Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 17

The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!

* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.

* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

* 64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.

* In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.

* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.

This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.

How does this school stack up?

The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.

* Inside the African essay factories that churn out university coursework for 115,000 cheating British students every year.

* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

The book posits an Iron Law of Meritocracy, in which meritocratic systems will collapse in on themselves because eventually inequality of outcomes grow so vast, it's impossible to provide equality of opportunity. What you then get is something like aristocracy and oligarchy.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019

* Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.

* Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.

* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.

* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”

the idea that Omega Point aliens will someday be able to resurrect me on the basis of my public writing is 89% of the reason I’m still on Twitter https://t.co/l348wObaXp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

to be perfectly honest I have a little bit of a Roko’s Basilisk fear that I’ve *already* been resurrected on the basis of my social media posts in some techno-gnostic simulation scenario and that’s why absolutely everything is garbage

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

* Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.

* Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.

* It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.

* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.

* Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.

* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

* Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.

* 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.

* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

Basically our – very neoliberal – plan for everything these days is to dump the consequences for contradictions we refuse to resolve on the most vulnerable, the over-stretched, and the future itself, and monetize every miserable step of it all the way down.

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019

* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.

* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.

* North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

* How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.

* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.

* Meanwhile, a Maryland teen has been labeled a child pornographer for sharing a video of her own sex act.

* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.

* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).

* In the age of the psychonauts.

* “It’s time to talk about James Mattis’s involvement with the Theranos scandal. He’s selling a book, not saving the country from Trump.”

* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”

*

* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.

Okay, folks. Here's a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart. pic.twitter.com/fuqglnUEE6

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019

* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!

* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

* Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.

* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…

* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

But, doctor, I am the Joker

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019

Friday Links!

* ‘I Don’t Think We Should Be Afraid of Protests’: Marquette Faculty Members Speak Out Against Policy Requiring Approval for Demonstrations.

* Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used the same language to defend slavery.

* The ‘1619 Project’ Isn’t Anti-American — It’s Anti-White Identity Politics.

If Erickson and Co. would simply choose to identify as Americans – instead of as white Americans – then they’d free themselves from the compulsion to defend Thomas Jefferson’s sainthood, and belittle Sally Hemings’s suffering. If they would only seek meaning and belonging through identification with every American whose deeds affirmed our republic’s highest ideals – instead of with those whose pigmentation affirmed their racial pride – they could feel themselves ennobled by MLK’s heroism, and unthreatened by a frank accounting of the Founding Fathers’ crimes.

* Most Canadians Are Now Better Off Than Most Americans.

* How Paying for College Is Changing Middle-Class Life.

* Against happiness.

* Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media.

* Welcome to the US, Greta. With your help we can save the planet and ourselves.

* But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the high-definition simulation we call reality, and to unravel the physical mysteries of our world? A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts.

* ‘Nobody cared’: A woman gave birth alone in a jail cell after her cries for help were ignored, lawsuit says. Trump administration leaves menstruating migrant girls ‘bleeding through’ underwear at detention centres, lawsuit claims. The Trump Administration Wants To Start DNA Testing Undocumented Immigrants In Government Custody. When Solitary Confinement Is A Death Sentence. CDC reports 900 mumps cases in migrant detention facilities over past year.

It’s easier to believe Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide was due to malevolent indifference rather than sophisticated conspiracy when you know that jailers are ignoring pregnant women crying for help as they give birth. https://t.co/DB0e6qBSGb

— Alex Tabarrok (@ATabarrok) August 30, 2019

* Every day with this guy. It’s a truly astounding record of achievement.

* How Democrats Can Win Back Rural Wisconsin.

* The DNC Doesn’t Want a Climate Debate for a Reason.

The DNC has shown what it represents: plutocratic interests and their deep commitment to human extinction. Even a lightweight Ivy League skateposer like Beto has a better sense of where the political culture is headed than the DNC does. Greta Thunberg arrived yesterday in New York City after crossing the Atlantic in a small, janky-looking zero-carbon boat from Europe. She and the many other people around the world fighting capitalism and the fossil fuel industry are our best hope — not only for the future, but for the present.

* just manipulating markets lol

* YouTube is a very bad company.

* Big Pharma Is Starting to Pay for the Opioid Crisis. Make Those Payments Count.

* The twenty-year musical.

* Solved that little problem.

* Same joke but about PornHub planting trees to fight climate change.

* How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

* By and large, arbitration just shouldn’t exist.

* The largest study of same-sex sexual behavior finds there is no gay gene.

* Mark Twain wrote his own sad projections about Huck in 1891, when he planned a sequel: “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.” 

* Garak and Bashir: The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relationship That Should’ve Been.

* What is it with the kids today and Friends?

* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. Wild to see how some of these communities have limped on or evolved into cults since becoming irrelevant.

* I nearly cried reading this.

* Alright alright alright.

* And if you want a vision of the future.

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Thursday Links!

* Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.

* Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis.

* Scenes from dystopia: MUPD updates active shooter training for students.

* Steven Salaita: My Life as a Cautionary Tale.

* Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah.

* Bodies Aren’t Binary, So Why Are Sports?

* Why Aren’t More Women Working? They’re Caring for Parents.

* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.

* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.

* In about a single generation, Milwaukee morphed from the best city in the nation for a black laborer to a present-day cliche as one of “the worst cities for black Americans.”

* Tough medicine: people who talk about luxury socialism and infinity pools for everyone do not believe socialism can be built on a timescale on which practical problems or trade-offs of any kind will be relevant.

* Catastrophes in the Amazon and elsewhere are flash points for the larger, ongoing crisis that claims lives in less spectacular fashion—one that sees life itself as expendable.

* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.

* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.

* Marvel Comics Is Doubling Down on Its Misguided Crusade to Remain ‘Apolitical,’ and It’s Using Captain America to Do It.

* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?

* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.

* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.

Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.

* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’

* Here’s one for you: A DEA agent got a drug trafficker to buy a $43,000 truck so the agent could seize it through asset forfeiture and use it as his work vehicle.

* No more jails in LA County.

* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.

* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.

* The Dinosaur Artist.

* The Queen of Darts.

* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.

* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.

* This one cuts deep.

* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.

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Wednesday Links!

* Marquette now requires permission for on-campus protests. An Open Letter Opposed to Marquette U.’s Anti-Demonstration Policy.

Two aspect of Marquette's new protest policy worth noting:
1) All protests must be approved by the administration and in the designated protest era. This recalls the "free speech zones" of the Trump era. Essentially: denude protest of power by hiding it. pic.twitter.com/zh8aG9ztUm

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) August 28, 2019

* Elsewhere in academics behaving badly: Professors rally behind MIT Media Lab director after Epstein funding scandal.

* The Quantitative Easing of the Humanities.

The dangerous essence of the humanities is loyal criticism of the institutions one serves.

— William Pannapacker (@pannapacker) August 27, 2019

* Most-Expensive 4-Year Private Nonprofit Institutions, 2018-19. Impressive for Harvey Mudd to be so committed to that last three dollars to tick just over $75,000/year.

* College Board Drops Its ‘Adversity Score’ For Each Student After Backlash.

* New analysis finds that education researchers, unlike scholars in many other disciplines, don’t check one another’s work.

* Academia: A Life.

by @tomgauld pic.twitter.com/FQ3EkVW12M

— New Scientist (@newscientist) August 26, 2019

* The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials.

* I just knew it would be something like this.

* As e-scooters take over Milwaukee streets, other cities reckon with injured riders, scarce helmet use.

* This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost. A Q&A With the Man Who Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Bret Stephens’s “bedbug” meltdown, explained. Who Gets to Speak Freely? Aaron Bady goes all the way back to 2005 for a good old-fashioned blog post.

Rorschach's journal, August 27, 2019: “Time to do what I long ago promised to do. Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deact

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019

the thing you have to understand is that university administrations absolutely despise faculty and will gleefully seek out any opportunity to hurt them no matter how petty or embarrassing https://t.co/VZ1b9PotBD

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019

* Speaking of the mystery of free speech: Incoming Harvard Freshman Deported After Visa Revoked.

“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” he wrote. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.”

* Southern California police arrest 3 middle school students for inciting a riot.

* Journalism Is an Action.

* Photos: The Burning Amazon Rainforest. The basic premise of geoengineering is that it will be easier to get the planetary atmospheric and ecological systems to change the way they work than to get the capitalist economy to change the way it works. It is immoral to have climate change in the era of babies. Wildfires and Floods Push Russia to Revise Its Stance on Climate Change. Let’s just spray trillions of tons of snow on Antarctica?

it cost $350 million to make Avengers: Endgame https://t.co/WOdh4fEcxN

— flglmn (@flglmn) August 26, 2019

The US spends $32 million on its wars – per hour. https://t.co/0oetA6fFod

— Amir (@AmirAminiMD) August 26, 2019

That’s what climate change is. https://t.co/ooGMmSbIw7

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2019

* The Affair, climate change, and the new realism.

* Florida Marine vet teacher on leave after telling students he would ‘be the best school shooter.’

* Bigotry and hate are more linked to mass shootings than mental illness, experts say.

* Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S. (A rebuttal.) Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart. Trump Allies Reportedly Set Up Network to Smear Journalists Ahead of Election. He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

* The Entire Plane of the Milky Way Captured in a Single Photo. Keep scrolling, there’s more!

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* A reading list on alcoholism.

* School Administration Reminds Female Students Bulletproof Vests Must Cover Midriff.

* Native American Lacrosse Teams Reported Racial Abuse. Then Their League Expelled Them.

* When your kids start beating you in games.

* Where the candidates campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do.

[image error]* When you’re extremely on message.

* Congress by the numbers.

* Being Andrew Luck.

* Amazon Has Ceded Control of Its Site. The Result: Thousands of Banned, Unsafe or Mislabeled Products.

* Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, a county coroner is forced to confirm. He’s in on it.

* Johnson & Johnson must pay over $572 million for its role in Oklahoma opioid crisis, judge rules.

* Drug prices in 2019 are surging, with hikes at 5 times inflation.

As 1/4 of diabetics ration their insulin to survive, here's how much Pharma execs rake in:

Regeneron: $118M
Merck: $49M
Pfizer: $47M
Johnson & Johnson: $46M
Abbott: $32M
Gilead: $22M
Eli Lilly: $14M

Pharma's greed is as lethal as the diseases they’re supposed to be treating.

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 23, 2019

* The US Created MS-13.

* 2 California towns where chickens have free range.

* Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say.

* A growing army of ‘Airbnb’ police gets paid to expose the addresses of homeshare hosts.

* ‘They’re Putting People at Risk’: Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, and Inaction at Zeel, the Top Massage App.

* Human-guided burrito bots raise questions about the future of robo-delivery.

* More evidence of YouTube rightwing radicalization. In a study of >79 million YouTube comments, @manoelribeiro et. al. shows that a high % of people who now comment on Alt-Right videos used to comment exclusively on IDW or Alt-lite videos.

* ProPublica found that – despite the TSA saying it is committed to treating all passengers equally and fairly – five per cent of civil rights complaints against the TSA related to the treatment of trans passengers, despite trans people making up less than one per cent of the US population.

* Lots of nerds *think* they like science fiction because of the technology and perditions.

* Marvel Comics Just Retconned the Entire Vietnam War.

* There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate.

* Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time.

* “We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”

* We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture. The Campbell Award gets a new name.

* How Do We Colonize the Moon?

* And submitted for your approval: the new culture industry.

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Sunday Links!

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* Been waiting for this one for a while: Chris Ware talks Rusty Brown.

* Boots Riley has a key read on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that has been left out of nearly every review or thinkpiece I’ve seen. Here’s one thinkpiece that does take it up.

Re Once Upon A Time In Hollywood:

The Manson Family were overt White Supremacists who tried to start a race war w the goal of killing Black folks.

They werent "hippies" spouting left critiques of media. They were rightwingers.

This fact flips Tarantino's allegory on its head.

— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) August 24, 2019

* Elsewhere on the Tarantino beat: Box Office Milestone: ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Crosses $200M Globally, one of only two non-franchise films to earn that much this year.

* What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires. The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone. Why Are We Even Responding to John Delaney? The Democrats are climate deniers.

The liberal order doesn’t even have a way to say “now, now, Mr. Bolsonaro, that’s not nice” when the future is at stake.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2019

no it was the rich people who did it https://t.co/ICNi1SOlgb

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2019

* Summer on the swollen Great Lakes.

This. Climate reporting should be a major beat with serious devotion of resources. It takes connecting many particular human experiences to global transformation to make change. https://t.co/J2sd5dyKr8

— erica robles-anderson (@fstflofscholars) August 25, 2019

* The Bone Thief died. :( David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier.

* The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren.

* We got him! I’d like to see Ole Donny Trump wriggle out of THIS jam!

* Northern Ireland is already spiralling out of control but no one is paying attention.

* When Your Rapist Demands Custody.

* Gamergate will always be with us.

* Aaron Bady on Ready or Not.

Such an ending would imply that the ludicrous caricatures we imagine into existence to justify our preposterous wars with each other are, actually, just the pretexts we want and need to justify violence. In other words, it would skewer movies like The Hunt, and the ideological fantasies that divide the country into red and blue caricatures. If The Hunt seems to take a side — endorsing, by all indications, the worldview of its “deplorable” protagonists — Ready or Notnearly ends by suggesting that the stories we might tell ourselves to normalize violence are nonsense.

Instead, as it turns out…

* An update on a bizarre story: Ugandan mothers want justice for their children who died in care of an unlicensed American health worker.

* When You Can’t Afford School Lunch, the Toll Is More Than Just Physical.

* The New American Homeless.

* “The difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.”

* Insulin Prices Killed Josh Wilkerson. Now His Mother Is Taking On Big Pharma.

* Negative interest rates are coming and they are downright terrifying.

* Hellen Keller was a revolutionary socialist who wanted to abolish capitalism lol

* Suffering makes better art.

JUST SAYIN pic.twitter.com/kIjUTnrHlF

— I am the utterance of my name (@filamena) August 24, 2019

* Fairy stories have always been radical.

* The legality of owning a kangaroo in the United States. Kudos to Wisconsin for keeping freedom alive.

* And, finally, the story that never needed to be told is here!

Weekend Links!

* After Isle of Dogs, I’m filled with nothing but dread for The French Dispatch. Here’s what we know so far.

* Is true crime over?

* Astronaut Accessed Estranged Spouse’s Bank Account from International Space Station. How can they say true crime is over when we have the first-ever crime in space!

* Once again, for the people in the back: The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. In Bolsonaro’s burning Brazilian Amazon, all our futures are being consumed. We’re Living Through A Climate Emergency Right Now — We Just Aren’t Paying Attention. The Limits of “Experiencing” the Climate Crisis. In a Devastated Town, Sanders Explains His Plan for a Climate Revolution.

* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.

* Kirkwood professor who stated he supported Antifa resigns.

* Tenure, with variations.

* On December 22, 1973, an embattled President Richard Nixon met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces. It was a ceremonial meeting, not the sort where important decisions are supposed to get made. But one of the generals realized something was deeply off. Nixon was agitated. “He kept on referring to the fact that he [Nixon] may be the last hope, the eastern elite was out to get him,” the four-star general later said. It seemed the president was “trying to sound us out”—to see if, “in a crunch,” the generals would overthrow Congress and the judiciary, and keep the criminal president in power. Through a White House, darkly.

* The US is already occupying Greenland.

The US is already occupying Greenland. In 1951, they demolished the village of Pituffik & built the Thule Air Base in its place. Then a 1968 nuclear accident contaminated the Inughuit's hunting grounds with radioactive plutonium, leaving hairless fur seals and deformed muskoxen. pic.twitter.com/ELz8SOzM0v

— The Decolonial Atlas (@decolonialatlas) August 23, 2019

* A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

* In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria.

* Kids left without either parent at home for 8 days after Mississippi ICE raid. And updating a story from yesterday: Federal Agencies Have Been Sending Employees Articles From White Nationalist And Conspiracy Websites For Months.

* Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States.

* How segregation makes your commute worse.

* State of the unions: what happened to America’s labor movement?

* Tarantino corner! ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Is a Science Fiction Film. Tarantino’s gruesome revenge fantasies are growing more puerile and misogynistic. Stop, you’re both right!

* There’s a Latinx void at the heart of video games.

* How David Koch Changed the World.

* Slouching towards autokill drones hovering over every street corner.

“In addition to the bucket and kitty litter, the teachers were also given a pop-up tent to put around the bucket, a first aid kit, and a Sharpie to mark the time if a teacher has to tie a tourniquet to stop gunshot bleeding.”

What the actual hell are we doing? https://t.co/6GyJrgiQKK

— Meaghan (@meaghang) August 22, 2019

* The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media.

* When Kids Are Straight Until Proven Otherwise.

* Occasionally, though, one can sense the fears emerging out of the anonymous voices. A therapist talks about patients who are “one bad night away from suicide” now facing new burdens of paperwork. A parent writes, “Medicaid enrollment limits tell my son his life is worthless and he might as well die because he is diabetic.” Another respondent worries that enrollment caps will “limit my ability to get my asthma treated and medications covered.”

* Marvel’s making some interesting moves on Disney+. I might actually watch WandaVision.

With She-Hulk, Moon Knight, and Ms Marvel, Disney is doing a lot on Disney+ that people really wanted AND that seems like it will avoid the dourness that consumed the Netflix shows.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2019

* Playful chess variants.

* I’d listen.

* And that’s how you quit a job.

Friday Links!

* Why the Fires in the Amazon Are So Bad. The Fires in the Amazon Were Set on Purpose. Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest. Thank goodness someone lost their job over this.

climate-change induced extinction will not resemble your vague imaginary of a rapture-like mass death, it will look like an acceleration of the extractive processes of capital and world war, breaking biogeochemical cycles, and cascading ecosystem failures.

— isla (@islanoname)

the world that remains will not be dead as some claim, but it will be severely diminished, and permanently scarred by the damage of an accelerating capitalist industrial civilization exploding into the biosphere. it is by definition unimaginable.

— isla (@islanoname)

* But wait! There’s an easy solution to this! Can Mars Be Made Habitable in Our Lifetime?

* Elsewhere in the that’ll-solve-it bin: What if We All Ate a Bit Less Meat?

* 2 Scholars Will Leave MIT’s Media Lab Over Its Director’s Financial Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

* Want to Be an English Professor? It Gets Harder Every Year.

* Mesa College English Professor Showed QAnon Video in Class, Students Say.

* Justice corner! The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks. ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on Orange Is The New Black. Customers Handed Over Their DNA. The Company Let the FBI Take a Look. Precrime didn’t even work in the movie!

* What’s going on with Milwaukee’s population?

* ‘Forever chemicals’ detected at low levels in Milwaukee tap water for the first time.

* Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.

* The Ultimate List of What Star Trek You Should Watch Before Picard.

* Hasbro’s new Monopoly for Millennials game is an insulting experience.

Hot take:
The crap-AI essay grading system for the SAT is good actually

because it judges students on the thing that will most impact their lives,

which is being able to convincingly lie to poorly-designed AI.

— Actual Doctor Galaxykate (@GalaxyKate) August 22, 2019

* Tenured law professors behaving badly.

* The arc of history is long, but Major U.S. Phone Companies Agree to Plan to Combat Endless Robocalls.

* A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games.

* And MIT scientists prove you’re just lazy.

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Thursday Links!

* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.

* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.

* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal.  Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.

* Indentured.

* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!

* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.

* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.

* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.

* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.

* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.

If what you’re saying is true, that would be really bad! So it must not be true. https://t.co/QoBpMh2TCq

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 18, 2019

* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.

It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”

* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT

* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.

* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.

* Gamergate in the classroom.

* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.

* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.

* The most succinct articulation of the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism I’ve ever seen.

If we restored public funding to the university system, then they'd only be linked to large abstract war machines instead of individual billionaire perverts

— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) August 21, 2019

* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.

Environmental activists warn that if the Amazon reaches a point of no return, the rainforest could become a dry savannah, no longer habitable for much of its wildlife. If this happens, it could start emitting carbon — the major driver of climate change. https://t.co/ZLX0PMcZls

— CNN (@CNN) August 21, 2019

When Notre Dame was burning, the world's media covered every moment of it and billionaires rushed to restore it. Right now the Amazon is burning, the lungs of our planet. It has been burning for 3 weeks now. No media. No billionaires. #PrayforAmazonas pic.twitter.com/RkBLS8SiE8

— charlotte

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.

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* 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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2019

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

—

Thursday Night Links!

* Rest in peace, Toni Morrison. A New Yorker flashback. The obligatory MetaFilter thread.

With the death of Toni Morrison coming after this brutal weekend it really does feel like we’re living in an age where the primary historical forces just consist of the churning annihilation of everything beautiful.

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) August 6, 2019

* Just in time for my fall class: [r/FanTheories] Hagrid is a Death Eater.

* Toward a Theory of the New Weird.

* In Praise of Samuel R. Delany. Samuel Delany on capitalism, racism, and science fiction.

* Don’t teach this way! Ever!

* Another professor is under fire for using the slur in class while discussing a work by James Baldwin. Should universities pursue cases against instructors who use the word in a teaching context, not as a weapon?

* An elite D.C. girls’ school thought its founding nuns taught slaves to read. Instead, they sold them off for as much as they could.

* More Than 100 Immigrants Were Pepper-Sprayed At An ICE Facility. ICE Raids Miss. Plant After $3.75 Million Sexual Harassment Settlement. Families “Are Scared To Death” After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People. Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter. America’s “Poster Child” Syndrome. ICE agents try to raid Brooklyn homeless shelter without warrants, sources say. Death by deportation.

* Police Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder. Boston Police crush wheelchairs belonging to homeless folks. After HuffPost Investigation, 4 White Nationalists Out Of U.S. Military — But Others Allowed To Remain. Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules.

* Trump administration authorizes ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill wild animals.

* Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. Surviving Amazon.

* Tired: Trade war. Wired: Real war.

* Nightmare in Kashmir.

* Police “neutralized” the Dayton shooter in 30 seconds. He still shot 14 people. White House rebuffed attempts by DHS to make combating domestic terrorism a higher priority. Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing Are Chapters in the Same Manifesto. Understanding The Statements Of Mass Shooters. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto contains a dangerous message about climate change. How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. A future that currently doesn’t exist. America decided the death of children was bearable before America became America.

I read these manifestos for a living. you want to know what I think the real thing people want to erase is? how generic and similar they all are – and how little daylight there really is at the end of the day between them and what gets published daily in many WSJ or NYT op-eds

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 3, 2019

* Joke’s on you, libs! McDonald’s new paper straws aren’t recyclable — but its axed plastic ones were.

* How Gender Stereotypes Affect Pro-Environment Behavior. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper changes the game.

* How Peanuts Created a Space for Thinking.

* What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old?

* now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list

the fact that many americans think of plantation as vacation destinations to be enjoyed like disney world is sort of all you need to know to understand how we got to this place in our politics https://t.co/CcpoaN8T1N

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 8, 2019

* A thread involving me where the other people are saying more interesting things: The NYT published a review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s “cosmic justice” that basically convinced me the film *is* fascist.

* How often do women talk in Quentin Tarantino films? Updated now for Death Proof, if you saw it earlier.

* Where are they now? Manson family edition.

* Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding. In the richest country in human history.

* The Highway Was Supposed to Save This City. Can Tearing It Down Fix the Sins of the Past?

* There’s a ‘Toxic Fallout’ From the Notre-Dame Disaster: Lead Contamination.

* Greta Thunberg Joined A Walkout At The First Major Summit Of The Movement She Inspired.

* Jeffrey Epstein Is the Face of the Billionaire Class.

what’s the formal greek or latin term for “rule by degenerate billionaire perverts”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 8, 2019

* Dreams are lost memories: a fatalism vs stoicism film roundup.

* The legacy of colonialism on public lands created the Mauna Kea conflict.

* Robin Vos is a truly odious person.

* Seems fine: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials.

* Twilight of Pacific Standard.

* The man just upped my rent last night / and tardigrades on the moon

* The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On.

* And copyrightopia is already here, it just doesn’t apply to anything you’d actually want to read: Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.

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