobel Prize, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, OK Boomer, online advertising, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Oz, paradise, pardons, Peter Pan, plastic straws, podcasts, politics, prosecutors, race, racism, Republicans, Return to Oz, Rorschach, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, slavery, sniff, social media, Sonic, Stephen Miler, streaming, surveillance, taxes, the Anthropocene, the archive, the courts, The Culture, the debt, the deficit, the law, the Midwest, the university in ruins, trans* issues, true crime, Uber, Ukraine, University of Wisconsin, vaginas, Venice, war crimes, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, Žižek
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
Here is my most humorless opinion: The concept of ghosts is an example of how we stigmatize victims of violence as much as perpetrators, and perceive them as a threat to our peaceful lives. The desired outcome is to make them go away, shut up, and let us forget about them again.
— Sandra Newman is objectively frightening (@sannewman) October 31, 2019
Xennials are called Calvinistas now https://t.co/8vhCm4X8vU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
I am sure you will be surprised to hear that in less than 48 hours a gigantic corporation has superseded Twitter’s PR-grabbing “no political ads” rule because Twitter really likes money https://t.co/rTyNE6xC3X
— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) November 5, 2019
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
The narrative about totalitarian political correctness on college campuses HAS to be true, because otherwise the greatest political dangers would be coming almost exclusively from the right, and every smart pundit knows that's impossible.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) November 6, 2019
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
A lot of people on my timeline like this proposal but my reaction is just pure dread on every level, from the thought of kids trapped at school literally all day to the inevitable revenue-neutral strategies to somehow wring an extra three hours of care out of the existing budgets https://t.co/2Q89HE4iTb
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
the liberatory potential of fandom lies in dispensing with any loyalty to the 'original' and the structure of media conglomerates that exploit it for profit. the most visible kind of fandom now is the opposite, astroturfed by disney
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 5, 2019
pitch: THE GOODFELLAS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
NTSB docs: Uber's radar detected Elaine Herzberg nearly 6 seconds before she was fatally struck, but “the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians” so it didn't react as if she were a person. https://t.co/M2B38i2Bq2 via @mikelaris
— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) November 6, 2019
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 8, 2019 at 10:23 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", a whole host of promising academic careers strangled in the cradle, academia, Adorno, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, Alexa, algorithmic culture, ALS, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, Bernie Sanders, Big Apocalypse, billionaires, birds, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Bloody Sunday, books, boycotts, brands, Brazil, Brutalism, burnout, California, Calvin and Hobbes, child abuse, children, class struggle, climate change, comics, computers, concussions, cults, dark side of the digital, Deadpan, deforestation, delicious ice cream, disability, Disney, DNA, Donald Trump, Durham, e resistance, ecology, economists, Exxon, fandom, fascism, film, forbidden knowledge, fossils, free marks, free speech, Frozen, futurity, games, general election 2020, Generation X, George Washington, ghosts, Goodfellas, Grand Theft Auto, Green New Deal, Halloween, Hamilton, hate crimes, health care, health insurance, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, homelessness, How the University Works, immigration, insects, Into the Spiderverse, Into the Spiderverse 2, iPads, John W. Campbell, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lean In, Let It Go, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, McDonald's, MCU, Medicare, Medicare for All, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, money, monopolies, Mr. Rogers, my media empire, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, OK Boomer, Oregon Trail, pasta, police, police state, politics, printers, quantum mechanics, race, racism, Satan, school, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, scooters, Scorsese, screen time, Should I go to grad school?, Siri, social media, SpaghettiOs, speculation, sports, Stanford, Stanford University Press, Star Trek, struggle, superheroes, Superman, surveillance society, survival, teachers, television, texts, The Affair, the Amazon, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Uber, unions, Utopia, victims, Watchmen, white supremacy, whiteness, wildfires, Williams College, winter, Wisconsin, Wonder Years, work, Yugoslavia
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W
— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019
the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.
This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk
— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019
that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019
“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2019 at 10:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Afrofuturism, algorithms, America, apocalypse, assassinations, Barack Obama, books, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, CFPs, Charlton Heston, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, China Miéville, class struggle, David Bowie, Deadspin, death, Democrats, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, environmentalism, Equal Rights Amendment, Fahrenheit 451, franchise fiction, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, gig economy, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, Halloween, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, income inequality, journalism, Juul, kids today, loneliness, Mars, Marx, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, moral nuance, mortality, my life as a nerd, neoliberalism, New York, nuclearity, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, photography, police state, police violence, politics, precarity, prequels, presidential libraries, privacy, race, racism, Ray Bradbury, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, seasons, solar punk, Supreme Court, technical debt, the Anthropocene, The Doors of Eden, the Internet, The Matrix, the tuition is too damn high, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, University of Chicago, Utopia, vaping, Virginia, Vonnegut, WeWork, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing