Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 14
January 6, 2020
SCIENCE FICTION FILM AND TELEVISION Call for Reviews 2020!
Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.
We are currently in the process of shifting the format of our review section. We are now primarily interested in:
* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;
* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.
This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.
Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much SF media from 2018-2020 is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!
December 29, 2019
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
the full corporate takeover of fan culture has turned fans from a subculture whose creativity stems from overidentification with commodities into guardians of IP, enabling the transition of ‘their’ franchises into a series of expensive but low-risk technical updates
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
& to shift the political horizon of fan ‘resistance’ away from from IP theft & toward minor gains in representation
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
repeating to my self in the mirror "Star wars is for adults" before seeing the final one & having a violent reaction like ingesting a poison
— wint (@dril) December 22, 2019
still the best star wars story produced in any medium cc @mattthomas pic.twitter.com/cfllpuBDzT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2019
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
The greatest work of science fiction I’ve ever been involved with – my Men in Black profit statement – arrived for the holidays. Sadly it lost 6x what it lost last period. Impressive for a movie that hasn’t been out in 22 years. Unless it’s been *sneaking* out. Yeah, that’s it. https://t.co/fE3bFMRJvb
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) December 27, 2019
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
Not to be all Everything Is Connected, but an inability/unwillingness to think hard and carefully about Society–and an insistence on individuals as the only thing that's real–is why Star Wars, Watchmen, and Bret Stephens are obsessed with genetics
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) December 28, 2019
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
[image error]* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
terms like 'financial crisis' and 'bad economy' are propaganda obfuscating the fact that the point of capitalism is to bleed working people
for the vast majority of humanity there's no such thing as a good economy, and there's no such thing as a crisis for the ultra rich
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 27, 2019
You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years
— Raging Dull (@InternetHippo) December 27, 2019
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
In a somewhat healthy polity the fact that the president is pardoning, championing, and hanging out with this monstrous war criminal would be treated as a massive scandal and have serious consequences. But America is not healthy, and its political and civic elites are failing. https://t.co/vJdnrU69bT
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 23, 2019
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
more seriously tho it's striking what these two franchises, which are immense cultural productions and supposed testimonies to the limitlessness of imagination and possibility, implicitly posit as immutable – war, class stratification, various ideologies of gender and sex, etc
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 19, 2019
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
SANDERS: I was the only senator in 1999 who opposed Fat Bastard wanting to eat a baby, whereas my colleague Joe Biden was in favor of it
BIDEN: Look I’ve been friends with Fat Bastard for a long time, and I told him Fat, you gotta stop this talk about eating a baby, its not right
— cj (@currentvictim) December 20, 2019
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
December 20, 2019
Submitted for Your Approval, A Spoiler-Free Star Wars Hot Take Accidentally Composed on Twitter
With Episode 9 Star Wars is finally unveiled as a multigenerational, nearly century-long saga of every major character trying to kill themselves with one grand gesture that solves all their problems. There are so many characters trying to kill themselves in the final third of The Rise of Skywalker it’s actually hard to keep track of which are the good suicides and which are the bad ones. (This might seem like a joke, but it’s truly a description of the last two acts of the film.) Just like Infinity War/Endgame was about there being too many Marvel movies now, TROS is very much about Star Wars as a franchise wanting to, but being unable to, die.
December 18, 2019
Happy Star Wars Eve, One… Last… Time
* Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place. A dismal farewell to the trilogy. Even Solo got a better reception. The Rise of Skywalker—and the Fall of Fun. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up. ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is A Convoluted And Clumsy End To The Star Wars Saga. The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse. The Most Incoherent Star Wars Movie Ever Made. watching the rise of skywalker is like telling an acquaintance you ate potato salad once and enjoyed it, and then having that acquaintance break into your home in the middle of the night, tie you to a chair, and mash potato salad into your face and eyes for 2+ hours
Probably the least realistic thing about the Star Wars Universe is the speed and convenience of air travel. Probably the most realistic thing is that when you get down to it there are really only three kinds of job, viz, Employee of a Military State, Peasant, and Criminal.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) December 18, 2019
"It's an epic that charts an endless dialectic of democracy and authoritarianism in a universe where the only real constant is war. Billions die but only a few families actually matter. Too real, huh? OK. It's in space now – and they have swords. Fuck you."
– George Lucas, 1977
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 18, 2019
No idea who made this originally but if they're out there somewhere I want them to know I love them pic.twitter.com/CtMrFyZpKT
— Joab Gilroy (@Joabyjojo) December 17, 2019
* Of course the real content of Episode 9 discourse is The Last Jedi nostalgia.
"You can see Laura Dern say 'pew' when she fires the gun, which she could never not do every time she shot it." — Rian Johnson, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Commentary pic.twitter.com/Wkr803BQte
— ellie (@theriseofsoIo) March 13, 2018
* How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.
* Don’t Hold Your Breath for That Quentin Tarantino Star Trek Movie. “In a strange way, it seems like [‘Hollywood’] would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement,” Tarantino told Consequence of Sound. “I mean to such a degree there was a moment when I was writing and went, ‘Should I do this now? Should I do something else? Is this the 10th one?’ No, no don’t stop the planets from aligning, what are you, Galactus? If the Earth is saying do it, do it…But in a weird way, it actually kind of freed me up. I mean, I have no idea what the story of the next one’s going to be. I don’t even have a clue.” Kill Bill 3 confirmed.
* Netflix and the monoculture.
WORLDWIDE REVENUES
Film Box Office
2018: $41B (+5%)
2015: $39B
Video Gaming
2018: $138B (+50%)
2015: $92B
This has not yet sunk in.
— Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew) September 24, 2019
* Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets.
* Living through the era of school shootings, one drill at a time.
* Why did my sweet 5-year-old become so stormy when she started kindergarten? The Miseducation of the American Boy.
* A New (Jesuit) Model for Community Colleges.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Be Good at Your Job.
* The World The Economist Made.
* Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.
* The Oil Age Is Coming to a Close.
* A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health.
Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks.
* The 2010s Killed Off the Polite Climate Change Conversation.
* Trump’s Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape. Police officer admits he told homeless man to lick public urinal to avoid arrest.
* How Families Cope with the Hidden Costs of Incarceration for the Holidays.
* Devin Nunes lives on a congressman’s salary. How is he funding so many lawsuits?
* Memo: the Senate is an irredeemable institution.
* Insulin prices double since 2012.
* Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver. For an extra $50,000 it’ll kill a poor person every time you turn it on just because.
* 15 major cities around the world that are starting to ban cars.
* America is still innovating.
* An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad.
* John Mulaney Made a Kids’ Special. We Sent a 10-Year-Old to Interview Him About It.
* ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress Delusion: How strategy games have held on to one of colonialism’s most toxic narratives, and how they might finally be letting it go.
December 16, 2019
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin
older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:
-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019
What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci
— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will
— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
focus on a different child every time you watch
December 9, 2019
Monday Morning Links That *Will* *Not* *Make* *You* *Sad*
* Caroll Spinney, puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird of ‘Sesame Street,’ dies at 85. My own mini Twitter thread. Meanwhile, in the other universe…
Such was the appeal of Big Bird that NASA asked Mr. Spinney to fly into orbit in costume, to interest young people in space exploration. Mr. Spinney agreed to go, but it was ultimately determined that the space shuttle was too small to accommodate the Big Bird suit. A New Hampshire teacher, Christa McAuliffe, went in his stead and was killed along with the rest of the crew when the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986.
Caroll Spinney operating Oscar the Grouch, while wearing his Big Bird legs https://t.co/AUMQFtqeID pic.twitter.com/ehlJFPmNfn
— Masque of the Red Death (@doctorow) December 9, 2019
The original Big Bird Caroll Spinney has passed away at 85. On the outside, he made it all look simple. On the inside, Big Bird was incredibly complex. This look gave me a new appreciation inside his genius. pic.twitter.com/BjRZI752PU
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) December 8, 2019
And from the archives…
BREAKING: Zoey just saw Big Bird for the first time and completely lost her shit.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2012
* Ali Sperling: On Futurity and Futility: Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts.
So, what does it mean to fight for a future you know may already be lost? In such a context, questions underlying our relation to futurity become less about whether or not one can maintain hope for a failing planet and its deeply corrupted social and political structures; instead, the novel explores other forms of responses to the problem of the Anthropocene. One could argue that this isn’t a book about any particular future at all; instead, it’s about a present that has already come to pass. For many, there is already no other option but to fight fate, an imperative that suggests the strange paradox that structures both Dead Astronauts and the seemingly impossible political and ecological challenges faced at this moment around the world. The novel suggests that even something broken can be useful: “They had failed in the last City, and the one before that, and the one before that. Sometimes that failure pushed the needle farther. Sometimes that failure changed not a thing. But perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.”
* CFP: Posthuman Global Symposiums.
* ‘I’m working until I’m 75’: Factory worker describes family’s student debt nightmare.
* The Class of 2000 ‘Could Have Been Anything’: The high school yearbook is a staple of teenage life. But for some, it reflects the devastating toll of the opioid crisis.
* Tinder, but for the master race.
* Why US is still bad for working parents.
* It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics.
* Biden! Biden! Biden! Buttigieg! And my global take on politics, more or less.
An underappreciated aspect of media bubbles: Democrats simply do not know and cannot understand Republicans consume media telling them they will soon need to murder liberals 16 hours a day. There is no “oh, if only we could just go back to being friends” on AM radio, or on Fox.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2019
me watching TV pic.twitter.com/ABUt2Y9TZt
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2019
* Service, and sacrifice and heritage.
* “Blackness is a superhero origin story.” The Performative Horniness of Dawn of X.
In short Watchmen is maybe the best demonstration ever of how thin the line is for me between “so good I can’t stop thinking about it” and “so bad I can’t stop thinking about it.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2019
* Counterpoint: every city, town, village, and hamlet in the United States is a universe unto itself.
* Disney warns Episode 9 may have an epilepsy risk.
Just learned about this letter K.A. Applegate wrote to fans about the end of Animorphs, and it is good. pic.twitter.com/zG2Xqm1kVn
— Matt Crowley (@MatthewPCrowley) December 6, 2019
December 6, 2019
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
[image error]* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce
November 26, 2019
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
—
November 16, 2019
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
wishing I could make content this sublime pic.twitter.com/UYPNVI2m1C
— Slavoj “Claire’s Trophy Wife” Vibecheck (@zizekthottie) November 15, 2019
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
Venn diagram of people saying “the state is too technically incompetent to install a broadband connection” and people who say “the state should build and maintain a thermonuclear arsenal”
— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) November 15, 2019
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
— mugrimm
November 8, 2019
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
Here is my most humorless opinion: The concept of ghosts is an example of how we stigmatize victims of violence as much as perpetrators, and perceive them as a threat to our peaceful lives. The desired outcome is to make them go away, shut up, and let us forget about them again.
— Sandra Newman is objectively frightening (@sannewman) October 31, 2019
Xennials are called Calvinistas now https://t.co/8vhCm4X8vU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 
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