Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 11
July 7, 2020
Grad School Vonnegut #7: “The Sirens of Titan” (1959) with Rebekah Sheldon!
This week we talk to Rebekah Sheldon of Indiana University and the author of The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe about The Sirens of Titan (1959)! Sorry for the slightly awkward, shoehorned-in intro this time around, but I realized afterwards that we never actually say Rebekah’s full name or the name of her awesome book, and thought we should…
June 30, 2020
Grad School Vonnegut #6: BLUEBEARD (1987)
Three days late or three days early, depending on your philosophical view of spacetime, it’s the sixth episode of the Grad School Vonnegut podcast, where we talk to Susan Farrell of the College of Charleston and the international Kurt Vonnegut Society about Bluebeard (1987)!
June 19, 2020
GSV #5: “Harrison Bergeron”
After a week off, Grad School Vonnegut is back with “Harrison Bergeron” and our first guest, Sam Adler-Bell of the Know Your Enemy podcast! Take a listen!
June 5, 2020
GSV #4: Slapstick
A proper link post is coming this weekend but for now here’s episode four of Grad School Vonnegut, which is all about Slapstick (1976) — but please, listen anyway! I think this one might be our best episode yet despite being about Vonnegut’s worst (Christ, I hope) novel.
[image error]
May 24, 2020
Sunday Night Links!
* ICYMI: I’ve finally succumbed to the inevitable and started a podcast. Go ahead and listen! We’ve just recorded our first bonus episode, on “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which is a nightmare story about which there is nothing good to say. Watch for the episode next week!
* Why Our Economy May Be Headed for a Decade of Depression. The battleground states are getting absolutely hammered. Unions worry Congress is one step closer to a liability shield. Getting back to normal is the last thing we need. I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore.
* You go too far, sir! The Case for Letting the Restaurant Industry Die.
more convinced of this than I was two days ago and also more convinced that our pathologically dysfunctional institutions will have absolutely no way of properly evaluating risks if it does happen https://t.co/akDTiw0DKe
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 24, 2020
* Why do some COVID-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus at all? The coronavirus invades Trump country. Running in the Age of Coronavirus. The Pandemic and the Appalachian Trail. America gives up.
* Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says. Low virus rate leaves Oxford vaccine trial with ‘only 50% chance.’ No One Knows What’s Going to Happen.
Hill said that of 10,000 people recruited to test the vaccine in the coming weeks — some of whom will be given a placebo — he expected fewer than 50 people to catch the virus. If fewer than 20 test positive, then the results might be useless, he warned.
“We’re in the bizarre position of wanting COVID to stay, at least for a little while. But cases are declining.”
* The coronavirus pandemic is rapidly transforming this year’s elections, changing the way tens of millions of people cast ballots and putting thousands of election officials at the center of a pitched political fight as they rush to adapt with limited time and funding.
* Is Testing Students for COVID Feasible? Obviously not, are you joking? The Complex Question of Reopening Schools. ‘A Dramatic and Unprecedented Contraction’: A Look Inside JHU’s $375-Million Budget Shortfall. ‘The stakes of doing it wrong is that someone dies’: How coronavirus will transform K-12 schools in the fall. COVID-19 is driving students away from community college – maybe forever, says Bunker Hill president. Moody’s disagrees. 5 Myths About Remote Teaching in the Covid-19 Crisis. Reopening Indiana University? Troubled Reflections of a Wayward Professor. A Note from Your University About Its Plans for Next Semester.
I’ve said this before but if they really need to reopen they shouldn’t bother with any precautions and just save the money for the lawsuits.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 22, 2020
* Huge — if true: Locked-Down Teens Stay Up All Night, Sleep All Day.
I think a quietly radicalizing moment for me was realizing that basically everything we associate with being a teenager — irritability, bad decisions, impulsivity, depression — is a symptom of sleep deprivation caused by making school hours match working hours.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2020
* From Camping To Dining Out: Here’s How Experts Rate The Risks Of 14 Summer Activities. A summer without pools in Milwaukee.
* I Enrolled in a Coronavirus Contact Tracing Academy.
* The Misfortune of Graduating in 2020. The humanities vs. the virus. Teaching African American Literature During COVID-19.
My man is an economist who thinks the humanities are subsidized. Son, we are cheap and the excess revenue our students generate pays for most of the university https://t.co/N8ZTtbE3R8
— Matt Gabriele (@prof_gabriele) May 22, 2020
economics is simply a tool like anything else, with the proper training and safeguards it is no more dangerous than a firearm https://t.co/de6Sye85qg
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 24, 2020
* Today’s fan fiction prompt: 6 months on, Trump hasn’t completed his physical. The White House won’t say why.
The Senate nominee said she was “literally physically in tears ” after reading the statement posted by her own campaign to her personal Twitter account and bucked her own campaign by reiterating support for QAnon.
“My campaign is gonna kill me,” Perkins said. “How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.”
* The Progressives of Burlington, Vermont.
* Is capitalism racist? Oh god I hope not.
* Behind the scenes of Yesterday. Fascinating look how the industry works.
There is a *direct* line between the Democrats never holding their leaders accountable for anything for thirty years no matter how badly they behave or how catastrophically they screw up and a Joe Biden campaign that is nothing but humiliation after humiliation.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2020
Biden doesn’t have an aspirational message, doesn’t have symbolic or historical importance, doesn’t even have a policy agenda, has an absolutely wretched, dirty record, and can’t appear on television without embarrassing himself, and it just doesn’t matter. It’s absurd.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2020
what the hell man pic.twitter.com/c6dXJfbnkk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2020
* What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain.
* Just this article made me more afraid of spiders.
* What to Do When Your Video Game Gets Co-opted by Neo-Nazis.
* Of course you had me at Exclusive First Look at the New Back to the Future Game.
* An Oral History of the Battle of Hoth. Maybe AT-ATs Aren’t as Dumb as They Look.
* After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure: Universal Orlando to re-open with new guidelines, grim reminder that you, too, shall die.
* Picard, the xBs, and Disability.
* Did… did a dark feeling write this?
* And the only other good thing left on the Internet: a thread of Taika Waititi smiling but his smile gets bigger as you keep scrolling.
May 22, 2020
Podcast Alert: “Grad School Vonnegut” with Aaron Bady and Me
On a lark, without thinking through the consequences or about the needs or wants of anyone else, Aaron “zunguzungu” Bady and I decided to start a Vonnegut reread podcast. We start with Slaughterhouse-Five and then hurl ourselves randomly through his oeuvre; episode two was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
You can find the first two episodes, plus a preview episode, here. Check it out! We hope it’s interesting! Bonus episode on “2BR02B” and “Welcome to the Monkey House” coming next week, then it’s on to Slapstick…
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK
— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020
This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
[image error]* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine:
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
*
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Lockdown Megapost Part One, Just the Bad News for Academia
* Decision Points Loom for College Leaders. Certainly Uncertain. Preventing the Collapse of Higher Education. Here’s what Fauci said about college students returning to campus in the fall. Colleges Are Deluding Themselves. The Case Against Reopening. Colleges Aren’t Reopening in the Fall. Empty Lecture Halls, No Fall Football, a Freshman-Only Campus. A Playbook for a Second-Choice Fall. This little piggy went online for the fall; this little piggy stayed in the dorm. The pandemic is the time to resurrect the public university. UW System leader eyes academic program cuts, layoffs at some campuses in COVID-19 plan. Missouri Western cuts 30 percent of the faculty, along with programs in history, political science, sociology, economics, music and more. Kean University slashes academic programs, faculty amid pandemic. Western Michigan University lays off 240 employees, enacts pay cuts for others. CUNY. OU. Northwestern. Madison. Duke. Marquette. Everyone. Colleges Worry They’ll Be Sued if They Reopen Campuses. Coronavirus Will End the Golden Age for College Towns. Game Over for the NCAA. University Leaders Are Failing.
* Will students show up for college in fall 2020? Colleges Could Lose 20% of Students. As Students Put Off College, Anxious Universities Tap Wait Lists. Another pandemic-related threat to universities: falling numbers of graduate students. How the Coronavirus Will — or Should — Transform Graduate Education.
the question is not whether universities should reopen in the fall or whether online teaching can be helpful. Rather there is s set of crucial issues about how this happens, and whether universities are
a) arranging to charge students full price for a lesser education. (Cont)
— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
b) dissembling to students so as to get that money
c) seizing the crisis to pivot to online courses longterm despite overwhelming findings that people learn less and also don’t like it
d) using this pivot to cut teachers and staff
(Cont)
— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
e) increase workload on surviving employees esp low-paid staff
f) render surviving employees (more) precarious
g) break a vital & growing labor movement among grad student workers
h) decrease teacher:student ratio
Every single one of these is happening & should be opposed.
— joshua clover (@joshuaclov3r) May 21, 2020
* A Case for Virtual Fall Term 2020 (and Probably Spring 2021).
* Disaster Capitalism Is Coming for Public Education.
* Don’t Frighten the Students: The Crisis of Academic Freedom in the Managed University. Consumption, COVID-19, and the Consequences of Language in Higher Education.
* The idea that college faculty and their allies have somehow failed to “make the case” for the value of their work is one of the hoariest clichés of higher ed commentary—our equivalent to the legendary “since the dawn of time”-style opening for undergraduate papers. A Google search for “the case for the humanities” turns up multiple books and articles. The tradition is so well established that new contributors can even engage in ironic meta-commentary on its conventions, as when a recent column argued that the best case for the humanities is precisely that there is no case. It is clear enough why academics would be drawn to a solution that draws on their particular skillsets of persuasion and argumentation, but the demand that we “make the case” is naïve and impotent.
* Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 in UCLA Classrooms.
* Distance Learning Is Taking an Emotional Toll on Students. Your Classes Are on Zoom and Your Teaching Staff Is Being Cut. What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom. Higher Education in the Age of Coronavirus. Chronicles of a higher Ed adjunct in the COVID-19 era.
* Denning: the social reproduction of the university depends on the maintenance of its graduate workers. Don’t let Yale infantilize you as “students” or people who don’t understand how institutions work. Universities Run on Disposable Scholars. Mass exodus. Now — Yes, Now — Is the Time for Contingent Faculty to Organize. CUNY Faculty On Verge of Wildcat Strike.
* Against cop shit 2: against rigor.
* Faculty Cuts Begin, With Warnings of More to Come. Colleges Lower the Boom on Retirement Plans. The first wave of pandemic cuts to colleges and universities. We’re Tracking Employees Laid Off or Furloughed by Colleges. Colleges Won’t Refund Tuition. Autumn May Force a Reckoning.
April 29, 2020
Wednesday! I Think!
* Amazon, Walmart, FedEx workers plan walkout on Friday. Too soon to declare victory over coronavirus, say experts. Model predicts higher death toll in US amid states reopening. Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality. ‘Heads we win, tails you lose’: how America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit. Federal bailout money bypasses hard-hit N.Y., California for North Dakota, Nebraska. Closed Hospitals Leave Rural Patients ‘Stranded’ as Coronavirus Spreads. The reopening, Texas-style. I’m Reopening My Hair Salon, and I’m Terrified. Under pressure to reopen this fall, school leaders plot unprecedented changes. Teachers union: ‘Scream bloody murder’ if schools reopen against medical advice. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
* How the Coronavirus Might — or Might Not — Slow Research Universities’ Ambitions. As the Trump Administration Offers Relief, Pandemic-Stricken Colleges Ponder the Risks of Taking It. There’s No Simple Way to Reopen Universities. The Evolving Fall Picture. How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America. When universities are hospitals: Losing $3m a day, UVa Health furloughs employees, cuts executive and physician pay.
Our new research shows that even according to Yale's own targeted endowment spend rate, they have underspent $648 million since 2013. But now they invoke austerity and cut budgets across the university? We don't buy it. #spendityale pic.twitter.com/q4FbeYPJaR
— Local 33 UNITE HERE (@33unitehere) April 29, 2020
* The Predicted Coronavirus Catastrophe Hasn’t Arrived In Sweden. What’s Next? Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is worse than America’s but better than New York City’s.
* Life in Wuhan after coronavirus. The post-coronavirus world doesn’t look good for China.
* CDC confirms six more coronavirus symptoms showing up in patients over and over. Study: Most coronavirus patients in hospitals didn’t spike a fever. We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us. The virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen. According to a CDC report, nearly 90% of patients hospitalized with coronavirus (COVID-19) had one or more underlying health conditions. In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead. 6 monkeys given an experimental coronavirus vaccine from Oxford did not catch COVID-19 after heavy exposure, raising hopes for a human vaccine. U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19. U.S. tops 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases — nearly a third of the global total. The successful Asian coronavirus-fighting strategy America refuses to embrace. No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out.
* Coronavirus Relief Often Pays Workers More Than Work. “As each day goes by, it gets more stressful”: Millions struggle amid delays in stimulus and unemployment. Millions can’t access unemployment benefits so actual job losses are likely greater than data shows. How Delivery Apps May Put Your Favorite Restaurant Out of Business. A business of razor-thin margins. The plan. How the Pandemic Will Change Retail. Nearly half of the Q1 decline in GDP can be attributed to healthcare, which is presumably delaying of elective procedures. American optimism is becoming a problem. Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus.
* Trump wants to use coronavirus aid as leverage to force blue states to change immigration policies. To Pressure Iran, Pompeo Turns to the Deal Trump Renounced. Controversial tech company pitches facial recognition to track COVID-19. Companies’ use of thermal cameras to monitor the health of workers and customers worries civil libertarians. No fireworks.
The Blue Angels fly-by is just an extension of this post-WWII/20th century mindset that America still clings to, that every crisis and problem can be solved by spectacles of might and prowess at war.
It's a relic of a bygone era and just feels so impotent and insulting.
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020
We don't need to continue sinking money into militarism. We need to completely restructure our economy and undo the damage of Reaganism, which combined war obsession with unequal hypercapitalism.
It's not time to rally around the flag. It's time to reconsider what the flag means
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) April 28, 2020
* Social Distancing As Demonstrated in Wes Anderson Films.
* In one month, the meat industry’s supply chain broke. Here’s what you need to know.
* The real state of exception.
* Leave Milwaukee alone! Haven’t we suffered enough?
* The Biden situation. Feminism Should Make You Uncomfortable. Trump’s focus on his base complicates path to reelection. Hell of a way to win an election. Beneath contempt. Climate Activists Need to Keep Turning the Heat Up on Joe Biden. Republicans’ Senate majority is now in very real jeopardy. This entire class of Democrats is not up to the challenge of delivering a basic message HANDED TO THEM ON A SILVER PLATTER. Justin Amash Moves Toward a Third-Party Bid for President.
Decades-old assault allegations are necessarily very hard to adjudicate fairly. But everything that was said about Kavanaugh — why stick with this incredible mediocrity when there are myriad candidates who haven’t been accused of anything? — applies just as completely to Biden.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 29, 2020
* Really helpful thread — solved a problem I was having with my own wifi.
* Game over: FTC goes after board game campaign gone wrong in first crowdfunding case.
* A brief history of the post office. But why tell a version of this story that starts in 1792 when this whole problem can be directly traced to a 2006 law passed by Republicans that required the USPS to refund its pensions for 75 years in advance, a requirement not placed on any other business in existence?
* The Cast of The Goonies Reunites for a Goofy Video and a Good Cause. We Could Be Getting a Goonies Sequel from the Creator of The Goldbergs. Dr. Strange is messy bitch who loves drama. Dinosaurs Is the Only Family Sitcom Grim Enough for This Moment. The last word on Joss Whedon.
* I’m doing my part! Belgians urged to eat frites twice a week to deplete coronavirus potato mountain.
* No one saw it coming, except Netflix: Police Investigating Death of Arizona Man From Chloroquine Phosphate.
* damn that’s bleak. understanding college. in praise of pessimism.
prof asked me what his department could do to improve career outcomes for phd students and I said stop accepting students into your programs who want to be professors.
— Hannah Alpert-Abrams
April 26, 2020
suNDaY ReAdiNG
* College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months. The Big ‘If.’ What If Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021? College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. Public Colleges Lose State Funding, Effective Immediately. I Teach at Rutgers and I Don’t Know If I’ll Have a Job This Fall. Rising expenses, falling revenues, budget cuts: Universities face looming financial crisis. ‘Pressure Is Turning Way Up’: College Presidents Plan Layoffs, Budget Cuts Due to Coronavirus, Says Survey. College Closures in the Wake of COVID-19: A Need for Forward-Looking Accountability. Pandemic Hits College Sports. Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online. The New Tenured Radicals. For the recovery, we need to spend like our lives depend on it.
* And at home: Faculty express concerns over university furloughs, financial decisions.
* NYU is not kidding around. Stanford Health Care to cut workers’ wages by 20%.
realizing on reflection that this is intended as an advertisement for high-cost private colleges, the only places that could possibly provide this level of test, trace, and quarantine https://t.co/ziT7PYRbrl
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020
anyway, I’m definitely sure our universities are definitely well-resourced and infrastructurally prepared enough to take on primary roles as stewards of public health this fall, no problems there!
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) April 26, 2020
* Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. Life After Ventilators Can Be Hell for Coronavirus Survivors. Even Palliative Care Doctors Have Never Experienced Anything Like This Before.
* Zoom as “The Gift of the Magi.”
* Here are the unambiguous rules for what to do in this pandemic.
* ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege. These epidemiologists say let’s think about reopening daycares and elementary schools. After Coronavirus, Nearly Half Of The Day Care Centers In The U.S. Could Be Gone. You’re Not Homeschooling — You’re ‘Crisis Schooling.’ To Access Online Services, New Jersey Students With Disabilities Must Promise Not To Sue.
* America gets back to work: My Family Was Denied a Stimulus Check Because My Husband Is an Immigrant. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? The end of bars and restaurants. Trump Donor Hired Trump-Tied Lobbyists, Then Raked in Coronavirus Relief Cash. GOP Governors Will Push Workers off Unemployment by Reopening Early. A Step-by-Step Plan to Reopen California. Can We Really Make a Safe Vaccine in 18 Months? ‘No Evidence’ Yet That Recovered COVID-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says. Just 14% of Americans support ending social distancing in order to reopen the economy, according to a new poll. The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests. Coronavirus is spreading fast in states that may reopen soon, study finds. We Cannot “Reopen” America. What Reopening Georgia Might Really Be About. Reopening Has Begun. No One Is Sure What Happens Next.
“If the state narrowly defines suitable work and doesn’t include the implications of the virus and what that means for a workplace, then that might put those workers who are drawing unemployment insurance in a precarious position, where they would have to either lose their unemployment insurance or go back to work in an unsafe environment,” Camardelle says.
Everytime I see this I realize anew that the plan is for every small restaurant in the country to fail, with the space eventually taken by a new dent-financed restaurant venture, a national chain, or just nothing. https://t.co/DOJTeDaway
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 26, 2020
The longer the lockdown goes on, the more burden will be placed on the government to make it livable. "Opening the economy" is about forcing working people to put their health at risk to avoid that terrifying problem: https://t.co/yWanaHbNCD
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020
* The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. Understanding media bias.
Bret Stephens doesn't write "opinion columns"; he uses the leeway provided him by "opinion" to pass along the alternative facts that his ideological fixations would require to be to true to be valid.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) April 25, 2020
* American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Small Business Rescue Earned Banks $10 Billion In Fees. With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November. Most people dying from Covid-19 are old. Don’t treat them just as statistics.
* Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan. Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections. Say It Loud, Say It Clear: Donald Trump Needs to Resign Over His Handling of the Coronavirus. And for the people in the back: The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It.
* All the Reasons This Will Be a Bleak Summer for N.Y.C. All Children.
* Tread *very* carefully, Joe — there are a lot of perverts in swing states.
* Pelosi’s Playing Hardball, Charlie Brown.
Three problems:
1) Biden doesn't support doing those things.
2) Biden isn't getting an LBJ-sized mandate.
3) Even when Dems got the biggest mandate realistically possible in 2008, they fucked it up absolutely thoroughly with Joe Biden leading the damn way.
We're fucked. https://t.co/BuOevwn2gt
— Chris Wachal (@notChrisWachal) April 24, 2020
* A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. They didn’t even let him get interviewed for this!
It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.
* How the Supreme Court’s Progressive Minority Could Prevent a Stolen Election. Or the conservative majority could steal it! Who knows, really.
* We will not stand for the erasure of Wisconsin’s proud Confederate history. Or Michigan’s!
* Planet of the Humans pulled from Netflix.
* Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products. This would be an open and shut case if we actually had a government.
* Parks and Rec is back, baby!
* This fall on Netflix: Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer. Stay till the twist!
* Great, one more thing to worry about.
* And for your consideration: another Bible as D&D thread.
Gerry Canavan's Blog
- Gerry Canavan's profile
- 12 followers
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/thsrnsfttn1979.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/525912.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/709157._sy540_.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/img_6116.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/ewobfkhucaactlw.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/1588692998-20200505.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/1589034784-20200509.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/1588258832-20200430.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/1589988588-20200520.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/img-6006.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/gerrycanavan_2020-apr-26.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://gerrycanavan.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/img-6005.jpg){kind=link}