Thursday Links!

* Call for papers: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult

* On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of ‘The Floor is Lava.’

* Antifascism and the left.

* There were like 15 separate Trump bribery scandals just yesterday. This one could be the biggest.

* Happy anniversary, Robert Mueller.

* None dare call it fascism: Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. “These aren’t people. These are animals.”  ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. Abolish the ICE Prison Complex.

“These aren’t people. They’re animals.” — Donald Trumphttps://t.co/Ycln6f5PTQ pic.twitter.com/gycKkv7PB5

— Jeffrey Vagle (@jvagle) May 16, 2018

Inflammatory liberal rhetoric isn't why there isn't a conservative-liberal alliance against authoritarianism. The refusal of conservatives to enter into an alliance with liberals against authoritarianism is the reason contemporary liberal rhetoric is inflammatory.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 17, 2018

America's near-future hard-border weapons-saturated climate-catastrophe is going to call for some really impressive perversions of empathy and the concept of humanity – and let me just say, my friends, we're on track to Bring It

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 15, 2018

* If men gave birth, the question of whether or not to have children would have been the central question of philosophy from the beginning of time.

* The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo.

* The worst -preneurs.

* The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.

* The Solo reviews are rolling in. Disney has already moved on.

SOLO Is Bad, But Editorial Policy and Our Fear of Online Creeps Prevents Us from Saying So Outright

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2018

* Revisiting Springsteen’s worst decade.

* Michigan State University Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Larry Nassar’s Victims. Report: USC Ignored Gynecologist’s Alleged Misconduct.

* Is Chicago Experiencing a Historic Preservation Crisis?

* Can Artificial Intelligence Help Find Alien Intelligence?

* The story you don’t care about, in the format you don’t want, in the series you’ll forget about while it’s still airing: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Will Focus On Young Aragorn.

* Same thing but Young Alfred.

* The Wrath of Khan Director Reveals He Was Making a Star Trek Trilogy for CBS, But It’s Been Delayed.

* How can you make Arrested Development season five even less promising? Netflix’s top scientists are hard at work.

* Elsewhere in entertainment news: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.

* Scenes from the Anthropocene: Scientists Match Pollution in Greenland’s Ice Sheet to Events from Ancient Greece and Rome.

* Someone, somewhere, is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect.

* We can now see how humans have altered Earth’s water resources.

* The secret, unaccountable location-tracking tool favored by dirty cops has been hacked (and it wasn’t hard).

* Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.

* Inside the largest comic book collection in the world.

* In a time without heroes…

* Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park.

* Poverty and the brain.

* Rage and the incels.

* It is sometimes said that a generous basic income could empower workers to better resist their capitalist bosses. This familiar claim regarding the emancipatory potential of basic income has things almost exactly backwards. A universal basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is an organized working class already powerful enough to extract it. This fact should inform the Left’s political strategy.

* The arc of history is long, but Uber and Lyft agree to stop forcing driver sexual assault victims into arbitration, confidentiality agreements.

* Batman and Eve.

* Kid, you got the job.

* And I always knew: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.

This cosplay at Salt Lake Comic Con pic.twitter.com/hF91aQM6BN

— Eric Alper (@ThatEricAlper) May 12, 2018

Friday Links Part Two Has Sent Layoff Notices to All Employees

* With state funding cut off due to the ongoing budget impasse, Chicago State University has announced all 900 employees, including the university president, are receiving layoff notices. This is stunning.

* On the other side of the country and the other side of pessimism: SFSU pledges to maintain funding for College of Ethnic Studies. “College faculty, however, said the financial boost promised Thursday won’t cover all of its costs.”

* The Secret History of Deadpool.

* R-Rated Superhero Stories Are Inherently Revisionist.

* The producers for the new Star Trek series, somewhat wisely, are devoting a lot of effort to heading off preemptive fan revolt.

* Academic Drivel Report.

* Nobody ever said creeping fascism has to mean no laughs. Well, maybe one person said.

* Sci-Fi/Fantasy “Best Of” Lists: A Visualization.

* A Statistical Analysis Of Stephen Colbert’s First 100 Episodes Of ‘The Late Show.’

* And some people just see farther.

Almost Too Many Thursday Links, Really, If You Ask Me

* Extrapolation is seeking essays for a special issue on Indigenous Futurism, edited by Grace L. Dillon, Michael Levy and John Rieder.

* Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

* No state worse than Wisconsin for black children, says new national study. The Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul. Other People’s Pathologies.

* Why UWM Matters.

* Life and debt.

* Coffee pods and ecology.

* University of California graduate students explain why they’re striking. Students Occupy Dartmouth President’s Office. Coaches Make $358,000 In Bonuses For Reaching NCAA Tournament Final Four. Emory University Eradicates its Visual Arts Department. Dear Harvard: You Win.

* A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine. Armed guards at faculty meetings.

* Major attack on academic freedom in Michigan.

* Academia Under the Influence.

* Surveillance, Dissent, and Imperialism. NSA Surveillance and the Male Gaze.

* The secret history of Cuban Twitter. If this tweet gets 1000 favorites Castro’s beard falls out.

* Kingdom Prep is one of dozens of basketball academies that have popped up in recent years to cater to “postgrad” players—recent high-school graduates who need to improve their standardized-test scores to meet the NCAA’s academic requirements.

* Just when I thought I was out: Marquette hires Duke associate head coach Steve Wojciechowski.

* The really rich are different from the rich, who are different from you and me.

* An heir to the du Pont fortune has been given probation for raping his three-year-old daughter because you know damn well why.

* What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?

* Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

* Libertarian Police Department. Koch Brothers Quietly Seek To Ban New Mass Transit In Tennessee.

* Detroit: Then and Now.

* A new study shows how Lake Tahoe might serve as a mammoth reservoir that could significantly mitigate California’s chronic water shortages without tarnishing the lake’s world-renowned beauty. What could possibly go wrong?

* The geographic sublime, from the Rural Assistance Center.

* How to Think About the Risk of Autism.

* Sepinwall vs. How I Met Your Mother.

* How To Negotiate With People Around The World.

* Gasp! CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says.

* Gasp! Torture Didn’t Lead to Bin Laden.

* New G.O.P. Bid to Limit Voting in Swing States.

* Who’s afraid of Suey Park?

* You once said: “I’m part-android.” Has that revelation haunted you?

* The kids are all right: Talking With 13-Year-Old Leggings Activist Sophie Hasty.

* Bourbon and Girl Scout Cookie Pairings.

* How to Improve Aquaman.

* The Definitive Ranking Of Robin’s 359 Exclamations From ‘Batman.’ 25 Weird Batman Comic-Book Covers.

* Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy.

* Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rRise of the BBbad Fan.

* Original Star Trek II: Wrath Of Khan VFX Storyboards Are A Visual Feast.

* The greatest, richest, freest country in the history of the world.

* The wisdom of markets: Walmart Realizes It’s Losing Billions Of Dollars By Denying Workers More Hours.

* Classic good news / bad news situation: Television Without Pity Archives Will Stay Online. Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come.

* Weird science: Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death.

* On Moretti-ism: Knowing is not reading.

* The New Inquiry’s “Money” issue is out with some great pieces, including one on China that really highlights a key contradiction in American ideology, which simultaneously holds that capitalism is the only possible economic system and that the future belongs to China. And Rortybomb’s piece on human capital is super chilling: basically dystopian literature, and it’s pretty much already real. And then the freedom piece! And the egg donation one! Great issue all around.

A person may be free because she can choose among a broad range of possibilities, or she may be free while she undertakes some action about which she has no choice at all, but whose compulsion she deems legitimate. Or she may be free when she faces a range of options, one of which is clearly superior to the alternatives, so that her behavior is perfectly predictable despite a formal freedom to choose. Freedom is not, at bottom, about the range of possibilities one faces but about the degree of consent one offers for the action to be taken or the circumstance to be endured.

* Japan Ordered To Stop Killing Antarctic Whales For “Science.”

* Teen Wins $70,000 Settlement After School Demanded Her Facebook Password.

* Is being thin more deadly than being obese? Take that, skinnies!

*  I’ve had this dream: Student claims college instructor spent months teaching class the ‘wrong’ course.

* I dream of the day that Seattle and Portland can get along.

* And please don’t make me say it again.