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.

* The humanities in ruins.

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