Just 363 Shopping Days Till Christmas Links
* Call for Papers: Literature and Extraction. Call for Papers: The Romantic Fantastic.
* A new Black Mirror is dropping tomorrow. From doing some recent workshops with Black Mirror as a focus I think it’s clear that an occasional surprise release is a much better model for them than the binge.
* Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era.
* Sure, when you put it that way it sounds really bad.
* The global economy should isolate Japan by any means necessary until it reverses this decision.
* When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.
* This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.
* How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. A helpful Twitter thread elaborates on just how much of the internet economy is predicated on fraud of one type or another.
The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. https://t.co/sfmdrxGBNJ pic.twitter.com/thvicDEL29
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) December 26, 2018
"Popular media should be taken seriously as art, it's just as vital and meaningful as any classic work"
"Okay. Super-hero movies are mostly male power fantasies that yearn for a world of total moral clarity that can only be achieved through a kind of benign fascism"
"Please stop"
— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) December 24, 2018
* U.S. Grip on the Market for Higher Education Is Slipping.
* The Southwest May Be Deep Into a Climate-Changed Mega-Drought. Discovery of recent Antarctic ice sheet collapse raises fears of a new global flood. Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find. 2018 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history. “The last five years have been the five warmest years in modern human history … The last cooler-than-normal year, based on the 20th century average, was way back in 1976.” Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says. ‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change. ‘Future-proofing’ is how you say climate change in Texas. 130,000. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation. Democrats remain fundamentally unserious.
* Moving a section of railroad up and inland is not going to be the drastic logistical challenge of the 21st century. It is going to be an ordinary baseline necessity, one minor component in a comprehensive retooling of life and infrastructure. Whole cities will have to move up and in. Rail and transit, water and sewer, power and industry—none of it can stay put on the low ground. Nor, if there’s any hope of getting emissions under control, is the feeble, endangered Amtrak line more than a fraction of the transportation systems the country will need for its survival. The issue isn’t whether we can mobilize to keep rail service running through Wilmington without interruption. It’s whether there’s going to be a Wilmington at all.
* Here are the yoga pants you should buy if you don’t want to poison the groundwater.
* Fifty years since Earthrise.
* Migrant boy dies in U.S. custody; Trump vows shutdown will last until border wall is funded. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol. Border Patrol says young girl in custody nearly died after going into cardiac arrest: report. ICE Quietly Drops 200 Asylum Seekers at El Paso Bus Station with No Money or Shelter Right Before Christmas. ICE Is Using Driver’s License Applications to Arrest Immigrants. ICE, CBP Seize Billions In Assets Including Human Remains.
* A College Student Was Told To Remove A “Fuck Nazis” Sign Because It Wasn’t “Inclusive.”
* The fact that there can be no accountability despite “serious” allegations is, in some sense, the common theme of the time. It’s part of a drumbeat that insists: We cannot indict a sitting president; we cannot discipline a sitting justice. If you are untruthful for a long enough period of time, you can find your way into a job where there are no consequences for being untruthful.
* How Mark Burnett Invented Trump.
* The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said. Wild that the Catholic Church would think it could win a morality fight about kids and sex.
* Elon Musk is a ludicrous, transparent fraud, and it just doesn’t matter a bit.
* After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools.
* You can’t argue with facts! Milwaukee named one of the best places to start a business in the US.
* Why did the Times let Alice Walker recommend an anti-Semitic book?
* What if the Constitution is bad?
* Putting your mass shooting on credit.
* What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle. Everything! And they were wrong about unions too!
* A Mysterious Object Twice the Size of Earth is What Caused Uranus’ Lopsided Orbit.
* Julie Rea was convicted of killing her son largely on the testimony of bloodstain-pattern analysts. She was later acquitted and exonerated, joining a growing community of Americans wrongly convicted with bad science.
* The Spider-Verse story that (kind of) inspired Into the Spider-Verse is only $8.99 at Comixology. It’s fun!
* How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Animators Created That Trippy Look.
* Berlin Is a Masterpiece of a Graphic Novel.
* One second from every episode of Mad Men.
* Great session today, doc, thanks.
* The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.
* Childhood poverty has a lasting impact on developing brain, finds study.
* I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.
* Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not).
* For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain. Stay tuned for my darkly erotic sequel to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
me the first time I hear a They Might Be Giants song: ahaha the boys have done it again, what a wacky, witty tune
me the 100th time I hear that They Might Be Giants song: oh wait it’s a crushing examination of anxiety and/or depression
— Nathan Goldman (@nathangoldman) December 19, 2018
Never forget you are made out of stardust and unexamined despair
— Kim Kierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) November 30, 2018
Oh no pic.twitter.com/4TciQHgilj
— Abiral (@AbiralCP) December 21, 2018
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