Posts Tagged ‘Wolverine’
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Call for Papers: Series Books and Science Fiction (National PCA Conference). CFP: Contemporary American Fiction in the Age of Innovation. CFP: Indigenous lands, waters, and ways of knowing.
* The Labor Movement’s Newest Warriors: Grad Students.
* Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming.
* Appeals court consider whether youth can sue the government over climate change. A Levee Fails and an Illinois Town Is Thrown Back in Time. White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony saying human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it. The Democrats are climate deniers too. And some more good news: Industrial methane emissions are underreported, study finds. 130°F heat index in South Texas, 13 days from the start of summer.
Like I was saying the other day, denialism is the price of admission to public life: to be taken seriously as a commenter one must signal that they will not under any circumstances discuss what is actually going on.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2019
we demand a DNC debate on climate change highlighting all the positions the party currently holds on climate change, from “do nothing” to “do nothing and pretend to feel bad about it”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2019
* Border Patrol is confiscating migrant kids’ medicine, U.S. doctors say. Reports reveal ‘egregious’ conditions in US migrant detention facilities. US opens new mass facility in Texas for migrant children. Third undocumented migrant in 3 days dies after being apprehended at US-Mexico border. ICE is struggling to contain spread of mumps in its detention centers. “He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay…He did a bad thing.”
I keep coming back to the points made in this thread. There is simply no opposition in the US whatsoever, only an out party with a different sense of what good manners are. https://t.co/5J5DdUD0BX
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2019
* In 2014, China released sweeping plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Local trials covering about 6% of the population are already rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, with Beijing due to begin its program by 2021. There are also other ways the state keeps tabs on citizens that may become part of an integrated system. Since 2015, for instance, a network that collates local- and central- government information has been used to blacklist millions of people to prevent them from booking flights and high-speed train trips.
* From Whole Foods to Amazon, Invasive Technology Controlling Workers Is More Dystopian Than You Think.
* YouTube is a radicalization engine for fascists.
* Prez in 2019: Are These Teenagers Really Running a Presidential Campaign?
* The heroes are split on opposing sides, and among the key matchups was a Wolverine vs. Mr. Fantastic battle that ended with Reed Richards pinning Wolverine down, extending his hands until they’re one molecule wide, and using them as scissors to cut the mutant’s arms off. You know, for kids.
* When it comes to westerns, the difference matters. Especially in the streaming era, the words “television” and “movie” have gotten disconnected from their origins; no one watched the Deadwood “movie” in movie theaters (and the old “television” show lives in the same HBO app, on the same computer, as I watched the movie). But television Westerns are all about the gap between one event and the next — and the random vagaries of life that get lived in the interval — while it’s film Westerns that tell the Big Stories about History, epics about Beginnings and Endings and Grand Historical Transitions (with plenty of capital letters), with ordinary people getting swept by the tides of modernity and progress.
* John Wick as modern fairy tale. John Wick 3 Delivers the Justice We All Crave. I’m so out of touch I haven’t seen one of these.
* John Rieder reviews Nisi Shawl’s New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color.
* A more honest show, I think, would acknowledge that there isn’t that much of a difference between Serena and Commander Lawrence. They’re both smart people who created a hell on Earth to justify their own twisted notions of superiority, and they both realize that fact, on some level, and are tortured by it (though not nearly as much as their victims are and have been). I think episode 3 is trying to draw a distinction between them when it has Lawrence continue his mind games with June (and his casual acceptance of female fawning from the dependent members of his household) while Serena at least opens herself up to the idea of rebellion. It might be rooting that distinction in gender, in arrogance and humility, and even in religious faith. But I don’t buy it. A person who did the things Serena has done (notice how her orchestrating June’s rape has simply been memory-holed? Not just ignored for the sake of expediency, but completely forgotten) wouldn’t be as open to remorse as she is. You don’t just wake up one morning and think “you know, maybe creating a fascist, theocratic rape-dystopia was a bad idea.”
* The New Yorker remembers How To Read Donald Duck.
* The Importance of ‘Godzilla’ Cannot Be Overstated.
* A Joe Biden Nomination Would Solidify All Our Worst Fears About the Democrats. I mean really.
When Trump dies, Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Bush, both Clintons will all be at his funeral, praising an American original who, love him or hate him, always did it his way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2019
* Inside the Fight to Define Extreme Poverty in America.
* Pfizer had clues its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer’s. Why didn’t it tell the world? Give you one guess.
* Why aren’t states doing more to lower the cost of insulin ONE GUESS
* Reflections of an Incarcerated Worker.
* Star Trek’s characters, like all of us, live in a universe full of injustice, suffering, and struggle—not a utopian vision, but an optimistic one, because they also live as if that better world is possible. We have to do that. We have to. When someone tells us that they’re in distress, in pain, in danger, or in a time loop, we have to say “I believe you. I’ll help however I can.”
* Catholic Church spent $10 million on lobbyists in fight to stymie priest sex abuse suits.
* The new American religion of UFOs.
* Ultimate limit of human endurance found. Me at the end of spring semester, am I wrong folks.
* 108 Women’s World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything.
* Dodgeball is a tool of ‘oppression’ used to ‘dehumanize’ others, researchers argue. As an incredibly unauthentic and uncoordinated kid, I was unusually good at dodgeball — so I’ve got mixed feelings here to say the least.
* And it’s a cookbook! A cooooooookbooooooook!
DEFINITIVE X-MEN MOVIE RANKING
1. X-MEN THE ANIMATED SERIES
2. X-MEN stand up arcade game, four players, c. mid-1990s
3. LOGAN
4. Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast
5. dim memories of having liked X2 when I saw it
6. rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ
7. Deadpool?
8. field— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 7, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
June 10, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adminsitrative blight, Afrofuturism, Alzheimer's, America, apocalypse, Ariel Dorfman, asylum, Bernie Sanders, Big Pharma, biodiversity, bioethics, border patrol, capitalism, Catholic Church, CBP, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, climate trials, college presidents, comics, concentration camps, corpocracy, Dark Phoenix, Deadwood, Democratic primary 2020, denialism, deportation, diabetes, dodgeball, don't be evil, doomed to repeat it, ecology, endurance, ethics, fairy tales, Fantastic Four, fascism, films, free speech, futurity, general election 2020, gerrymandering, Godzilla, Google, graduate student movements, guns, Handmaid's Tale, history, How the University Works, How to Read Donald Duck, ice, immigration, indigenous peoples, indigenous studies, innovation, insulin, Joe Biden, John Rieder, John Wick, Jordan Peele, kids today, labor, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, mass extinction, mass shootings, methane, Mexico, misogyny, mumps, Nazis, New Suns, Nisi Shawl, North Carolina, now my story can be told, politics, poverty, prison-industrial complex, radicalization, rape culture, religion, rich people, Santa Cruz, schools, science fiction, science fiction studies, soccer, social media, Star Trek, superheroes, surveillance, surveillance society, television, Texas, the courts, the Democrats, the law, tragedy, UFOs, unions, Us, Utopia, war on education, Westerns, Wolverine, women's sports, work, World Cup, X-Men, YouTube, zunguzungu
Thursday Noontime Links!
* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.
* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.
* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.
* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.
* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.
* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”
The @washingtonpost opinion staff should be ashamed of themselves for letting Michael Anton run this garbage op-ed. This, for example, is one of the most misleadingly edited quotes I've ever seen: pic.twitter.com/gARKf2OL1B
— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 19, 2018
Adding the extra "or" completely changes the meaning of the sentence, and IDK if editors actually look up quotes provided in op-eds or not, but maybe you should when the writer was a comms guy for a notoriously dishonest admin & wrote the Flight 93 election piece?
— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 19, 2018
[really getting into it] We need new, disruptive models of citizenship for a challenging new era. Instead of where you're born or where you live, why not base citizenship on relevant factors, like tax bracket, Amazon Prime membership status, or your credit rating?
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 19, 2018
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* Deported for doing journalism.
* If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.
* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.
yes, the pee tape is real, but what's even realer is that sense of existential desolation that tells you, with total certainty, that it doesn't matter
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 19, 2018
* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.
* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.
* America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.
* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.
* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?
* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.
* Snikt!
* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…
* Money is speech. It’s better actually.
* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?
* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.
* But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.
* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.
* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.
* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
* Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.
* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.
A reboot called My So-Called Mid-Life Crisis where Angela Chase is 40? I’m willing to write the pilot 😜📺
— Curtis Sittenfeld (@csittenfeld) July 18, 2018
* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.
* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.
* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?
* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.
* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.
* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.
* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.
You could teach a screenwriting class with this gif-
pic.twitter.com/NWIBVKi8LI— David Yazbek (@DavidYazbek) July 14, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
July 19, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolition, academia, actually existing media bias, alt right, Amazon, America, animal extinction, AP exams, apocalypse, Avengers, Bernie Sanders, birthright citizenship, Black Mirror, celebrities, CEOs, CFPs, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, concussions, crows, democracy, denialism, deportation, Disney, diversity, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, equality, Facebook, fake news, football, Fox, Fox News, free speech, gay rights, girls, gonzo journalism, head injury, history, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice, immigration, intersectionality, Israel, journalism, Kindle, labor, lead, Mariia Butina, Mark Zuckerberg, Marvel, MCU, Medicare for All, migrants, money, monopolies, My So-Called Life, narwhals, Nazis, necrophilia, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nike, NRA, police, politics, Putin, race, racism, refugees, robots, running, Russia, search committees, snikt, socialism, Springsteen, Star Trek, Star Wars, story, television, the arc of history is long but, the Constitution, the courts, the law, the military, there's just one story and we tell it over and over, UNC, United Kingdom, water, weird science, Wisconsin, Wolverine, Wonder Woman
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
The Fox X-Men franchise is actually the most authentic comic book universe because it has:
– absolutely fucked continuity
– wildly fluctuating quality
– universe resetting mega-events
– spin-offs with different tone/audience
– makes people very angry— Séan Casey (@NoticeSeanpai) April 22, 2018
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
The ONLY relevant story here is that being "disrespectful" to the political elite is a thought-crime in the eyes of a public university president, and he's pretty much saying that if he can fire her, he will pic.twitter.com/2EHlCCQxrJ
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 19, 2018
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
how is it taking this long to find out what horrendously shitty thing Sean Hannity hired Michael Cohen to cover up
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 17, 2018
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
Boomers: when you pay off your student loans,
Me: when I what pic.twitter.com/bUx6F8AruH— DEATH ✌️ AMERIKKKA (@barf_stepson) April 21, 2018
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
The American left underestimates the degree to which "Fuck the fucking Democrats, oh my god" is this country's single most popular political message.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) April 18, 2018
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
no one man should have all that power pic.twitter.com/CVnwRnothg
— 🌊 (@mattwhitlockPM) April 20, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
April 23, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, Aaron Sorkin, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, adjunctification, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, America, animal testing, animals, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Asperger's, astronauts, autism, Baltimore, books, Borges, Buffy, Cape Town, Catan, catastrophe, cats, CFPs, China, Chloe Sullivan, Cincinnati, class struggle, climate change, college, comics, communism, computers, conferences, contingency, continuity, cruelty, cults, cussing, Cynthia Nixon, dance like no one's watching, Darwin, Darwinist literary criticism, death, dementia, democracy, Democratic National Convention, Democrats, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, drugs, ecology, emancipation, eu-antisociality, Extrapolation, fake news, fantasy, FBI, film, Florida, free speech, Fresno State, futurity, games, general election 2016, genetics, Go, Gulf Stream, Han Solo, Harper Lee, heroin, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, James Comey, Janelle Monae, Jin Yong, John Scalzi, Johns Hopkins, Kim Stanley Robinson, Korean War, labor, liberalism, Liberty University, life, Los Angeles Review of Books, Maria Bamford, marijuana, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Michael Cohen, military-industrial complex, misogyny, MLA, modeling, moneybag, monkeys, Moravec's paradox, murder, my scholarly empire, National Geographic, Native Americans, Neil Gorsuch, New York, no one man should have all this power, normalization, nuclear war, nuclearity, Ohio, online education, oops, Oregon, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palantir, parenting, Philadelphia, photography, Pierre Menard, podcasts, police, police state, police violence, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, relativity, resistance, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Sean Hannity, Settlers of Catan, sexism, SFRA, Smallville, smartphones, Solo, South Africa, sports, Star Wars, strikes, student debt, student government, superheroes, Supreme Court, swearing, teachers, television, tenure, the courts, the Flash, The Handmaid's Tale, the humanities, the inadequacy of apology, the law, the oceans, To Kill a Mockingbird, true crime, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, university presses, Utah, Utopia, voter ID, voter suppression, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, water, Wisconsin, Wolverine, Wonder Women, work, X-Men
Monday Night Links!
* Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Will Be R-Rated: ‘The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith Frontrunner Scribe. Patrick Stewart would play Picard again, but only for Tarantino. Still pretty firmly on board.
* Pretty strong contender for the moment the Singularity happened: an AI teaches itself chess in four hours and beats the strongest human-designed AI that exists, which itself can beat any human. AI is now so complex its creators can’t trust why it makes decisions.
* It is significant that it is women of colour, a doubly marginalised group, who are at the forefront of finding new ways to figure uneven development during this, our time, of successive systemic crises. Imbalances between cores and (internal and external) peripheries appear in the novels of Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor that also brought Caribbean, Yoruba, and Igbo folk culture into the core of genre sf at the same time as working to explode it. More recently, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels (2015-2017) feature a fantasy world repeatedly wracked by cataclysmic geological upheavals that can easily be read as a metaphor for anthropogenic climate change. But as their coded commentary on #BlackLivesMatter, hardened borders, and refugee-panics indicate, these profound shocks are also those to which capitalist cores expose their internal and external peripheries. From world sf (via, if we must, World Sf) to world-sf.
* The short story phenomenon that’s sweeping the world: Men React to “Cat Person.” Based on the original short story by Kristen Roupenian.
* When an algorithm writes science fiction.
* One of my graduate students, Brian Kenna, has a terrific review of the new Tolkien publication Beren and Lúthien in the Los Angeles Review of Books, focusing both on Tolkien and gender as well as the weird inaccessibility of Christopher Tolkien’s editorial decisions. Check it out!
* Every English major joke is a small concession to the same logic that leads administrators to trim humanities programs, or leads lawmakers to strike the NEA and NEH from the budget as wasteful, though these offices claim at best fractions of fractions of our larger national expenses. Humorless Man Yells at English Major Jokes. Facing My Own Extinction.
* Stony Brook Professor Detained in Cameroon.
* 8 Grad Students Are Arrested Protesting the GOP Tax Bill on Capitol Hill. College and the End of Upward Mobility. How Harvard’s Hypocrisy Could Hurt Your Union. Private Colleges Had 58 Millionaire Presidents in 2015. Charles Koch Gave $50 Million To Higher Ed In 2016. What Did He Buy?
* In the richest country in human history. How Big Medicine Can Ruin Medicare for All. Girl has blunt message for Aetna after her brain surgery request was denied.
* Drug trial shows promising results to fight Huntington’s disease. This is a very promising finding: whether or not this particular treatment becomes “the cure” or not, the fact that you can shut off huntingtin production without negatively impacting the adult brain suggests some version of this treatment could diminish or entirely prevent the emergence of the disease. “I really think this is, potentially, the biggest breakthrough in neurodegenerative disease in the past 50 years.”
* After Trent Franks, men worry if asking subordinates to bear their child is still okay. For Female Lobbyists, Harassment Often Accompanies Access. Al Franken’s selfish, damaging resignation speech. Time POTY more or less gets it right for once. The Unsexy Truth about Harassment. Weinstein as Crime Boss. As More College Students Say “Me Too,” Accused Men Are Suing For Defamation. Dirty Old Men on the Faculty. Over two thousand entries on a Google doc detailing sexual harassment in the academy. Our Professors Raped Us.
“You can have my vote if you have sex with me,” Ms. Alarid recalled the lawmaker saying, although he used cruder language for sexual intercourse. He told Ms. Alarid she had the same first name as his wife, so he would not get confused if he called out in bed. Then he kissed Ms. Alarid on the lips, she said.
Shocked, Ms. Alarid, who was 32 at the time, pushed him away. Only after he was gone did she let the tears flow.
When her bill came up on the floor of the New Mexico House of Representatives the next day, March 20, 2009, it failed by a single vote, including a “No” by the lawmaker, Representative Thomas A. Garcia.
As Ms. Alarid watched from the House gallery, she said, Mr. Garcia blew her a kiss and shrugged his shoulders with arms spread.
* Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 64. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052. Just one story of thousands: Lives at Risk Inside a Senior Complex in Puerto Rico With No Power.
* ‘Holy crap’: Experts find tax plan riddled with glitches. The Republican tax bill: four takeaways. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lets corporations loose to do what they will—and then imposes pain to make the numbers work. And inevitably.
* The first wintertime megafire in California history is here. California’s wildfires are not “natural” — humans made them worse at every step. Incarcerated women risk their lives fighting California fires. It’s part of a long history of prison labor. California Is Running Out of Inmates to Fight Its Fires.
* The ‘poisoned landscapes’ we leave behind. As the climate changes and seas swell, coastal colleges struggle to prepare. Fracking Is a Huge American Money Pit.
* Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.
* “Here are the keys, Don, gas is in the tank.”
* Pilots stop 222 asylum seekers being deported from Germany by refusing to fly. Deportation under Trump.
* Millennials now biggest voting group in U.S., 2-1 Democratic.
* Dem lawmaker calls for extra protections to ‘safeguard’ Senate pages if Moore is elected. That’s MILWAUKEE’S OWN Dem lawmaker Gwen Moore.
* “Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy.” Don’t give an inch, brother!
* How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult.
*An exclusive analysis of data from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States shows that police shoot Americans more than twice as often as previously known.
* Subsequently, The Intercept, working with the ACLU of Texas, obtained several DPS dashcam videos that show immigrants being detained on the road for trivial violations and then carted away by the Border Patrol.
* Mark Hamill Made Up an Absurdly Grim Backstory for Luke Skywalker Ahead of The Last Jedi. The “True Nature of the Force” is More Complicated Than You Think. I made the “the Force is the villain” prediction way back in 2015, too, and still think some version of it is going to land. Star Wars vs. the Nazis. The First Impressions for Star Wars: The Last Jedi Are Overwhelmingly Good. And the only review I needed from the only voice I trust.
* An extremely petty breakdown of everything dumb in the Jurassic World 2 trailer.
* The Hollywood Drama Around Annihilation Shows Why We Can’t Have Smart Things.
* How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met.
* Very 2017 Headlines: Why are America’s farmers killing themselves in record numbers?
* No one makes a living on Patreon.
* Dial B for Blog is back! Again!
* Podcasts have truly arrived: they’re being turned into superhero movies.
* Tis the season: reference-writing guidelines for avoiding gender bias.
* The fascinating history of the first commercial jetliner.
* A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and concluded with an alarming question about psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is – but it’s also a NSA memo from 1977.
* A New Optical Illusion Was Just Discovered, And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* A female translator reckons with The Odyssey.
* When a DNA test tells who your daddy isn’t.
* Stalk your friends the Wired way.
* From Zoey’s eyeballs to megabucks: This 6-year-old made $11 million on YouTube in one year.
* And Slaughterhouse-Five is coming to TV. Can’t wait to see what they cook up for season two…
Written by gerrycanavan
December 11, 2017 at 4:52 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, academia, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, administrative bloat, adulthood, Aetna, Afrofuturism, airplanes, Al Franken, algorithms, Annihilation, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, asylum, Barack Obama, Beren and Lúthien, books, California, Cat Person, chess, class struggle, climate change, comics, Democrats, deportation, Dial B for Blog, DNA, ecology, emails, English majors, Episode 8, Facebook, fake news, fascism, fracking, friendship, games, genetic testing, Germany, graduate student movements, Gwen Moore, Harvard, Harvey Weinstein, health insurance, housing, How the University Works, Huntington's disease, Jeff Vandermeer, Jurassic World, Koch brothers, laptops, LEGO, letters of recommendation, Mark Hamill, Marvel, Medicare for All, medicine, millennials, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Nazis, neoliberalism, Nnedi Okorafor, NSA, optical illusions, our brains don't work, outer space, parties, Patreon, Patrick Stewart, Paul F. Tompkins, Paul Ryan, pedagogy, podcasts, police shootings, police violence, politics, pollution, prison-industrial complex, psychics, Puerto Rico, Quentin Tarantino, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Roy Moore, Russian Revolution, science fiction, science is magic, sexual harassment, Silicon Valley, single payer, Slaughterhouse Five, social media, Soviet Union, stalking, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stony Brook, superheroes, Tarantino, taxes, teaching, the Force, The Force Awakens, the Odyssey, the Singularity, TNG, Tolkien, translation, unions, Vonnegut, voting, war on education, wildfires, Wolverine, YouTube, Zadie Smith
Closing All My Tabs Tuesday
* CFP: Octavia Butler Companion. CFP: MOSF Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Afrofuturism. CFP: Shakespeare and Science Fiction. CFP: Monsters and Monstrosity, A Special Issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal. CFP: Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies: New Epistemologies and Relational Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene.
* Classic “you had one job” situation: Credit giant Equifax says Social Security numbers, birth dates of 143 million consumers may have been exposed. How to Protect Yourself from that Massive Equifax Breach. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You.
* A Poem About Your University’s Brand New Institute’s Conference.
* Academe on the Auction Block.
* Adjuncting in Trump Country: What Has Not Changed.
* She Was a Rising Star at a Major University. Then a Lecherous Professor Made Her Life Hell.
* What to Do When the Nazis Are Obsessed with Your Field. J.R.R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit.
* What the Rich Won’t Tell You.
* Dreamers at Marquette. Marquette University leaders show support for students affected by DACA announcement. Why ending DACA is so unprecedented. And they tried to warn us: Immigrants Gave Their Info to Obama, Now Trump Could Use It to Deport Them. How to Support Students Facing Immigration Crises: Suggested Policies and Best Practices for UCI Departments/Faculty. The 3 bills Congress could use to protect DACA recipients. The United States Cannot Be Trusted.
Donald Trump is a vicious, utterly reprehensible human being capriciously ruining tens of thousands of lives for no gain.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2017
* Trump’s Repeal of DACA Is the GOP’s Pathology in a Nutshell: An entire country is being held hostage by a thin slice of the Republican electorate, and they answer to no one.
* ICE Wrongly Imprisoned an American Citizen for 1,273 Days. Judges Say He’s Owed $0. Relatives of Undocumented Children Caught Up in ICE Dragnet. ICE wants to destroy records that show abuses and deaths of immigrants in custody. Dispatches from the Northwest’s immigration dystopia.
* Abandoned States: Places In Idyllic 1960s Postcards Have Transformed Into Scenes Of Abandonment.
* Urban artwork gives downtown MKE some color.
* An American Dialect Dictionary Is Dying Out. Here Are Some Of Its Best Words.
* Prisoners Face Horrifying Conditions, Limited Drinking Water After Harvey Pounds Texas. Texas Republicans Helped Chemical Plant That Exploded Lobby Against Safety Rules. The devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we’ve entered the age of climate chaos. Parts of Puerto Rico could be without power for 6 months after Irma. Tampa Bay’s Coming Storm. The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners. A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been. What Homeowners Insurance Won’t Cover If a Hurricane Hits. Floods in drought season: is this the future for parts of India? State of emergency for fire danger declared for all Washington counties. In the wake of Harvey, it’s time to treat science denial as gross negligence—and hold those who do the denying accountable. We should be naming hurricanes after Exxon and Chevron, not Harvey and Irma. The cats are all right.
* What is it with New Jersey senators?
* How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt.
* The ‘internet of things’ is creating a more connected world but there is a dark side to giving up our domestic lives to machines. You don’t say!
* The Arctic is now expected to be ice-free by 2040. But of course to the World Economic Forum “entirely preventable civilization-ending catastrophe” is just another word for “opportunity”:
On the upside, the Arctic Council foresees increased shipping once the sea-ice has disappeared. Using the route across the top of the world to sail from northern Europe to north-east Asia can cut the length of voyages by two-fifths compared with travelling via the Suez Canal.
* Gasp! House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers.
* The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
* North Korea: “All Paths Lead to Catastrophe.” What Would War with North Korea Actually Look Like?
* Spider-Man Needs to Be White and Straight, Say Leaked Sony Emails.
* A Timeline of Postapocalyptic Dystopias That Didn’t Actually Happen.
* Wole Talabi’s Compilation of 654 Works of African Speculative Fiction Should Top Your Reading List.
* Why Does High School Still Start So Early? Why a later start to the school day could pump $1 billion into Illinois’ economy.
* Traces of Crime: How New York’s DNA Techniques Became Tainted.
* Winning the white working class for criminal justice reform.
* Star Wars is falling apart. The “Star Wars” franchise officially has a director problem.
* The Defenders Are Here to Tell You All Lives Matter. What is going on at Marvel TV?
* San Junipero 2: I Told You They Were Actually in Hell.
* A(mother) Solution to the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich Manuscript “solution” rubbished by experts.
* Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake. Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost. The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools.
* Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history. End of lecture.
* The Republican Party Is Building The Electorate That Will Keep It In Power.
* The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party.
* Sexual Harassment in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Communities Survey Results.
* The onus should be on universities that rely on SET for employment decisions to provide convincing affirmative evidence that such reliance does not have disparate impact on women, underrepresented minorities, or other protected groups. Because the bias varies by course and institution, affirmative evidence needs to be specific to a given course in a given department in a given university. Absent such specific evidence, SET should not be used for personnel decisions.
* If immigration agents show up at your door. Life after love. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Hemingway called it the saddest short story ever written. Superheroes we can believe in. Statement of teaching philosophy. The child is the father of the man. Abbrs.
* Futurama is coming back again, for a single, audio-only episode.
* But at least they finally found the Savage Land.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 12, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abbreviations, academia, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncting, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alexa, America, apocalypse, art, Black Mirror, Bob Menendez, canon, catastrophe, CFPs, charter schools, Cher, class struggle, climate change, comics, credit scores, crime, DACA, Democrats, deportation, dialect, DNA, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, drugs, dystopia, Equifax, fandom, flooding, Florida, Futurama, futurity, Great Recession, hacking, Hemingway, heroin, high school, housing prices, Houston, How the University Works, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, ice, ice sheet collapse, identity theft, immigration, India, Inhumans, insurance, John Ashbery, kids today, language, Len Wein, Linus, Marquette, Marvel, Michigan, Milwaukee, monsters, my teaching philosophy, Nazis, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nintendo, North Korea, Octavia Butler, Ozymandias, Peanuts, pedagogy, politics, public schools, Puerto Rico, race, racism, radicalism, Randolph, rape culture, Republicans, rich people, ruins, San Junipero, Savage Land, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, segregation, sexual harassment, Shakespeare, Sony, Spider-Man, Star Wars, subprime mortgages, Super Mario, teaching, teaching evaluations, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the courts, the dark side of the digital, The Defenders, the internet of things, the law, the university in ruins, Title IX, Twitter, University of California, Voynich Manuscript, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, white people, wildfires, Wolverine
Father’s Day Links!
* The entire bloody country hates the AHCA.
* Democrats to step up attacks on GOP’s Obamacare repeal effort.
DEMs: Here's our new platform
US: Exciting!
DEMs: Number one, we're going to swear a lot
US: Is number two Medicare for All?
DEMs: Fuck no— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) June 17, 2017
* Democratic 2020 contenders? Voters haven’t heard of them. Maybe the best one:
More than a third of voters, 35 percent, said they have never heard of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — a former governor and national party chairman who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee last year.
* Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke rescinds acceptance of Homeland Security post.
* Sad.
Give not this rotten orange to your friend
— William Shakespeare (@Wwm_Shakespeare) June 17, 2017
* Listen, I’m getting sick of this.
* Plastic polluted Arctic islands are dumping ground for Gulf Stream. An Abandoned US Nuclear Base in Greenland Could Start Leaking Toxic Waste Because of Global Warming.
* Amazon is a very unusual company. I said on Twitter that it was the closest we’re ever going to get to the weird hybrid of monopoly capital and state socialism you get in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and I really think that’s right.
Where will it all end? Mr. Kubica has thought about this. Amazon can be understood as a decades-long effort to shorten the time between “I want it” and “I have it” into as brief a period as possible. The logical end of this would be the something Mr. Kubica jestingly called Amazon Imp, short for “implant” and also “impulse,” Mr. Kubica said. It would be a chip inserted under the skin.
“The imp would sense your impulses and desires,” Mr. Kubica wrote in an email, “and then either virtually fulfill them by stimulating your brain (for a modest payment to Amazon, of course) or it would make a box full of goodies for you appear on your doorstep (for a larger fee, of course).”
Every desire fulfilled. “I am sure that Amazon even now is building it,” Mr. Kubica said.
* Elsewhere in Big Data: Google Doesn’t Know My Dad Died.
* “At this point it appeared that the left testicle and cord may actually have been removed instead of the right one,” the surgeon, Valley Spencer Long, wrote in a postoperative report, according to court records. Seems like the sort of thing you wouldn’t need to rely on speculation for!
* The recordings revealed that fathers engaged in more “rough and tumble play,” such as “tickling, poking, and tumbling,” with boys than girls. On the other hand, “fathers of girls used more sadness language when talking to their child.”
* Jordan Peale’s next: Lovecraft Country.
* Science fiction for the ungovernable: Cory Doctorow’s Walkaways.
* Sounds like Sony and Disney/Marvel will be suing each other soon.
* Alignment chart. Maybe he’s born with it. From our family to yours, Happy Father’s Day. Press start. And the Trump presidency, in one tweet.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 18, 2017 at 1:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #dads, Affordable Care Act, AHCA, alignment charts, Amazon, America, artificial intelligence, Chris Christie, class struggle, climate change, comics, Cory Doctorow, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Bellamy, fascism, fathers, fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, futurity, games, Get Out, Google, Greenland, guns, health insurance, homeland security, Jeff Bezos, Jordan Peale, Julius Caesar, language, Looking Backward, Lovecraft Country, maps, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mega Man, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, New Jersey, nuclearity, parenting, Philando Castile, police, police violence, politics, potatoes, race, racism, science fiction, segregation, Shakespeare, Sheriff Clarke, Sony, Spider-Man, superheroes, testicles, the Arctic, Twitter, Walkaways, Wisconsin, Wolverine, words
Tuesday Links!
* FiveThirtyEight has been doing a great series on Mars colonization. Today’s entries are all about space sex. Also: Everything About Mars Is The Worst.
* Also at FiveThirtyEight: The Odds You’ll Fill Out A Perfect Bracket.
* TRAPPIST-1 seems like a no-go for humanity, but three of the worlds are close enough for life to hop between them.
* New York 2140 vs. The Collapsing Empire: Which New Sci-Fi Novel Is for You?
* ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Turns 20, from my “Buffy at 20″ co-organizer James South.
* On the coming apocalypse (and other’s people’s babies).
Your grandchildren were murdered by your parents.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2017
* What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
* From the archives: Snow Days Under Socialism.
* No, big snowstorms like this aren’t normal.
* America elected a parasite. Let’s take away health insurance from 24 million people. Or 26 million, who’s counting. This Level of Corruption Is Unprecedented in the Modern History of the Presidency. Gotta save money to steal money. “Senate Democrats prepare for spring battle over Trump’s border wall.”
24 million people losing insurance is roughly equivalent to the population of:
VT
AL
ND
SD
DE
MT
RI
ME
NH
ID
WV
NE
NM
KS
WY**combined**.
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 13, 2017
more people will lose health insurance under trumpcare than the entire population of florida
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 13, 2017
Fun fact: AHCA is projected to kill 17,000 people its 1st year. If all 301 GOP congressmen vote for it, each will have murdered 56 Americans
— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) March 13, 2017
find a man who smiles at you the way Paul Ryan smiles at a rise in the infant mortality rate
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 13, 2017
Ah good, Paul Ryan is finally clearing up some misconceptions about the GOP's health plan: pic.twitter.com/FWRiMb30Ni
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) March 14, 2017
TRUMP: I will use the bodies of dead 64-year-olds to build my wall.
DEMOCRATS: lol I thought you said Mexico would pay for it— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2017
* Remember the People America’s Healthcare System Has Already Killed.
* The university in ruins, Trump edition.
* The Party of Eugenics. They both are, honestly, but the GOP is just so much more vulgar about it.
* At every moment when Trump might have been stopped, when he might have been forced into bankruptcy, had his credit denied, had his loans called in, his licenses revoked, at every juncture where he might have been convicted of a crime or sent to jail—and, again, this is well before he makes his successful bid for the White House—some unplanned and unintended conspiracy of economic reason and political lowlifery mobilizes to protect him. (And it really is unplanned and unintended. The genius of the American system is how the Invisible Hand works to produce systemic vice rather than incidental virtue.)
* We’re heading towards something very ugly: Employers can ban staff from wearing headscarves, European court rules.
* American Empire: The Reboot.
* Seeing red: Membership triples for the Democratic Socialists of America.
* The Onion struggling to lampoon Trump.
* Violent video games found not to affect empathy, again.
* The hype for Logan seems to be reaching comical proportions, but still, you’d be hard-pressed to find another recent superhero movie that was worth emulating.
* Should a Chimpanzee Be Considered a Person?
* MMMBop: Hanson announces 25th anniversary tour as your death rapidly approaches.
* The economics of airline classes.
* Bowie impersonates other singers like Springsteen, Lou Reed. Everything has been bullshit since Bowie died.
* Because you demanded it! Young Sheldon.
* USA Today discovers Hello from the Magic Tavern. They’ve hit a real stride lately as story events have allowed them to move away from their standard format — and they were great before.
* Every Author on Your English Syllabus, Summed Up in a Single Sentence.
* It’s Donald Trump’s Fault Iron Fist Is Bad, Not Marvel’s, Says Star Finn Jones. If you say so.
* A People’s History of the Marvel Universe. Via Abigail Nussbaum’s second Hugos post.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 14, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, aging, AHCA, airlines, America, animal personhood, animals, apes, apocalypse, austerity, because you demanded it, Big Bang Theory, Bowie, bracketology, Buffy, CBS, chimpanzees, class struggle, climate change, conferences, democratic socialism, Donald Trump, ecology, empire, English classes, eugenics, Europe, extrasolar planets, FiveThirtyEight, games, general election 2016, Hanson, health care, Hello from the Magic Tavern, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugos, I grow old, infant mortality, international students, Iron Fist, Islamophobia, John Scalzi, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Logan, longevity, March Madness, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Mexico, MMMBop, monkeys, moral panic, mortality, movies, music, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York 2140, outer space, Paul Ryan, podcasts, politics, race, racism, Republicans, satire, sex, snow, socialism, Springsteen, Steve King, super-agers, superheroes, syllabi, television, The Collapsing Empire, The Onion, the university in ruins, Trappist-1, Trumpcare, Veep, violence, visas, white people, Wolverine, Young Sheldon
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago “black site” should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 24, 2015 at 7:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alejandro González Iñárritu, algorithms, America, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, Batman, Birdman, black sites, books, Catholics, CFPs, chance, cheese, Chicago, climate change, clopenings, college, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, Cops, democracy, denials, diversity, drugs, ecology, education, England, English majors, European Union, fellowships, film, first contact, free speech, Genghis Khan, genocide, Glenn Reynolds, God, Golden Girls, Greece, guns, Harris Wittels, hate speech, housework, How the University Works, Hugh Jackman, hydrofracking, Idaho, Instagram, Instapundit, Jeb Bush, Joseph Kahn, Kentucky, kids today, labor, libertarians, Lord of the Rings, majors, male privilege, Marc Maron, Marquette, Mars, men's rights, meritocracy, microstates, misogyny, music, my scholarly empire, National Adjunct Walkout Day, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Octavia Butler, orcs, Oryx and Crake, Oscars, photography, playlists, police brutality, police state, police violence, poverty, Power Rangers, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, privilege, public authority, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, reboots, recycling, right to work, Robert Heinlein, robots, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexism, Silk Road, sitcoms, sperm donation, Starbucks, Starship Troopers, states of exceptions, STEM, Steven Spielberg, strikes, superheroes, Superman, Syriza, tech economy, television, Tetris, the courts, The Ecstasy of Order, the humanities, the law, the Left, the Singularity, Title IX, Tolkien, torture, Twitter, Two and a Half Men, UNC, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, welfare state, Wes Anderson, white privilege, Wisconsin, Wolverine, work-life balance, WTF, Žižek
Fall Break!
* The shutdown is over; bring on the next shutdown! Communists at Standard and Poor’s Determine the Shutdown Took $24 Billion Out Of The US Economy. What You Can Get For The Price Of A Shutdown. Here Is What Republicans Got For Shutting Down The Government. House Republicans Hold Hearing on Why Their Shutdown Shut Things Down.
* Meanwhile, poor children now make up a majority of school children in South and West.
* Who benefits from the safety net? You’ll never guess!
* Gasp! Report by Faculty Group Questions Savings From MOOCs. More here.
* To Prevent Rape on College Campuses, Focus on the Rapists, Not the Victims. How To Fix The ‘College Women Need To Stop Drinking’ Narrative. How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.
* Bad Lip Reading presents Game of Thrones: Medieval Land Fun-Time World.
* Is it true that Oreos are more addictive to lab rats than cocaine?
* Gus Lives! And right here in Milwaukee: McDonald’s restaurants allegedly used to launder drug money. I actually make fun of this forlorn-looking McDonald’s all the time; now I know…
* The A.V. Club reviews Schooled: The Price of College Sports.
* And Wes Anderson’s The Grant Budapest Hotel has a trailer. Bring on March!
Written by gerrycanavan
October 17, 2013 at 11:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, addiction, austerity, bad lip reading, Breaking Bad, class struggle, college basketball, college football, college sports, drugs, feminism, film, Game of Thrones, games, gay rights, government shutdowns, homophobia, How the University Works, McDonald's, Milwaukee, misogyny, MOOCs, NCAA, neoliberalism, Oreos, politics, poverty, privatize everything, race, rape, rape culture, Republicans, sexism, the economy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the South, the West, trailers, Wes Anderson, white people, Wisconsin, Wolverine, X-Men
Tuesday Links
* R. J. “Walt Jr.” Mitte talks to the Marquette Tribune about bullying, disability, and Breaking Bad.
* So it turns out jobs data is basically useless.
* More legal theft from the high frequency traders.
Today, the balance in our retirement accounts falls wildly short of what we need to keep us from destitution in old age, much less to secure a comfortable existence. According to the Vanguard Group, in 2012, the average account balance in our 401(k)s was $86,212 — and that number is skewed by high earners at the top. The amount experts say we need? $1 million or more, depending on how much you make now.
* What Tony Soprano taught me about running a university.
* In the future, private prison companies will be the only industry left.
* Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business.
* Yglesias wept: Bangladeshi workers set fire to factories.
* New Firefly/Serenity comics on the way.
* How fake science explains Wolverine’s healing factor.
* And there’s nothing left to believe in when even horse_ebooks was a lie.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 24, 2013 at 1:16 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 401Ks, academia, amateur's just another word for we don't want to pay you, America, Bangladesh, Breaking Bad, bullying, capitalism, college football, college sports, comics, data, disability, Firefly, high-frequency trading, horse_ebooks, How the University Works, jobs, labor, Marquette, Matthew Yglesias, NCAA, neoliberalism, prison-industrial complex, protest, retirement, robots, science, Serenity, Sopranos, stock market, stocks, strikes, sweatshops, Twitter, unemployment, Wolverine
Friday Links
* CFP: Foundation, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames (15 Apr 2014).
* Tor has an excerpt from the introduction to Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure.
* In their complaints to federal authorities, students and alumni have faulted campus officials for missteps at nearly every juncture: Telling students who report rape to take time off until their assailants graduate. Treating judicial cases like educational exercises. Slapping perpetrators with penalties less severe than those for stealing a laptop.
* The costs of raising a child from birth to age 17, including housing, food, clothing, health care, education, and other expenses, will come to $241,080 for a child born in 2012, up 2.6 percent from the year before, according to new data released by the Department of Agriculture. The annual cost for a child in a middle-income, two-parent family ranges from $12,600 to $14,700.
* Scandal! Exactly Zero Of The 17 Suspected Voter Fraud Cases In Boulder, CO Exist.
* Propublica crowdfunds an intern to study interns.
* A quality product in the digital age: Cleveland.com’s Review of the Cheesecake Factory Reveals the Sorry State of American Newspapers.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 16, 2013 at 8:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing journalism, actually existing media bias, CFPs, cheerleading, Cheesecake Factory, class struggle, Cleveland, disability, disability studies, film, games, How the University Works, interns, kids today, MOOCs, politics, rape, rape culture, science fiction, voter fraud, voter suppression, Wolverine, Woody Allen
Tuesday Night!
* Hard to say which is more shocking: that a male worker born in 1973 retiring at age 70 can expect to live a full year less than the expected length of retirement for a worker born in 1912, or that Richard Shelby apparently has evidence that by 2025 “America will be burned … and a lot of us will be dead.”
* Catholic Church approves iPhone confession app. Not an Onion hotline…
* Paul Campos tries to read Laurence Tribe’s mind.
* The Tea Party Movement has driven out Colorado state party chairman Dick Wadhams. Because I am an adult, I will leave the man’s absurd name out of this, and just bid him adieu…
* Behold the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.
* Wolverine or 2 Batmen: a duckrabbit for our time.
* Academic Cliche Watch: “I want to argue that . . .”
* Fox News draws ever closer to its Fort Sumter moment.
* HuffPo’s Achilles Heel: Search engine optimization won’t work forever.
* Provocative claim of the day: …I find myself slightly gratified that one consequence of the now-dying post-Thatcher free-market consensus is that it made nuclear power development in the Anglosphere more or less economically impossible.
* And a quick note on how beer commercials work.
Beer commercials are designed around certain dominant themes, but the people who sell the beer would prefer that the dominant themes be misunderstood. What are beer commercials about? The two central premises are these:
1. Beer—cheap, common, domestic beer—is a rare commodity that drives men mad with the desire to have it, at any cost.
2. Women are the great obstacle between men and the fulfillment of this desire.
Taken literally, this is baffling. Beer is cheap and easy to find. The only cost should be $6.99 for a six pack, at any convenience store. And rather than hiding from women to drink their beer, many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they’re drinking. “Drink our beer and avoid contact with women!”—who could possibly be the target for that pitch?
But it makes perfect sense if the target audience is—and it is—16-year-olds.
The girls aren’t really girls; they’re Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 8, 2011 at 10:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, advertising, alcohol, Batman, beer, Catholicism, Civil War, clichés, Colorado, commercials, duckrabbit, Fox News, health care, Huffington Post, iPhone, legal realism, Malcolm Gladwell, neoliberalism, nuclearity, nullification, politics, religion, Republicans, Richard Shelby, search engine optimization, Social Security, Supreme Court, Tea Party, teenagers, Wolverine, writing
Other Links
* Why would Fox remake Torchwood? It’s like two years old and already in English. If they like it they could air it as is and it would cost them nothing. They should spend that money on Untitled Joss Whedon Cancelation instead.
* Wolverine admits to steroid use.
* Battlestar anthropology: The human population of Earth has generally always been 50,000. Via MeFi.
* Breathless news reports are claiming overstimulation during Avatar may have contributed to a Taiwanese man’s death.
* Lessons from an Academic Vagabound.
* How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. Helpful advice from Mutual of Omaha. Via Boing Boing.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 20, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, anthropology, Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, film, Fox, Joss Whedon, nuclearity, steroids, Torchwood, welcome to my future, Wolverine
Thursday, Thursday
Thursday, Thursday.
* My four-word post on marriage equality in Maine yesterday somehow turned into yet another epic comment thread about gay marriage. I just know this time we’ll hammer out agreement.
* Science fiction in the New Yorker: “The Slows” by Gail Hareven.
* Dollhouse “certain to be canceled.” Keep hope alive.
* Wolverine, despite by all accounts not being very good, gets a sequel.
* Craig Arnold update: they think they’ve found his trail.
* ‘MLA Urges Chairs to Focus on Adjunct Issues.’
* When the bomb goes off, everyone’s got one last thing to do before they die. A game.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 7, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, apocalypse, Craig Arnold, Dollhouse, games, Maine, marriage equality, MLA, New Yorker, nuclearity, politics, science fiction, welcome to my future, Wolverine