Posts Tagged ‘WWE’
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
* And even in the time of coronavirus, progress marches on.
A Few Links for Monday Morning
Yes, it’s only been one day, but I’m trying to get back in the habit of doing these more regularly…
* Following up on yesterday’s bonus Hugo’s post: This Is What The 2015 Hugo Ballot Should Have Been. Notes from the WSFS business meeting (read alongside this description of what all the voting propositions were).
* Mindfulness on the academic job search. I was fully prepared to mock this based on the headline, but I was actually won over, and I won’t beat myself up for that.
* Now the Ransom Center has gotten Ishiguro’s archive, too.
* I’m not lawyer, but wouldn’t this be a pretty clear violation of employment law if Duke and UNC were traditional corporations?
* This is the most common job held by immigrants in each state.
* Jon Stewart’s post-Daily Show career is weird.
* Vulture interviews Tarantino.
So all the potential movies you’ve mentioned through the years — Killer Crow, The Vega Brothers, the Django/Zorrocrossover movie — those will probably never happen, right?
No. I don’t think I’m going to do Killer Crow anymore, but that’s the only one that could possibly be done.
Is Kill Bill 3 also off the table?
No, it’s not off the table, but we’ll see.
I’m bummed about Killer Crow, but I’ll always keep my Kill Bill 3 hope alive.
* And new from #BlackLivesMatter: Campaign zero.
Tuesday Links!
* The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism interviews my friend Ramzi Fawaz about his exciting new book on the X-Men in the 1970s: The New Mutants.
* David Foster Wallace’s blurbspeak.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo Will Be Published In October.
* Scientist studies Diplomacy game to reveal early signs of betrayal.
* US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence.
* Whatever happened to Gary Cooper: You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”
* The fire next time: The Pension Crisis at Public Universities.
* The Clinton plan for college. This summary leaves out all the awful disruptivation and neoliberalization stuff that will be part of any actual plan, so it sounds great.
* Widespread use of private email revealed a day after Wise resigns. The Revelations in Phyllis Wise’s Emails. Legal experts react. It’s so bad the board is going to vote on whether to pull her $400,000 golden parachute.
* More on Duquesne’s proposition that adjunct unions would interfere with its Catholic mission.
* SeaWorld sees profits plunge 84% as customers desert controversial park.
* The Making of the American Police State.
* The Socrates of the National Security Agency.
* Police Union In Missouri Declares ‘Darren Wilson Day’ On Shooting Anniversary. Yankees’ Minor League Affiliate Holds ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Event On Anniversary Of Michael Brown’s Death.
* One Holdout Juror Was Likely Why James Holmes Avoided Death Penalty.
* Comic book movies and the forgotten art of the ending. You heard it here first!
* The big Superman reveal (from the pre-52 DC Universe) that DC never got around to revealing.
* Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics.
* No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games.
* Netflix’s Dystopian Show 3% To Be Developed Entirely In Brazil.
3% takes place in a world where most of the population lives in “Hither”: a decadent, miserable, corrupt place. When people reach 20 years of age, they go through the “Process”, the only chance to get to “Thither” – the better place, with opportunities and promises of a dignified life. Only three percent of the applicants are approved by the Process that will take the applicants to their limit, putting them in terrifying, dangerous situations and testing their convictions through moral dilemmas.
* More incredibly bad behavior in SF fandom. A little more context here.
* Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct. Colleges Under Investigation for Sexual Assault Wonder What Getting It Right Looks Like.
* Here come the automated trucks. Kids today don’t even want to drive anymore (or their helicopter parents won’t let them)!
* The Amazonization of Everything.
* Point: Please don’t have sex with robots. Counterpoint: Humans should be able to marry robots.
* Point: They clearly should have let Max Landis write Fantastic Four. Counterpoint: The Fantastic Four Are Jerks.
* Two interesting essays on sex work and sugar daddies from TNI’s “Daddy” issue: “Letter to a Young Baby” and “You Deserve It, Sweetie.”
* Atlas Shrugs Google Rebrands.
Natalia’s tweet became a whole great blog post on modernism, childhood, and tech.
* Why do hotels have ice machines?
* Why do pro wrestlers die so young?
* Prison-industrial-wildfire complex: Nearly half the people fighting wildfires wreaking havoc across California are prison inmates.
* Sandernistas would do well to reflect on one thing. In a few months’ time, Sanders’s campaign will be gone. He will not win. … But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away. And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. A useful corrective, I think, though my intuition remains that this is one brand of underpantsgnomism competing with another for underpants-gnome supremacy.
* Diseases of the twenty-first century: Foot Orgasm Syndrome.
* This could actually be interesting: Harvard Professor Larry Lessig To Explore Democratic Presidential Run.
* Because you demanded it: Werner Herzog’s Ant-Man.
* Science has discovered a new pentagon.
* And while the lion still remains at large, Milwaukee remembers its polar bear.
Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!
* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!
* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.
* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.
* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.
* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.
* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.
* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.
* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!
* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.
* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.
* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.
* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?
* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.
* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”
* The Verdict on Charter Schools?
* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.
* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.”
* Social networking and the majority illusion.
* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!
* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.
* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”
* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?
* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.
* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.
* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.
* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.
* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.
* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.
* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].
* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.
* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.
* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.
* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.
* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.
* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.
* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.
* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.
* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.
* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.
* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.
* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.
* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.
* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.
* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.
* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.
* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)
* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.
* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.
* So you want to announce for the WWE.
* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.
* I’m not happy about this either.
* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.
* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”
* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.
* Another round of the polygamy debate.
* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.
* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.
* And then there’s Whitesboro.
* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.
* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.
* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.
* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.
* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.
* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!
* And there’s nothing sweet in life.
Gerry Canavan 