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Posts Tagged 'Parable of the Sower'
Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You're Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday
* Don't sleep on Grad School Vonnegut's Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…
* One of my better citations: "Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America."
* I've got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).
* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!
* Octavia Butler just made the NY Times Bestseller List for the first time ever — 14 years after her death.
* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.
* "The daily blitzkrieg of the news," bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. "Every day everything a little worse."
* A Message from Future Generations.
* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.
* "Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?"
* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.
* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students' demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.
* Which doesn't count the die-in.
Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette's English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB
— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020
Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.
— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020
* One of the things I've had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.
Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I'm not going to try and hurt them.
* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It's happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.
* We are calling for a Scholar strike #Scholarstrike on September 8-9 2020 to protest ongoing police violence and murders in America.
* Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year.
Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ
— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020
* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It's GW's second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.
* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.
* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: "Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium."
* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones' Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.
If you've ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W
— stefanielaine🌹 (@stefanielaine) September 1, 2020
* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.
Obama is, mostly quietly and behind the scenes, the single most powerful counter-revolutionary force in 21st-century US politics https://t.co/QjAnCDOKCS
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 28, 2020
* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don't Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America's Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.
* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin's Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin's record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.
I think people outside the state just can't fathom that Wisconsin's gerrymander is real. Republicans take 60%+ majorities in the legislature no matter how many people vote for them. In 2018 they took 64% of the Assembly on 46% of the vote. https://t.co/FExUcedl4Z
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2020
* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America's future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don't Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and 'Triggering the Libs,' Former Classmates Say.
* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. "When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society." Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven't killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents' permission.
* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They're Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD's Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.
Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality — including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred — in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) August 28, 2020
not sure anything has quite gotten to me the way the drive to make rittenhouse a right-wing hero of self-defense has. it is, to me, the single most ominous development of the year.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020
Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) "order."
Looking at what's gone down in Kenosha these few days—the police shooting, the immediate crackdown, the militia shooting—is just staring off a dizzying edge into the abyss, knowing things are about to get so much worse & hoping like hell there's some way we don't take the plunge.
* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that's what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.
* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after 'rapid spread' of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed's Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here's What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I'm weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I've got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don't Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students' positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don't Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.
* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We're Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.
* University of Oregon Will Charge Students for a Full Year of Dorm Housing Even if They Can't Enter the Classroom.
* Why New Jersey's Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here's what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.
* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University's Debt—And Who's Paying for It.
* Deeply unappreciated fact: the most "impactful" person in science right now is this Kazakhstani hacker queen. She is the one-woman bridge to the largest repository of scientific knowledge ever collected.
* Biden campaign desperate for digital access to students as college campuses remain closed and students don't know where they'll be on Election Day.
* Legionnaire's Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.
* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.
* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.
* Bernie Sanders's Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.
Liberals hate leftists for the same reason you'd hate someone at a theater who kept yelling "These are all actors, none of this is real." Liberals are trying to enjoy a fictional performance about their side being heroic protagonists, and leftists keep disrupting the illusion.
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 27, 2020
* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.
* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we're not talking about a government shutdown, are we? 'We shouldn't have to beg': Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.
* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but "pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower" actually made me wince in pain.
* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial 'herd immunity' strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.
* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens' anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.
* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here's why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.
* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.
* The Literature of White Liberalism.
* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada's COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.
* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.
* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.
* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.
* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series' real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.
* Why Uber's business model is doomed.
* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry's Fall Season.
* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.
To get a sense for how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 1, 2020
* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).
* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on 'Black Panther' Without Chadwick Boseman.
* All roads lead back to All My Children.
* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it's about time.
* Stan Lee's American pantheon.
* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.
* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.
* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.
* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you're feeling positive enough to get through your day.
* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track 'Labor Organizing Threats.'
* Understanding Batman.
One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."
— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020
* Understanding Tasha's Hideous Laughter.
* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).
* Development ceases on Amazon Prime's CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.
"Money implies poverty." — an adage in The Culture, Iain M. Banks
— Michael (Noble Continuation) (@OmanReagan) April 9, 2020
* Ah dinnae ken this: I've discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can't speak Scots.
I was today years old when I learned that a "buttload" is an actual measue of volume dating back to middle English, equal to two "hogsheads," or about 126 gallons.
— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) August 20, 2020
* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery's third season to introduce franchise's first transgender, non-binary characters.
* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive 'jumping' earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.
* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!
* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.
* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.
Tagged with #RaceFail, 1918, 2021, academia, academic jobs, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, All My Children, Amazon, America, anti-racism, anxiety, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Batman, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Panther, Black Student Council, black studies, books, Call of Duty, CFPs, Chadwick Boseman, Charles R. Saunders, China, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CWRU, David Graeber, Deadeye Dick, debt, Deep Space Nine, depression, Disney, District 9, divorce, domestic terrorism, domestic violence, doomscrolling, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, earthworms, ecology, epidemic, Eugene V. Debs, evictions, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fan culture, fantasy, fascism, Florida, football, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Gloomhaven, Go, government shutdowns, Grad School Vonnegut, Great Recession, grief, GWU, herd immunity, How the University Works, Hurricane Laura, hydrochloroquine, Iain M. Banks, Incredible Hulk, Jailbird, James Madison University, Jed Rubenfeld, Jessica A. Krug, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kenosha, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kyle Rittenhouse, Legionnaire's disease, liberalism, literature, Louisiana, manifestos, Mario, Marquette, Marquette English, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miami, Milwaukee, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NBA, NC State, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Jersey, New Mutants, NFL, Nintendo, NYPD, Octavia Butler, Pacific Edge, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, pirates, podcasts, police, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, QAnon, Quakers, quarantine, race, racism, Sci-Hub, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, Scots, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA Review, social media, Spanish flu, sports, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, strikes, Super Mario, surveillance society, teaching, teenagers, tenure, terrorism, The Culture, the kids aren't all right, Three-Body Problem, TikTok, Twitter, Uber, UNC, unemployment, unions, University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, Vonnegut, Wakanda Forever, Watchmen, whiteness, wildcat strikes, Willy Wonka, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, X-Men, xkcd, Yale, zombies
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It's also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we're back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you're done with that, listen to Octavia's Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: "Comics Grow Up."
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It's been a bit since I've recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They're Okay — Chances Are They're Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who's been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you're not getting any fouls, you're not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America's long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city's Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a "transformative new model of public safety."
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops' union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
"Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state's full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don't wield that tremendous power wisely." https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* When Will Capitalism End?
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An 'Avalanche of Evictions' Could Be Bearing Down on America's Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn't Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. "A Political Form Built Out of Struggle": An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It's not obesity. It's slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. 'All the psychoses of US history': how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – "we can't breathe."
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is 'very rare,' WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America's Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other 'respiratory' infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it's everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don't Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don't Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won't Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don't Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* Žižek vs. the virus.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be 'Encouraged' but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don't bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren't convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers's austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn't Work.
* What Is College Worth?
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won't Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We're homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let's Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there's no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. "The backlog concerns me the most," he said. "It's going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims."
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street's Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* Before the End.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I'm nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I'm A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* All the signs were there.
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* 'She just started blooming': the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden's Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The Prophecies of Q.
* Facebook researched the affect of its own platform on polarization and found that "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," and then largely shelved its study, the WSJ reports.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don't really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren't as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by 'Song of the South,' should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Rumors of Goonies 2.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn't Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching "The Office."
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a 'Black Lives Matter' Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* "What's Actually Happening": Looking for History in Jordan Peele's "Get Out."
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* 'Watchmen' Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. 'Watchmen' Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America's White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn't.
* How racist was Flannery O'Connor?
* The Long Battle Over 'Gone With the Wind.'
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars' High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley's 'Dark, Absurd' Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I'm putting up huge numbers.
* The Case against Mars.
* Recreating the 'Left Behind' Books From Memory.
* fMRIs (still) don't work.
* Hitler's alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of "What is genre?"
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Civil War ends.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* "My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem."
* This is how you get Skynet.
* And 2020, man, I just don't know.
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Quick 'n' Dirty Sunday Links
* I was asked by Marquette Today to provide an uplifting list of quarantine movies to watch instead of Contagion. It was counter to my instincts, but I did my best!
* Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower: The Concert Version Online.
* Four types of fear.
At the same time, we can already feel it piercing a hole in our daily lives, and we can see and feel our hopes, our professions, our homes, our ways of life leaking out into an inky darkness. We can already experience the ways it has decimated the meager funds we held, and savaged the safety nets even the luckiest among us had managed to weave. We can feel the future and our sense of normalcy and our grand plans withering and bleaching under the heat of this new sun. And while we are trying to adapt and survive both of these, the virus is already creeping closer and closer to those we love. Like a crowd watching a wave slowly roll in toward the shore, we can monitor its slow and implacable progress. The wave is rolling in. Some of us will flee; others of us will be drenched. But the biggest fear of all is that some of us, whose names and hearts and faces we have known so well, will almost certainly drown.
* Mike Davis: The Monster Enters.
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." ― Samuel Beckett #sundaythoughts
— JONATHAN KEMP (@JonathanMKemp) April 19, 2020
* Coronavirus Testing Needs to Triple Before the U.S. Can Reopen, Experts Say. Researchers warn the COVID-19 lockdown will take its own toll on health. Patients in pain, dentists in distress: In a pandemic, the problem with teeth. Coronavirus and depression. Don't bet on vaccine to protect us from Covid-19, says world health expert. The rightwing groups behind wave of protests against Covid-19 restrictions. Trump Encourages Protest Against Governors Who Have Imposed Virus Restrictions. Floridians Pack Beaches as Coronavirus Cases Continue to Increase. Heartland hotspots: A sudden rise in coronavirus cases is hitting rural states without stay-at-home orders. Life in Wuhan isn't back to normal. For The Rich, A Dilemma: Quarantine With Staff, or Do Their Own Chores. Trump Calls For Reopening America's Gyms Day After Call With SoulCycle's Owner. Essential Jobs, Disposable Workers. In some areas of the US, Covid-19 is killing Latinos at up to three times the rate that it is killing white people, even as they are among the least able to access care. Due to COVID-19. It's not just mortality. How experts see the future after coronavirus. "It'll all be over by Christmas."
* Approximately 9,200,000 workers in the US have likely lost their employer-provided health care coverage in the past 4 weeks, an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute concludes. The Trump Administration Is Writing a Death Sentence for America's Most Important Restaurants. Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis. 5 lessons from World War II for the coronavirus response.
* In terms of crisis governance, the United States is not a country with a central bank. It is a central bank with a country. Today in kleptocracy.
* COVID cases were trending down in Wisconsin when the state went forward with its in-person election April 7. Now they're trending back up — which was the certain result of holding the election.
* Coronavirus could complicate Trump's path to reelection. You think?
* This article suggests there is no practical way to contain a coronavirus outbreak if schools resume in-person instruction this fall.
* The Coronavirus Has Emptied Dorms and Dining Halls. Here's Why Refunds for Them Are a Tricky Calculation.
* Michael Denning: Impeachment as Social Form.
* Please don't stan Cuomo: How Delays and Unheeded Warnings Hindered New York's Virus Fight.
* The WSJ dives deep into the wild plan to bring baseball back.
* Here's What You Do With Two-Thirds of the World's Jets When They Can't Fly.
* Empathy riot.
me waking up: the fuck is this
me going to bed: the fuck was that
— JP (@jpbrammer) April 3, 2020
* Folks…
* This Chart Will Tell You What Kind Of Space-Based Sci-Fi You're About To Watch Just By Looking At The Main Ship.
* Is the first person who will live to 150 alive today?
* Buttigieg political alignment chart.
* There's an Eighth Chronicle of Narnia, and Now Is the Perfect Time to Read It.
Tagged with academia, air travel, America, banks, baseball, books, class struggle, coronavirus, Donald Trump, elections, empathy, epidemic, fear, film, Florida, Francis Spufford, general election 2020, How the University Works, impeachment, Joe Biden, kleptocracy, Lando, Lando Calrissian, longevity, Marquette, Mike Davis, Milwaukee, monsters, mortality, Narnia, Octavia Butler, opera, optimism, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Pete Buttigieg, politics, schools, science fiction, Second Great Depression?, vaccines, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus's Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: "The Infrastructure of Emergency." CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: 'Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.' CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I've experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That's a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author's Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
perhaps the real message of The Lord of the Rings was that only people who are well-rested, enjoy plenty of leisure time and have a healthy work/life balance are capable of accomplishing what needs to be done
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) February 22, 2020
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson's Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy's "Parable of the Sower."
* The Shell Game: From "Get Out" to "Parasite." Reading Colonialism in "Parasite." Subtitles Can't Capture the Full Class Critique in 'Parasite.'
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders's Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie's Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he's a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
* It worked for me!
why must i "earn" a graduate degree? is it not enough to lie in bed reading octavia butler short stories, unhinged?
— ren / josh / crow (@ymirjotunn) February 18, 2020
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
Because of "Watchmen." Decades of historians have been trying to let the world know about this massacre, and it took an alternate history comic book drama to break the wall of racism. IDK whether to laugh or cry, but let no one say fiction has no power in the real world. https://t.co/l7ixJN5JlQ
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) February 20, 2020
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What's To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* Serfs of Academe.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* I volunteer to consult.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I'm giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* The father of a former student at Sarah Lawrence College –accused of manipulating her school friends, extorting nearly $1 million from them, and profiting from their work as prostitutes – was charged with sex trafficking, forced labor and extortion, in a federal indictment released today.
* How the central administration has consolidated power and deflected dissent at the University of Chicago.
* Their findings suggest college closings won't be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country's colleges and universities face "substantial market risk," and closings are likely to affect "relatively few students." Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven's Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I've ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don't take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won't make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste's supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California's multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. 'Splatometer' Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year's Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* After Carbon Democracy.
* Actually existing media bias.
* Among the Post-Liberals.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: "It's very depressing."
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller's memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. "Bring us back some help," residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a "Dickensian farce," in which "Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit." Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that "Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger."
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol's New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government's "Gruesome Logic." How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can't Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* End the GOP.
* The 53-State Solution.
* Michael Bloomberg's Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News's Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I've worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here's their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
he's most famous for his racist policing, endorsed Bush in 2004, was a Republican until his 60s and the 2010, AND was the mayor of a famously corrupt city who used his personal wealth to purchase favorable political outcomes! the NDAs barely crack the top five https://t.co/4KMFiK6bSR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2020
The central argument for a Bloomberg campaign is that we could have all the fascism and ethnic cleansing of a Trump presidency without being embarrassed about it when we summer in Paris.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2020
* Big yikes.
* Kasy we're counting on ya.
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn't Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target's Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. 'Every Single Person Is Losing Money': Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn't care.
* But it's not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* Canada is fake.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren't a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* It's always amazing when something like the "woman tax" moves from ludicrous, laughable nonsense to explicit policy instantaneously.
* Founder of Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* 'The Scream' Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Twilight of GameStop.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* Universe Sandbox.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* Rise of the blur.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will 'Absolutely' Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was 'Star Wars' ' Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn't Just Buy 'Hamilton' for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
2HAM2TON
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: TOKYO DRIFT
H4MILTON
HAM FIVE
HAM & TON 6
TON 7
THE HAM OF THE ILTON
HAMILTON PRESENTS: JEFFERSON AND BURR https://t.co/hXQtjYzNeA
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the "Separated-at-Birth" Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at "literary Ponzi scheme."
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
A whatchamacallit in different languages:
7. Thingamajig (English)
6. Chingadera (Spanish)
5. Himstergims (Danish)
4. Naninani (Japanese)
3. Zamazingo (Turkish)
2. Dingsbums (German)
1. Huppeldepup (Dutch)
— Adam Sharp (@AdamCSharp) February 17, 2020
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. 'Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it': Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* @ me next time
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I'm begging you to get a new gimmick.
just realized wes anderson essentially makes whitesploitation movies and i'm into it
— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) April 16, 2018
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, Adderall, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, apartheid, apps, art, artificial wombs, autism, basketball, Bernie Sanders, Biden, billionaires, blindness, Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, carbon, CBP, CFPs, Chevron, Choose Your Own Adventure, class struggle, climate change, college closures, comics, coronavirus, cults, CVs, David Foster Wallace, Democratic primary 2020, denaturalization, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, e-sports, eating meat, ecology, English departments, English majors, environmental racism, Europe, falling short of expectations, farts, film, fire, Florida, food, free speech, futurity, games, Gamestop, Generation Z, Get Out, graduate student life, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, Grubhub, Hamilton, health insurance, Heaven's Gate, history, How the University Works, ice, Infinite Jest, insects, irony, Joanna Russ, Kickstarter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Konami code, labor, landmines, Last and First Men, libel, Locus, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, manuscripts, maps, mass shootings, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Mr. Peanut, music, my media empire, Nelson Mandela, New York, New York Times, Nintendo, North Korea, Octavia Butler, Olaf Stapledon, opioids, orcs, organ transplants, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parasite, peace in our time, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, pharmacies, photography, podcasts, politics, polls, pollution, Ponzi schemes, PornHub, post-liberalism, postdocs, Proletarocene, Punic War, QAnon, race, Republicans, Rome, Rotten Tomatoes, Sarah Lawrence, scams, schizophrenia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, SFRA, South Africa, spicy memory, Star Wars, strikes, Target, taxes, teaching, television, Tesla, the Constitution, the courts, The French Dispatch, The Good Place, The High Republic, the humanities, the Internet, the law, the Left, The Scream, theme parks, therapy, they paved paradise, tigers, Toba catastrophe, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Tulsa massacre, twins, Uber, UC Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, Utopia, waste, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, whitesploitation, Wikipedia, Wisconsin, words, work, workers, YouTube
2020 Links for 2020
* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware's Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: "Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?" When you're done with that, check out these: "Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware" and "'Red People for a Red Planet': Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif."
* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!
* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.
* It's 2020 and you're in the future.
FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* Public Domain Day 2020.
* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO's 'Westworld.'
* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.
* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don't Have To.
* The Subterranean Press edition of Unexpected Stories will be its first print edition, with a newly-commissioned introduction by Nisi Shawl, and an afterword by Butler's longtime agent and literary executor, Merrilee Heifetz.
* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.
* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: "Watchmen" and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO's Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore's Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.
Thinking about @adamkotsko's TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.
* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.
* The problem with bringing back blogs is.
* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.
* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.
300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a
* Meet the Obamog(ho)uls.
* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing "Well-Being" Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan's single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.
* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.
* …one of the strongest cases for Bernie isn't just what he'll be able to achieve, it's what he'll refuse to do (cannot imagine him signing a grand bargain weakening Social Security, for instance).
* One Year in Washington.
* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.
* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating 'lone wolf' murders and occasional armed shitstorms. "We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover." NPR's sanitizing of Trump's Milwaukee rally shows how he's broken the media.
* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.
* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you'll never play.
* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.
* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.
* Higher Ed's Dirty-Money Problem.
* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.
* The MLA Started Publishing Job-Searching Advice More Than 50 Years Ago. Here's How Things Have Changed.
* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.
* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.
* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.
* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.
* Being black at UW.
they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020
* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.
* The rise of the permanent protest.
* This is probably dumb — though maybe 1919 had a lot of bonus fraud in it, would be cool to study — but I have immediately and permanently internalized its lessons nonetheless.
* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500's blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that's a problem.
* When your abuser is a cop.
* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.
* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.
* Colin Trevorrow's Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?
Star Wars' insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will
— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020
* Jeri Ryan's latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.
* When AI runs the entertainment industry.
* When business people run the Olympics.
* DC and Marvel vs politics.
* The Okorafor century! 'Binti' Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).
* Bad news y'all, seven more years of winter.
* Being Larry David.
* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.
OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s
— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020
* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.
* Asimov, groper.
* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!
* The decolonization of Miles Morales.
* Despite Scorsese's attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino's) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, "nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy." This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, "nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams." Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that "formed" him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of "love letter" to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic "1969"). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino's Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.
* 'We are not alone': Confirmation of alien life 'imminent and inevitable.' Top-Secret UFO Files Could 'Gravely Damage' US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.
* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.
* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth "Turdsworth," and yes, this is a real historical fact.
* And Christopher Tolkien departs for the Grey Havens.
Tagged with 2020, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Airbnb, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, America, artificial intelligence, Australia, Baby Boomers, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Binti, blogs, boondoggles, capitalism, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Ware, Christopher Tolkien, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, climate fiction, coffee, college football, college sports, comics, Curb Your Enthusiasm, DC, deportation, depression, domestic violence, Donald Trump, ecology, ed tech, empire, English departments, Episode 9, eugenics, F-Stop, fascism, film, Finland, fraud, futurity, games, Generation Z, graphic novels, HBO, health care, Hollywood, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, Iceland, immigration, intergenerational struggle, Iran, Isaac Asimov, Jack Kirby, Larry David, Lord Byron, Lord of the Rings, malls, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, MCU, medicine, memory, Middle-Earth, Miles Morales, millennials, misogyny, MIT, MLA, money, my media empire, my scholarly empire, negativity, Nnedi Okorafor, nostalgia, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organized crime, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, Picard, poetry, police, politics, Portal, post-truth, protest, public domain, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, relationships, retirement, Rusty Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Scrabble, sexism, sexual harassment, single pager, Slaughterhouse Five, small liberal arts colleges, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, superheroes, syllabi, Taiwan, Tarantino, teaching, television, the 2010s, the 2020s, the Arctic, the Catholic Church, the humanities, the long now, the Olympics, The Rise of Skywalker, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, The Wonder Years, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, truth, Twitter, UFOs, ultracrepidarians, Unexpected Stories, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vermont, Vonnegut, walking simulators, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Watchmen, Westworld, wildfires, William Wordsworth, World Science Fiction Studies, zunguzungu
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don't think I've even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I've been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I'd also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: "Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction."
* My entry on Kim Stanley Robinson for the Oxford Research Bibliography in American Literature has gone live.
* Along with some of my colleagues I'll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Thompson said among neighboring states, the condition of Wisconsin highways was rated "not only the worst, but it was worse by a gaping margin."
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin's preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There's No Severing Michael Jackson's Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled "Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?"
You can dance around it all you like, but the simple fact is that we need to curb our emissions and guide the rest of the world in doing so in an amount of time radically shorter than conventional politics and market solutions alone will allow. https://t.co/5u82WDnACF
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 25, 2019
I have a 7 year old daughter & a 9 year old son. They are not going to meekly accept living in hell so that people can write essays laughing at them for The Atlantic. Millions and millions and millions of children won't accept it. Politicians have no idea what's coming for them.
— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) February 25, 2019
A very small group of rich people have condemned virtually every living thing on Earth to death—genocide on an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable scale—and not only will they get away with it, they're actually rewarded for it. That's what capitalism is.
— ☭ sicko modus ponens ☭ (@babadookspinoza) February 25, 2019
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America's Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel 'Normal' After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen 'already cost competitive', say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He's on to us.
One of my students is very cheeky. pic.twitter.com/2CfSRQ77mZ
— Roy Scranton (@RoyScranton) February 26, 2019
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing "the most important event in postwar American literary history." For an academic book full of graphs and terms like "technomodernism," it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking "historical interpretation," not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere "credentials" for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn't either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called "Iowa style." The world of creative writing isn't homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor's prose or verse. But creative writing also didn't come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn't do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district's policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn't require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can't Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! "Health Insurers Sink as 'Medicare for All' Idea Gains Traction."
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It's Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* "Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs." How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don't Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren't alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Then ruin them!
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking "useful field of view," the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what's important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough 'social credit.'
* Upsetting subplot.
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can't have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
* Whoever wins, we lose.
truly *perfect* that the question of "happiness" under capitalism vs marxism will be litigated (& represented!) by two male grifters of questionable charisma & almost infinite perversion in a space that charges a ticket if you bring a stroller. now that's traversing the fantasy!
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 28, 2019
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Still a bit long honestly.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I've weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic labor, administrative blight, advertising, Afghanistan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, anti-capitalism, apocalypse, autism, Ayana Jamieson, Bernie Sanders, bibliographies, Black Mirror, Bolivia, California, capitalism, Catholic higher education, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, China, class struggle, climate change, clothes, clouds, comics, concrete, conferences, creative writing, debate, democracy, diabetes, disability, disability studies, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elon Musk, energy, fascism, games, Global Anglophone, Grant Morrison, grawlix, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrogen, I grow old, ice sheet collapse, immigration, India, insulin, insurance companies, Jordan Peterson, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Erie, letters of recommendation, literature, Mark Waid, Marquette, masculinity, mass shootings, meat, medicine, men, metrics, MFAs, Michael Jackson, migrants, Moya Bailey, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, oceans, Octavia Butler, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pakistan, Parable of the Sower, parenting, photography, plastic, police corruption, police state, politics, Polygraph, postcoloniality, potholes, promotion, Pulp Fiction, R.D. Mullen fellowship, racism, rape, rape culture, rehab, remedial courses, reproductive futurity, retirement, rights of nature, roads, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, SEC, settler colonialism, SFRA, SFRA Review, social credit, social networking, soup, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, stocks, stratocumulus clouds, strikes, superheroes, tenure, Tesla, Texas, the draft, the Huntington, the Wisconsin Idea, ticks, traumatic repetition compulsion, true crime, University of Central Florida, University of Wisconsin, voter suppression, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, whiteness, Wisconsin, Wright State, X-Men, Žižek
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There's a kind of "deleted scene" from my book out in the new issue of Women's Studies: "Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia." It's in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I'll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette's Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here's what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we're talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: "Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature."
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* CFP: Global Utopian Film and TV in the Age of Dystopia (a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television).
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai'i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for 'Hamilton' in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* 'Now Comes the Hard Part': 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court's chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal's Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won't Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice's Rights. Massive restoration of world's forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. 'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don't worry, they've got this.
This is a genuinely incredible video of a senator scolding frightened children who are begging her for a chance to live, like it's their fault for disturbing her. https://t.co/JyEs9UPxTt
This entire generation of ostensibly liberal leaders has failed in every conceivable way by every conceivable metric, their entire careers, and their final act on the global stage is this endless petulant temper tantrum that anyone has dared to notice.
I don't want to hear any Democratic politician say anything to children but "I'm sorry, and I will never stop fighting to make up for what we've done."
The year is 2020. Democrats have won control of the White House and Congress. A new President declares a National Emergency on climate change and guns. Their bold plan: an exciting new web site where businesses and private persons can decide which tax-deferred advantage plan they
Decline in global population, past decade.
Butterflies: 53%
Beetles: 49%
Bees: 46%
Dragonflies: 37%
Flies: 25%
(Biological Conservation)
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) February 12, 2019
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees 'talk' just like humans. It's time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don't try to solve a problem, it doesn't get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself "The Crack Master."
* "Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow" is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don't—only replicates that wrongness; you can't say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child's teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
In the debrief for that one I realized: my colleagues think they're being taught how to survive.
They don't know this technique is intended to slow down our deaths, to give law enforcement more time to respond
— Dr. Lisa Gilbert (@gilbertlisak) February 14, 2019
* Rethinking suicide.
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in 'Serious Delinquency' Tops $166 Billion. Here's Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What's changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* Nearly half of Duke University's female undergraduates say they have been sexually assaulted since enrolling at the university, a sharp increase from the proportion in 2016, according to a report released on Thursday.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng's Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity's New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* Report Shows ICE Almost Never Punishes Contractors Housing Detainees No Matter How Many Violations They Rack Up.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Some Thoughts on EJ Levy.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You're half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* Hard pass, no thanks.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube's child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a "soft-core pedophile ring" operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping 'enforce gender apartheid' by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn't over, it isn't even past.
* We need a far more profound conception of white supremacy and how the mainstream press has always been complicit in its maintenance.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor's Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* The future is a place where it doesn't snow anymore, but "snow days" is the term we use for roving service outages caused by striking teachers.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* 'It's eating the world': Inside the Knicks' and David Fizdale's battle with 'Fortnite.'
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren't Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it's not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* No, you can't win.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
R2-D2's career is also a century long legacy of failure and catastrophe, culminating in catatonic depression, while C-3PO's nihilism allows him to attach himself to the ruling class of any political order he encounters.
The analogy is flawless. https://t.co/27TCF5QXV0
* Harvard got so rich it's even going after Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
pic.twitter.com/TntwLf3C6n
— matthew miles goodrich (@mmilesgoodrich) February 23, 2019
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, Amazon, America, animal cognition, animals, apocalypse, Arizona, Atlantic City, Aunt May, Bandersnatch, Barack Obama, basketball, bathrooms, Black Mirror, Bush, capitalism, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conferences, dark side of the digital, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic National Convention, Democratic primaries 2020, Democrats, deportation, diet soda, disability studies, Disney, DNC, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, ecology, education, Einstein, EJ Levy, Elizabeth Warren, email, empire, esports, extrasolar planets, Facebook, fascism, finance, Fortnite, Frankenstein, game theory, games, Google, Grand Canyon, guilty pleasures, guns, Hamilton, Harvard, Harvard Square, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income inequality, infrastructure, KKK, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literary criticism, living wage, Lyft, Marquette, mass markets, mass shootings, mere genre, migrants, Milwaukee, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, narcissism, Native Americans, NCAA, neoliberalism, Nintendo Switch, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, politics, race, racial slurs, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, segregation, Sesame Street, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA19, Silent Sam, slavery, snow, speculation, Spider-Man, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, strikes, strong female characters, student debt, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Tetris, Tetris 99, the courts, the Internet, the Knicks, the law, The Wandering Earth, theory, this is fine, Title IX, trans* issues, Uber, UNC, Utopia, war on education, windfalls, words, Wright State, YouTube
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my "Superheroes vs. the Climate" talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you're dying for more Worlding SF content, there's always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub's latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on "Artifice." CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire's Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there's many, many, many more links below the image…
* Isn't the most important response to the question "how do we get students to value the humanities" this: how do we get the humanities to value students?
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* "While humanists are often skeptical of measuring a major through debt, salaries, or employment after graduation, other fields that have not already seen extensive declines probably have more to fear from an honest accounting of salaries than we do."
* The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has paid $424,000 to insure itself against a significant drop in tuition revenue from Chinese students.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They've got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* I mean it's only half (up front) what they're paying their basketball coach not to coach basketball anymore.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here's the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People's Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here's How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn't Ready, Report Says. America's Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn't Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there's still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren't a mark of adult politics — they're a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it's actually happening before our eyes. And it's led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* "The notion that a) the constitution absolutely forbids charging the sitting president for crimes, and b) the statute of limitations for those crimes *still runs while he's in office* so he might never face charges, shows how fatuous the constitutional analysis was to begin with."
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America's Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid's life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It's Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America's Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn't need to leave the Durham church where he's been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after "zero tolerance" was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump's Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Meanwhile, the Democrats.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* How Democracy Works.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball's $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn't great, and yet.
* The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native Americans.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country's most widely read prison newspapers.
* I've been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people's sympathies for dogs. It's such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the Stuntwomen.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer's Body An Apology. I don't think I've ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn't illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students' lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China's plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they're creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Surveillance in everything.
* The Palm Oil Catastrophe.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr's porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people's history of He-Man.
* Remembering Square One.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: "I'm writing about dragons as a black woman, and it's fucking political."
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* 'Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro's Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* How one man's quest to spread Christmas cheer led to a miserable four-year war with his neighborhood.
* Uber is a "bezzle," doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* If you flip every word in "manic pixie dream girl" you get "depressive demon nightmare boy" and you think "well thank goodness THAT'S not a thing at least-" but then you…
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* Jigsaw puzzle mashups.
* Huge — IF true.
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I've been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
* Six french fries? In this economy?
* And here's how long it would take you to poop a LEGO.
Tagged with acting, actually existing media bias, Africa, African literature, Ainehi Edoro, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, America, animals, Anthropocene, anxiety, apartheid, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, billionaires, blackmail, books, Brexit, Brooklyn, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Christmas, Chuck Wendig, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college basketball, color, comics, communism, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, coral reefs, corruption, coups, CRISPR, debt, delicious French fries, democracy, deportation, depression, diabetes, dogs, domestic violence, Donald Trump, drones, East Germany, ecological humanities, ecology, English departments, English majors, financialization, fire tornados, Fortnite, Friday the 13th, games, Generation X, gentrification, geoengineering, George H. W. Bush, gig economy, glaciers, graduate school, graduate student movements, graduate student strikes, graft, Harry Potter, He-Man, health care, health insurance, Here, Hillary Clinton, history, housing associations, How the University Works, Hubble Telescope, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, insects, Instagram, insulin, intergenerational struggle, intergenerational warfare, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Jennifer's Body, jigsaw puzzles, Kim Stanley Robinson, lame duck session, Latin America, LEGO, life expectancy, lunch student, manic pixie dream girl, Margaret Atwood, Mark Lamont Hill, mass extinction, medicine, Megan Fox, memes, Michigan, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, military-industrial complex, millennials, minimum wage, Minneapolis, minority rule, money, Moscow, my particular demographic, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Carolina, nostalgia, NPR, obituary, Octavia Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, palm oil, Parable of the Sower, Paradoxa, parents, pedagogy, photography, plagiarism, podcasts, poetry, poets, points, police brutality, police dogs, police violence, pornography, poverty, Powerball, Prime Directive, prison, race, racism, radicalism, rape, rape by deception, rape culture, refugees, Republicans, rich people, Richard McGuire, Russians, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science fiction, science fiction studies, Silent Sam, social media, socialism, Square One, stunts, stuntwomen, suicide, superbabies, Supreme Court, surveillance, surveillance society, teaching, temp workers, the 1990s, the Arctic, the bezzle, the Confederacy, the Constitution, the courts, the economy, The Handmaid's Tale, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Lottery, the Pentagon, the Sentinelese, The Testaments, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, voter fraud, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, West Virginia, wildfires, Wisconsin, Worlding SF, writing
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: "TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance." CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: "Peak Oil after Hydrofracking." It's a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left's case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren't written to be read—they're written to be "broken." That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you're the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* I get it.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald's Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump's 'emoluments' battle: How a scholar's search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He's Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: "If You're a Predator, It's a Gold Mine." Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. 'Like I am trash': Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. 'Why Did You Leave Me?' The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It's happening here. Don't doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were "Totally Unaware" They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She'd Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won't share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn't determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn't permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it's up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I'm stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven't fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh's Legal Opinions Show He'd Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren't Really Employees Under The Law.
* The over-under on the Supreme Court's liberal minority cohort all continuing to draw breath is about five years.
* Imagine being a Democratic senator & actually telling yourself you are "playing the long game" by not doing everything you can to stop a lifetime Supreme Court appointment that will shift the entire American judicial system for the rest of everyone's lives.
* Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It's Having a Major Revival.
* Gasp! A New Zealand company that tried 4-day workweeks says people were more creative, more punctual, and more energetic — and they want to keep it going.
* Quiet Skies: Air Marshals are following thousands of random Americans through airports and on planes, for no articulatable purpose.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world's first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the "Coolness" of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the "coolness" of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Understanding "Kokomo."
* Why 'Sorry to Bother You' Is 2018's Sharpest Political Satire. "Crazy" Anticapitalism.
* The fracking of America.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world's plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world's discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime's Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California's wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It's a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don't worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there's just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn't mean "like now, but 2C warmer".
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming 'Dem garbage' into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* The Hacking of America.
* "Cooking Them to Death": The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We're Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there's no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* "I'm No Donna Reed": Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It's hard realizing that you're the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That's why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don't comprehend because they don't care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women's soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There's a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou's Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don't Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it's OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn't do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias' exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* Bet it's still a bit long.
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars' worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don't know me, computer!
* They're real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry's 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* WorldCon is crisis (again).
* Twilight of James Gunn.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to "Ancient Aliens."
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney's Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I've just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they're making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien's Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Plot hole
In the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People's History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies 'R' Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* Orwell knew.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell's heart I stab at thee.
* And you may ask yourself.
* We'll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It's Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Behold, the thagomizer.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City's grid layout, with a great punchline.
* Did… did a cat write this?
* The new astrology.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It's a living…
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Monday Morning Links! All of Them! ALL OF THEM
* Of course you had me at Zelda propaganda posters.
* Special issue of Deletion: Punking Science Fiction.
* Editorial: We Should Create a Honors College to Propagandize on Behalf of the People Who Already Control Everything.
* Victory in Ireland.
* A surprisingly large number of Obama-era ICE and HHS horrors got rediscovered as if they were new to Trump this weekend. This is a case where Trump's horror truly is as much continuity as break.
My grandfather prosecuted Dachau war criminals. Later he wrote a book called "After Fifteen Years." Its premise was that Nazism can happen anywhere, once good people start believing lies while not believing that those who are different from them are human beings.
— Robert Draper (@DraperRobert) May 26, 2018
I think "abolish ICE" is the moderate position and "arrest ICE's leaders and put them on trial" is the progressive position, but that's me.
by the time the 2020 primary arrives (like next month) the squishy centrist position should be "not ALL ICE employees should serve life sentences"
* Even despite that continuity, though, we seem to be moving to a new energy state: Taking Children from Their Parents Is A Form of State Terror.
"My son was crying as I put him in the seat. I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was cry, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away." pic.twitter.com/2EmdndFIKo
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 25, 2018
Man. I reread the Parable books recently. First time I read them, I thought Butler was going too hard on the predation of children. But she was right in this, too. We are a nation that devours children screaming, then blames them for making too much noise in their pain.
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) May 25, 2018
* Fighting spectacle with snores, or why Trump could easily win a second term.
* Is America heading for a new kind of civil war?
extremely healthy society that has absolutely nothing to worry about pic.twitter.com/VOyqESV6To
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2018
* Fascism is back; blame the Internet.
* Genocide in Yemen.
* I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I think he's dangerous.
* After a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville in 2017, Facebook pushed to re-educate its moderators about hate speech groups in the US, and spell out the distinction from nationalism and separatism, documents obtained by Motherboard show.
* Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Milwaukee PD Misconduct Has Cost the City $22 Million Since 2015.
* When a Nashville man named Matthew Charles was released from prison early in 2016 after a sentence reduction, he'd spent almost half his life behind bars. But in a rare move, a federal court ruled his term was reduced in error and ordered him back behind bars to finish his sentence.
* Man, 79, sentenced to 90 days of house arrest in 5-year-old girl's rape.
* She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.
* This has created a problem that has not been seen before: voluntary, intentional, migrating, mobile, functional, litter. The bikes and scooters are disruptive to the locations where they are abandoned and, because they are constantly moving, the issues of abandonment and refuse are constantly cycling (sorry) throughout an urban region. Yesterday's bike or scooter blight might be around today, or it might move for a few days and then return. In short, the bikes and scooters share a civic pattern similar to that of homelessness. Thus, in an unexpected way, the dockless bikes and scooters are also competing with the homeless for pieces of urban space upon which to temporarily rest.
* Mike Meru, a 37-year-old orthodontist, made a big investment in his education. As of Thursday, he owed $1,060,945.42 in student loans.
* Executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further. Also, rich people are going to be needing your blood so they can stay young forever, just FYI.
* Be more like Chipotle, Jerry Brown tells California universities.
* Report Says Rising CO2 Levels Are Ruining Rice. Allergy Explosion Linked to Climate Change.
* For Women of Color, the Child-Welfare System Functions Like the Criminal-Justice System.
* Now that's what I call ideological state apparatus™.
* A new front in the drug war.
* HUGE IF TRUE: Hollywood isn't on the side of the resistance.
* Teen Vogue and woke capital.
* Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of 'bear arms.' I think a better description here is "not even wrong"; originalism is a rhetorical style, not a claim of fact.
* Sexpat Journalists Are Ruining Asia Coverage.
* A People's History of Superstar Limo, Disney's "worst attraction ever."
* Solo crashes and burns, even underperforming Justice League. I haven't seen it yet, but it certainly sounds like it had it coming. Relatedly: The Ringer takes a deep dive into the now-decanonized Han Solo prequels from the EU.
The Force Awakens: Female lead, $247M opening weekend
Rogue One: Female lead, $155M opening weekend
The Last Jedi: Female lead, $220M opening weekend
Solo: Male lead, $83M opening weekend (3-day)
Thus, the obvious conclusion:
LEIA: A Star Wars Story, December 2020 pic.twitter.com/QJdjW1nZva
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 27, 2018
* Wakanda fans might be interested in the very odd turn the comics have taken. Relatedly: 'Black Panther' meets history, and things get complicated.
* Janelle Monáe for President.
* Conducting a posthumous interview with science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Your People Will Find You: A Podcast with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. And Ayana Jamieson's authorized biography of Butler has a Patreon.
* This LARB review of Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. made me very interested in reading it.
* Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history.
With the passing of Alan Bean, eight of the twelve humans who have walked on the moon are dead. The youngest survivor, Charles Duke, is 82.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 26, 2018
* Wendy Brown at UC: What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?
* Interesting Twitter thread on emergency and the suspension of the law.
* Half the budget, half the fun: A Star Trek World May Be Coming to Universal Studios.
* Power vs. responsibleness. Politics y'all. Existence is objectively good.
* This is an urgent reminder: Mindflayers are not sympathetic.
* As Kip Manley said, this is the flag of the Anthropocene.
Earth's average temperature since 1850 — the most beautiful representation of a terrifying trend I've ever seen.
Image by the inimitable @ed_hawkins
Raw data and other visualizations: https://t.co/WZLJXRjvv6 pic.twitter.com/vuUPvASbsv
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) May 25, 2018
* And I want to believe! US aircraft carrier was stalked for days by a UFO travelling at 'ballistic missile speed' which could hover above the sea for six days, leaked Pentagon report reveals.
Tagged with #MeToo, #TheResistance, academia, Afrofuturism, allergies, America, Antonin Scalia, apocalypse, Asia, austerity, Ayana Jamieson, Barack Obama, Black Panther, canon, carbon, children, Chipotle, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, comics, cyberpunk, dark side of the digital, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drug war, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, emergency, existence, Expanded Universe, Facebook, family businesses, fascism, Fermi problem, games, general election 2020, genocide, gentrification, guns, Han Solo, Hollywood, homelessness, hotels, How the University Works, Hōshi, I want to believe, ice, ideological state apparatuses, immigration, Ireland, Janelle Monae, Japan, Jordan Peterson, journalism, Justice League, liberalism, Marvel, Milwaukee, mindflayers, misogyny, Morgan Freeman, Nashville, Nazism, Neal Stephenson, Nintendo, Octavia Butler, originalism, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parents, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, pollution, Princess Leia, prison, prison-industrial complex, propaganda, race, racism, rape, rape culture, real wages, Rice, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saudi Arabia, science fiction, Second Amendment, sexism, sexpats, Silicon Valley, Solo, special issues, stagflation, Star Trek, Star Wars, state terror, student debt, student loans, Supreme Court, teaching, Teen Vogue, the Anthropocene, the courts, the Internet, the law, the Moon, the suspension of the law, the truth is out there, theme parks, time travel, trash, true crime, UFOs, UNC, victory, voting, Wakanda, war on education, Wisconsin, woke capitalism, women, Would you believe they put a man on the Moon?, Yemen, Zelda
Last Weekend Before Classes Links!
* CFP: Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Gathering. MLA 2019 CFP: Stephen King at 45. Call for applications: The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.
* A special issue of Palimpsest on The Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.
* Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi. Parable of the Butler as an opera.
* Syllabus: Good Grief: Humor and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature.
* There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn't ours.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Very nice long read in the Guardian on what depression is and isn't.
* Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don't Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance.
* Black Mirror did this one already: Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner's mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.
* The 90s, World War II, and the War on Terror. Great little bit of cultural analysis in comic form, derived from a Chris Hayes essay from 2006.
* Tiny books of the resistance.
* Can the humanities be defended? Well, it depends.
* The best way to remember 2017 will surely be through the stories it told about what might come after.
* The Fierce Urgency of "How."
* Trump's offshore drilling plan defies 'wishes of every coastal state, city and county.' Insurance after climate change. Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, Ground Zero in the Fight for Climate Justice. Climate change and the global south. A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise.
* UBI already exists for the 1%. A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem.
* 5 things to know about Puerto Rico 100 days after Hurricane Maria.
* But the most notable difference in the table is political: no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance's book.
* The woman behind the "Shitty Men in Media" list. How I Learned to Look Believable. Why Dan Harmon's sexual-misconduct confession is actually worth listening to.
* "Every single neighbor I've had has died of cancer." This Town Is So Toxic, They Want It Wiped off the Map.
* This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love. On Liking Women.
* Justice Department Announces Court Order Revoking Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue. Washington state AG sues Motel 6 over giving ICE info on 9,000 guests. 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection. Trump may deport thousands of Indian H-1B visa holders as they wait for green cards. To fulfill Trump's vision on immigration, sheriffs are trampling over constitutional principles. The head of ICE is calling for mayors and local city councilmen to be arrested. Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor. ICE to move forward with deportation of paraplegic boy's caregiver. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence. Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words. And of course.
* The university after Trump.
* This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.
* If the President Is Uniquely Dangerous, Treat Him That Way.
* Child protective services and artificial intelligence.
* The Dogecoin century.
* The end of computer security. An amazing coincidence.
* How students pay for graduate school.
* Bringing back indentured servitude. Let's let kids mortgage their social security while they're at it.
* We Finally Know Why People Are Left- Or Right-Handed.
* The case for (and against) the tiger living on LSU's campus.
* College football has the money to pay players. The College Football Playoff proves it.
* North Carolina gerrymander ruled illegal, again.
* Living with Slenderman.
* You Won't Live to See the Final Blade Runner Movie.
* #MeToo, Inc.
* Uh Oh—CRISPR Might Not Work in Most People.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* Roads to nowhere.
* Police departments nationwide agree: guns officially have more rights than people.
* Solo, oh no. Star Wars fatigue is real. Why So Many Men Hate The Last Jedi But Can't Agree on Why. The Last Jedi and fandom. The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I've seen. Poe Dameron apologetics.
* Teaching the controversy the Duke way.
* Marxism and Nintendo? I love my Switch, so anything that keeps me from not feeling too bad about owning it… Nintendo's Resurgence Was the Best Tech Story of 2017. More at MetaFilter.
* Airline travel has become so safe even I'm barely afraid of it anymore.
* Southwest Flips on Big Three Airlines in Cartel Case.
* Boomeranging the boomerang effect.
* Web comic of the month: "Three Jumps."
* The Handmaid's Tale after Margaret Atwood.
* Fox (TV) after Disney.
* Flight of the Conchords forever.
* The coping economy.
* Stop speculating about Trump's mental health.
* Segregation today.
* The end of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Era? We'll see.
* Hamilton in London. Hamilton in Milwaukee. Next up: Saga, the Musical?
* As for the bots themselves, #R2DoubleD and #TripleCPU are indeed a very cool sight to behold but (in my opinion) don't come close to anything ever approaching "arousing."
* Carrie Fisher's private philosophy coach.
* google Uno truth
* Updated rules for Settlers of Catan.
* Choose Your Own Adventure, in graph form. Interactive map of every Quantum Leap time jump.
* What happens to the mind under anesthesia?
* Know your airport codes.
* The rise of the machines.
* In fact, it's cold as hell.
* And you've already seen it, but just for the record. Almost been one year. Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven't Even Imagined Yet. There's no way out.
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Fall 2017 Syllabi! Tolkien! Utopia! Hamilton!
I've put the syllabi for my fall classes up at my professional site:
HOPR 1953: Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton
ENGLISH 4610: J.R.R. Tolkien
ENGLISH 6700: Utopia in America
The Hamilton class is new, a one-credit pass/fail seminar for the honors program. The Tolkien class and the Utopia class are both revised a lit from the last times around; for the grad class, I've swapped in two Kurt Vonnegut and two Octavia Butler books for Utopia, Sula, and Man in the High Castle, in part due to known student interest and in part because I have some ideas about sequelization and utopia that I want to start exploring. For the Tolkien class the changes were much more minor; by moving a few things around and not going on as many trips this semester I was able to squeeze out about an extra week, which I devoted to more time to discussing the ending(s) of Return of the King and more time on The Silmarillion (the second change strongly desired by some of the students last time!). I also changed some of the language I used around the final assignment, including adding a creative option, and added a bit more architecture to the syllabus regarding suspense and spoilers. I thought the class worked great last time around but this will give me a chance to structure the initial discussions in the class a little more inclusively than I did last time (I hope).
Really looking forward to the next couple months…
Tagged with America, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Marquette, my teaching empire, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, pedagogy, syllabi, teaching, Tolkien, Utopia, Vonnegut
probably why it was the last good day twitter.com/elephanteating… 1 hour ago
Tolkien, THE FORCE AWAKENS, and the Sadness of Expanded Universes