March Links!

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— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021

SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube. I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB. Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television. CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.How to Build a World.How to Land on Mars.Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?“Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own. Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks? I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.

So my pitch for a retcon:
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

If the core of Wandavision were “everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn’t” I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021

An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations. From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’

So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.

It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx

— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021

President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10. The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.

When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA

— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021

‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.English departments rethink what to call themselves.A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.

from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021

Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.

NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021

I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021

The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.The Tyranny of Parents.Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.The realest tweet.

kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century

— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021

1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021

the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances

— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021

Chess is bad now. This is good.Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.Finally, someone is making sense.Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.Bring back the nervous breakdown!Is This the End of Tipping?The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat. I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement. All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.

During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7

— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021