Posts Tagged 'self-driving cars'
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon's new Lord of the Rings 'cannot use much of Tolkien's plot. Amazon's Lord of the Rings Isn't Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon's Lord Of The Rings.
* "The Lord of the Rings" as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski's "Tolkien."
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck's academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
I've been talking about this with respect to science fiction studies too for a long time. Widely seen as a field with no history, that anyone can just invent ex nihilo whenever they randomly get interested in it. https://t.co/58glEA9CFv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 9, 2019
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America's Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump's campaign – is trying to stay "apolitical".
* No shit, video games are political. They're conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* "We all recommend this."
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we're living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the "Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum." After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we're living through the "Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion," as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we're even at the dawning of the "Quaternary Anoxic Event" or, God forbid, the "End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction" if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn't stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America's fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how.
Well sure we could stop burning the world, but then how would we create Jobs, the things we all hate that make us want to die
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) August 11, 2019
A big reason conspiracy theories are so believable is that most of them start from the fundamental idea that there's a lawless class of sociopaths running our society, which is demonstrably true
— Erik Hane (@erikhane) August 10, 2019
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska's hottest month portends transformation into 'unfrozen state.' These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it's already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in 'pristine' Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria's legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
Climate TBD.https://t.co/XsNHwwr4ar pic.twitter.com/mWzfqIlbe2
— Rosemary Mosco (@RosemaryMosco) August 12, 2019
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven't been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of 'ethnonationalism' for judgeship. "I need my dad."
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It's not the "newspaper of record." It's a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska's governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn't Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America's Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don't Expect to Pay Less.
* Behold: the meta-major!
* Abolish the business major!
* Sexism in the Academy.
* Jane Austen's income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That'll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don't have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn't matter if it's good policy or it makes sense — there's too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein's death and America's jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein's private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein's Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn't Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein's Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein's Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein's scientist "friends" should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
Excitement aside I think the facts really do point to a prison system so monstrously incompetent and corrupt it couldn't keep Epstein alive even when they knew everyone was watching. https://t.co/p4I7Y8otl3
People want to see this as a conspiracy but imo the real story here is just that our criminal justice system destroys people's mental health and the mitigants against that damage are laughable. https://t.co/v0yAgmGcUM
— 🇧🇧🇹🇹🇺🇸👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🐕🌉 (@eparillon) August 14, 2019
* Even fixing Wisconsin's Foxconn deal won't fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt's cancellation and Hollywood's history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they're making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That's Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids' menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here's why that's not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won't you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It's true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s' Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD's Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database 'Insane.'
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won't get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had "knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated" racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon's Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* "Amazon's Rekognition software can now spot fear."
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers 'should be considered.'
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love 'Star Trek' are the reason that modern fandom exists.
* Batman, year by year.
This is a hilarious idea for a history of Batman from his initial publication onward. "Year by year, what movie was it that the ten-year old Bruce Wayne likely saw?" https://t.co/gEl3QLYtqU
— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 9, 2019
* Our Galaxy's Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* 'Dicey Dungeons' Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Have you seen me lately?
* Google. Don't let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
* And good grief, It's Jaws, Charlie Brown.
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Duritz, administration blight, Alaska, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Art Spiegelman, austerity, autism, Avengers, Batman, Bernie Sanders, biometrics, biopics, black holes, Bollywood, Brazil, business majors, California, canon, Captain America, CBP, Charlie Brown, cities, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, climate change, coal, college majors, conspiracy theory, Cops, cosmology, Counting Crows, cruelty, debt forgiveness, democracy, deportation, DNA, driving, drugs, dungeons, eating meat, Ebola, ecofascism, El Paso, elections, Elizabeth Warren, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Endangered Species Act, Endgame, escape rooms, ethnonationalism, Europe, facial recognition, fandom, fascism, Flat Earth, food, Foxconn, fraud, futurity, games, Generation X, good grief, Google, graduate student nightmares, Greenland, Gulf Stream, guns, Hamlet, Harry Truman, hate, Hiroshima, horror, House of X, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Hurricane Maria, hurricanes, ice, insurance companies, IPCC, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Jaws, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, kids' menu, Loot Crate, Lord of the Rings, lunch debt, Lyft, maps, Marvel, mass shootings, Maus, Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum, Milwaukee, miracles and wonders, misanthropy, misogyny, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, National Popular Vote Compact, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New School, New York Times, nice work if you can get it, nuclearity, NYPD, Ophelia, organs, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Standard, Peanuts, pedagogy, philosophy, phones, physics, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, private colleges, race, racial slurs, racism, radicalization, rats, recession, Red Skull, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, segregation, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, smart houses, socialism, Star Trek, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, syllabi, teaching, Thanos, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the economy, The Hunt, the rent is too damn high, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, true crime, tuition, Twitter, Uber, underwear, University of Alaska, war on education, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, YouTube
* Now this I'd watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal's 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You're Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link's nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* Demand for disability accommodations for schoolwork and testing has swelled. But access to them is unequal and the process is vulnerable to abuse.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their 'House Is on Fire,' Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there's always money in the banana stand.
Some of y'all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK
— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland's Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska's Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That's Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be "Good Business." Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon's annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world's fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) "was not based on science or facts" but motivated by plaintiffs "intent on destroying our Western way of life."
The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c
— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019
you, an intellectual: we can't afford a better society
me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they're currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019
I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.
* Trump's Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They're still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as 'Deterrence': the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. "A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors' worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter."
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that's true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as "pushing out the border." It's not a project that's new to the Trump administration, and it's not one that's unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, "Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World."
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin's high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* The Wisconsin veto has always been a deranged executive power, but it too only becomes a problem when a Democrat is governor.
* The weird contracts of the Fast and Furious franchise, which legislate who is allowed to ever lose a fight.
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become "a cesspool of hate." Video games don't cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it's the opposite.
wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it
— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you're on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
in this regard, Yang's "higher ground" remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we're going to hear more and more of. don't mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019
(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019
* Marianne Williamson isn't funny. She's scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
* Biden, Inc.
Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* The story of Native American dispossession is too easily swept aside, but new visualisations should make it unforgettable.
* Americans aren't as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: "Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA." Doesn't he know you only get what you give?
I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu
— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019
* a day late / a buck short / I'm writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA
— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen's flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP's billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it's no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, "Fascist terror is 'stochastic' because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century."
* Rituals of Childhood.
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children's lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of "Active shooters", "Safe corners", and "Shelter in place" is its liturgy. "Run, Hide, Fight" is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we're just overanalyzing stuff that isn't meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They're doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino's is even more egregious than UC Berkeley's.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* Did someone say my name?
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated "Frankenstein" brings lessons for today.
* Quantum computing.
* Self-help.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It's here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn't matter.
Tagged with 8chan, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, ADA, Africa, Alaska, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, animals, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, autism, bears, Berkeley, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, capitalism, CBP, Charles Manson, Chicago, climate change, collapse, debt, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, deserts, dinosaurs, disability, Domino's, ecofascism, ecology, El Paso, Elon Musk, English majors, Extrapolation, fascism, fonts, Frankenstein, fraud, games, gaming, gerrymandering, grading, Greenland, Guam, guns, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, immigration, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, Larry Niven, literature, Marianne Williams, Marine Todd, mass shootings, Mexico, MFAs, military-industrial complex, Museum of Science Fiction, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Netflix, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, open borders, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, phone farms, progress, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rich people, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Simpsons, slavery, social media, socialism, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Tesla, the Amazon, The Boys, The Fast and The Furious, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rock, the truth is out there, toxic masculinity, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Utopia, video games, Walter Benjamin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wealth, white men, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, Wisconsin veto, writing, X-Men
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene's documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn't mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I've already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* In two new books, 45 AI experts grapple with a field on the verge of something big, and possibly scary.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy's Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that's a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can't Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin's Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
The much-hyped MOOCS still have an astronomical dropout rate of about 96 per cent on average over five years – and this figure had not improved between 2013-14 and 2017-18.https://t.co/4U6F1jN1X6 #mooc #embarrassing #dropout #hype #online #HigherEducation @bureaucatliu @cnewf
— peter krapp (@pkrapp) March 4, 2019
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students' work to TurnItIn and now it's worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* Academic freedom clearly protects stealing student research and defrauding the university of millions.
* I can't wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
a cool thing about the last few years is that the U.S. became the leading exporter of the intellectual machinery of western fascism and one of the leading domestic debates about it is whether undergrads are treating the people behind it politely enough
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) March 15, 2019
There is virtually no institution in American public life where you have greater freedom of speech than the university. And the depressing corollary: you will probably never again be as free to express yourself in public as you were when you were a student.
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 4, 2019
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* A new white paper suggests that the Tolstoy rule may not apply when it comes to at-risk small colleges: they're all basically unhappy in the same way.
* Talk to your families about the academic job market, or they'll just find out about it on the street.
* The group described training exercises in which "four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries."
The "terrified" teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. "Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated." We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
something something about how–because we cannot actually address the root causes of school shootings–we will instead ritualistically perform them https://t.co/llYZF6i8vf
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 21, 2019
* Tonight, an appeal panel at Vanderbilt University found "no irregularities" in the reversal of #MeTooSTEM founder BethAnn McLaughlin's tenure recommendations.
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* 'Change Is Closer Than We Think.' Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Unlikely Rise.
* Let 16-year-olds vote.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There's No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It's time — high time — to take Fox News's destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he 'outsmarted' a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I've gathered that some people don't like this piece for various reasons but if you don't think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He "looks like a president" now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It's not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Not to mention that Democrats managed to completely break their own nomination process and no one seems to care.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave 'Inconsistent Info,' CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it's time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
so about fifty days in and it's very clear that the story of the Dem Resistance Congress is going to be about the party's decrepit leadership scuttling any positive movement on any subject and then demanding to be thanked for it
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* How to Hide an Empire.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation's Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It's raining on Greenland's ice sheet. That's a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic's ticking 'carbon bomb' could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature.' The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California's Wildfires Burn Through America's Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That's Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here's How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF's secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* The End of Recycling.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* What We Owe a Rabbit.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Against Garrett Hardin.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.'s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn't get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta's punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I've regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians.
* A room of one's own white colleagues.
you (stupid, hasnt read foucault): haha i hope i dont get thrown in prison for my tweets )
me (wise, has read foucault): twitter is the prison
— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) March 6, 2019
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix's Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television's Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It's increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest "event" shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don't feel too bad for Amazon, though: "Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.")
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix's own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I've talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest's Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who's the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You're blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury's coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can't answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury's "Avengers Initiative," and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name "Captain" discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it's because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther's triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War's "sure, we'll sacrifice Wakanda, why not." The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU's narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
a fun thing about the next Avengers movie is that all the characters are going to spend the entirety of it being very very very sad
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* The product sheet is clear: Any claim against a dysfunctional nuclear event detector must be made within 90 days.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you're right, you're right: "If someone is the enemy, it's okay to kill endless numbers of them," he continued. "Lord of the Rings is like that. If it's the enemy, there's killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you'll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don't know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots." Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won't want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real "Momo Challenge" is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here's the truth of what we know.
* Gut-wrenching story about parents using Nebraska's short-lived safe-haven law to institutionalize their children.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin's nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* Duke's gonna Duke.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Minnesota couple Michael and Jack McConnell are now thought to be the longest-married, same-sex couple in the U.S.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can't see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
* And Lord, make me outgrow Quentin Tarantino, but not yet.
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, academic publishing, activism, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, AI murder policy, air travel, airplanes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic culture, aliens, alt lit, America, Andy Daly, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, Antarctica, artificial intelligence, Aunt Becky, autism, automation, Barack Obama, BethAnn McLaughlin, Boeing, books, Captain Marvel, catastrophe, Catholicism, CBP, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college admissions, computers, creepypasta, data, David Foster Wallace, Daystrom Institute, dementia, Democrats, deportation, digital horror, dinosaurs, disability, Doki Doki Literature Club!, drugs, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, eco-fascism, ecology, education, Electoral College, empire, EPA, equality, ethnic cleansing, Europe, Facebook, fascism, Fermi paradox, film, floods, Foucault, Fox News, fraud, free speech, Full House, fun, Gabriel García Márquez, games, Garret Hardin, gay marriage, general election 2020, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, hateclicks, Hayao Miyazaki, heartbreak, HIV and AIDS, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, Infinite Jest, innovation, J.K. Rowling, jobs, Jurassic Park, juries, kids, kids today, killer death robots, labor, legacy media, literature, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Lyft, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, Max-8, MCU, medicine, Michael Jackson, Mitch McConnell, Momo, MOOCs, Mound builders, MPAA, my pedagogical empire, Nabokov, Native Americans, Nazis, Nebraska, Netflix, New Sincerity, New York, Nobel Prize, Normal Porn for Normal People, Norway, nuclearity, NYPD, Octavia Butler, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Open Access, Orientalism, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, plagiarism, playing, podcasts, police brutality, police corruption, politics, pon farr, potholes, poverty, prison-industrial complex, privilege, propaganda, public transportation, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, rabbits, race, racism, ratings, recycling, religion, Review, rich people, robots, Rutgers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, sea level rise, security, self-checkout, self-driving cars, slavery, sleep, small colleges, socialism, Spock, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Wars, strikes, Stuyvesant, suffering, suicide, surveillance society, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the courts, the Democrats, the law, the Sixties, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Tolkien, tragedy of the commons, travel, trigger warnings, true crime, Trumpism, TurnItIn, Twilight of the Elites, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of California, UT Austin, Vanderbilt, Vietnam, visas, voting, Voyager, Vulcans, Wal-Mart, Waldo, water, wealth, where are they?, white nationalism, white settlers, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, World Wildlife Fund, writing, YouTube, zombie ethics, Zora Neale Hurston
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, "Human Error."
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it's geolocked at the moment and even I can't listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 ("Ecology and Ideology"), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Speculative Anthropologies.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* For and against hopepunk.
* The hope in dystopia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling's Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity's richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a 'Stunning' 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* The MSU autopsy.
* Being Poor in America's Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences' revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the "genocidal regime" in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are "historical remnants" across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we're beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the 'Regular' Job Market. Okay, y'all, let's talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn't Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* College of Theseus.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students' social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using 'smart uniforms' to track their students' locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they've killed off every industry they're parasitic on? BuzzFeed's Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who's thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame, and it is this: to divest itself from the shame of its power, while working to revive the fear it needs in which to thrive.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as 'Paranoia.' Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It's Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq
I don't see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We're losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG
climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy
— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019
* Consider de-extinction.
* Soy boom devours Brazil's tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that's about three weeks of Bezos's earnings.
A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay 'collapse' for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin's Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* "If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History": The head of Harvard's astronomy department says what others are afraid to say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody's too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019
* Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* Surviving R. Kelly.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J'Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment's 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. "On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit." Star Trek 4.
standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:
7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly
200-1000 absolutely useless losers
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* What even is Fox News?
All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Twilight of the UCB.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On "Bandersnatch" and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch's horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* I have a problem with Black Panther: Anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation must regard 'Black Panther' as a counterrevolutionary film.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from 'accidental' drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or "Buddha Boy" as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that's shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he'd experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal's Famous Buddha Boy.
* 'Nobody Is Going to Believe You.' How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Sex after Chernobyl.
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There's more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* AAVE and court stenography.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* The United States of Rage.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn't actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn't very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating '80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* "Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life," says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: 'Everybody is a potential target.'
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk's corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called "the most difficult and painful year" of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston's economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The end of tag.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer's Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer 'What's next?' for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We're Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* The DNA grift.
* "Look, a lot of Twitter is bad. No question. But only Twitter can take you on a journey like this. What a website."
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the 'same' result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I've been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn't live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Tagged with 2018, 2019, AAVE, ACLU, administrative blight, adoption, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, AlphaZero, altac, Alzheimer's, Amazon, anger, Antarctica, anthropology, apocalypse, Arizona, art, artificial intelligence, Australia, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, baby it's cold outside, Bandersnatch, Black Mirror, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Bolsonaro, Boston, Brazil, breastfeeding, Bryan Singer, burnout, butterflies, California, Cambridge History Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, CBP, CBS All-Access, CEOs, CFPs, Chernobyl, Chicago, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, college admissions, comedy, Confederate monuments, corpocracy, cosmetology school, cyberpunk, de-extinction, deportation, dinosaurs, disability, diversity, DNA, Donald Trump, dystopia, Ecology and Ideology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, EpiPen, extinction, Facebook, forced arbitration, Fox News, Foxconn, game studies, games, genocide, George Saunders, gig economy, GoFundMe, Great Lakes, grifts, gym class, Hamilton, Hampshire College, Harry Potter, Harvard, health care, Hitler, hoaxes, hope, hopepunk, hospitals, How the University Works, humanism, ice, improv, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, IRBs, Isaac Asimov, J.K. Rowling, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, journalism, Kamala Harris, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, language, Larry Nassar, last names, layoffs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lisa Klarr, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Louis CK, lunch debt, Lyft, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, Medcare for All, medievalism, MFAs, Michelle Yeoh, millennials, Milwaukee, MLA, MSU, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazism, neoliberalism, Netflix, nurses, Octavia E. Butler, oh no, online preschools, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, photography, podcasts, polar vortex, politics, Polygraph, pornography, poverty, public transportation, pyramid schemes, queerness, R. Kelly, race, racism, rage, Random Trek, rape, rape culture, rich people, Richard Feynman, Running Man, Ryan Vu, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sea level rise, Sears, self-driving cars, sex, Ship of Theseus, slavery, Snowpiercer, social justice, socialism, Sokal hoax, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Trek: Discovery, statistics, student debt, suicide, Supernova Era, surveillance society, syllabi, tag, taxes, teaching, Tesla, the Arctic, the canon, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, The Jetsons, the law, the secret of my success, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, Utopia, veterinarians, Voyager, vulture capitalism, war on education, Washington D.C., Waukesha, weather, webcomicname, whiteness, wildfires, William Gibson, Wisconsin, writing
I Had To Do Some Laundry, So You Know What That Means: Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Feral Feminisms is pleased to announce that we are now accepting submissions for our first general issue. Submission deadline is 15 January 2019.
* What our science fiction says about us.
* From the Earth to the Moon. And hell why not it's Wednesday just a few more.
* Following a Board of Trustees meeting this afternoon, Temple University President Richard Englert released a statement on behalf of the board, announcing that professor Marc Lamont Hill will not be punished or investigated for his Nov. 28 speech during an event organized with the United Nations. Now investigate the feckless administrators who made these baseless threats.
* Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges 2018.
* Following scientists in three fields, the paper's authors found that it took about five years for a half of a science cohort to leave academic work in 2010 — compared to 35 years in the 1960s.
* Tired: China is building a social points system that will rank people from birth to death. Wired: Trump Is Trying to Use Credit Scores to Keep Immigrants Out of the U.S.
* Wow, here and I thought Scott Walker was a man of principle and integrity.
* Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off. I tweeted a tweet about the president and the modest virality of that tweet smells bad.
* Grant Morrison Opens Up About Feuding With Alan Moore and Why He Still Doesn't Like Watchmen.
* Upright Citizen's Brigade on the brink.
* The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what's to come. Unparalleled warmth is changing the Arctic and affecting weather in US, Europe. In what is being called the first of its kind, Mayor Francis Suarez quietly signed a resolution last month to address climate gentrification in Miami. Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed. EPA announces plan to poison all the water.
CNN put out a video urging people not to believe climate change deniers.
One problem: two of the four clips they cite are people *on* CNN. pic.twitter.com/tbCT6O43p0
— jordan (@JordanUhl) December 11, 2018
Twenty years from now, kids listening to "Baby it's cold outside" are gonna find it really, really weird.
We're gonna have to explain that it has to be understood in the context of its time.
You see, it used to get cold outside.
— Zi Teng Wang (@Zi_W) December 10, 2018
* Children of Ted: Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.
* ICE arrested 170 potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children.
* They say bipartisanship is dead, but U.S. House unanimously approves sweeping self-driving car measure.
* The law, in its infinite equality watch: Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has dropped charges against 23-year-old Jazmine Headley related to her arrest at a social services office on Friday, he announced Tuesday. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, and trespassing after security guards called police over a dispute that apparently began because she was sitting on the floor while she waited with her 1-year-old son to renew a child-care benefit. Charge the cops who did this next.
* "Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See?" What terrible luck that the camera mysterious turned off during the relevant portion of the search! What are the chances!
* What Everyone Having Diarrhea On The Set of The Magnificent Seven Tells Us About Toxic Masculinity.
* A ProPublica investigation has found that the IRS has been so gutted that audits of the top 1% are rapidly converging on audits of the bottom 36%. This is of course totally irrational, but completely in line with the contempt the ruling class has for the poor.
* What It Means to Be a Marxist.
* The CRISPR babies and scientific ethics.
* The final stage of any sufficiently mammoth crime is abusing bankruptcy law to avoid responsibility.
* I remember having my mind blown by reading this observation in Daniel Dennett book twenty years ago: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don't have.
* Throw these Chromebooks in the snow. Leave childhood alone, let kids have a little bit of joy.
* We lost that war. But the fight goes on.
* Yeah, that'll solve it!
* And here is John F. Kennedy in 1961 writing to reassure a child that fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapon testing won't kill Santa.
Here is John F. Kennedy in 1961 writing to reassure a child that fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapon testing won't kill Santa. #NuclearWarOnChristmas pic.twitter.com/4w4KapArwr
— Nuclear War on Christmas (Martin Pfeiffer) 🏳️‍🌈 (@NuclearAnthro) December 1, 2018
Tagged with absurdism, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Alan Moore, America, ants, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, baby it's cold outside, bankruptcy, CFPs, childhood, China, class struggle, climate change, climate gentrification, CNN, comedy, comics, consciousness, cosmology, coups, credit scores, CRISPR, Daniel Dennett, deportation, diarrhea, Donald Trump, eco-terrorism, EPA, feminism, general election 2020, Grant Morrison, gymnastics, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human nature, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, IRS, Joe Biden, John F. Kennedy, jokes, kids today, Mark Lamont Hill, Marxism, Miami, Milwaukee, Mitt Romney, nuclear war, nuclearity, Palestine, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, politics, rape, rape culture, rump cleavage, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, scientific ethics, Scott Walker, self-driving cars, snow days, social media, Temple University, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the Left, The Magnificent Seven, the Moon, the poor, the Unabomber, time travel, toxic masculinity, transporters, Twitter, UCB, Watchmen, Westerns, Wisconsin, you do not exist, zunguzungu