* Podcast: What is Irish Science Fiction? I’d also recommend a few new podcasts, Off Book (weekly improvised musical) and What Trump Can Teach Us about Con Law.
* Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again.”
* Researchers Just Launched a Prototype of Humanity’s First ‘Interstellar Spacecraft.’
* ‘Make It So’: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism.
* Star Trek: Discovery is the first Trek TV series in over 15 years. Here’s everything we know.
* Republicans don’t trust higher ed. That’s a problem for liberal academics.
* Three years after Steven Salaita lost a promised tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the tone of his anti-Israel tweets, he’s leaving academe.
* How a New Field Could Help Save the Humanities.
* Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color.
* They’re still fighting at Hypatia.
* “If There’s an Organized Outrage Machine, We Need an Organized Response.” Recovering academic freedom in an age of social media mobbing.
* Any parent could have told you this: Ravens plan better than four-year-olds.
* How to raise an optimistic human in a pessimistic world.
* Among the dead was a so-called Dreamer, a migrant who had been brought to the United States as a young child. Frank Guisseppe Fuentes, 20, spent much of his life in the U.S. and had crossed the border in an attempt to reunite with family members living in Maryland after he was deported to Guatemala City, Jose Barillas, the Guatemalan consul general in Houston, told Univision. The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Slain girl’s father, sister denied visas, miss her funeral. A Veteran Agent Speaks Out.
* New Jersey raised its smoking age to 21. The change will likely save lives. Honestly, just ban them outright, and soda too.
* Wisconsin is paying as much as $1 million per job, which will carry an average salary of $54,000. I’ve thought about it, and I think I’d rather have the iPhone.
* The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills.
* Don’t let your employer microchip you! Ever!
* A 21st-century form of indentured servitude has already penetrated deep into the American heartland.
* Woman turns home into museum after getting sick of black women being ignored by the art world.
* When there was a Lyme disease vaccine.
* Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle.
* North Dakota’s Norway Experiment.
* Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development.
* Dungeons and Dragons in America’s dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons and the Left.
* Hemingway just got beat by four words.
* Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child.
* The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values.
* 110/111.
* The next Matt Groening series isn’t just a Futurama-but-fantasy but a joke Futurama already did. But fine I’ll give it a chance.
* A definitive mapping of the decline of The Simpsons. It’s just math, folks.
* The attack on Poland’s judicial independence goes deeper than you may think. Here are 5 things to know. Dodged that bullet. Coming soon to a collapsing empire near you!
* On 500 episodes of Comedy Bang Bang.
* When Pokémon Go defeated Milwaukee County.
* Et tu, Roomba? I trusted you.
* The World May Have Less Time to Address Climate Change Than Scientists Thought.
* And yet there’s more dicks around than ever before.
* The knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.
* #NotAllTVIsDarkAndFullOfTerrors.
* And July 30 can’t come fast enough.
And because Trump is a nightmare from which none of us will ever awake:
* We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture.
* The Scariest Nuclear Threat Is Coming From Inside the White House.
After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
* Turtles all the way down: Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science.
At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.
* This guy is running communications now! Come on! COME ON!
* A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable. It’s not too early, or too nutty, to discuss grounds for impeachment. This presidency can’t be saved. A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly. Hot mic. 1 in 4. On the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis, the Nation Goes Numb.
* Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals. Sixteen years. We’ve long lost even the pretense that there is a rational reason for this.
* 64 years after Korean War, North still digging up bombs.
* William Regnery II, a man who inherited millions but struggled in business, tried for 15 years to ignite a racist political movement — and failed. Then an unforeseen phenomenon named Donald Trump gave legitimacy to what Regnery had seeded long before: the alt-right. Now, the press-shy white separatist breaks his silence.
* How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump.
* This is the tradition Ryan Alford sets himself against in Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. It is from a position of deliberate disinterest in institutional personality, particularly presidential personality, that Alford builds his account of the lawlessness of US counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks and charts our country’s official passage across the “threshold between an imperial presidency and an elective dictatorship.”
* What if Trump Ordered a Nuclear Strike on China? I’d Comply, Says Admiral. Not great, Bob!
* When you’ve lost the Boy Scouts.
* Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.
* Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims.
* Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated.
* RIP CBO.
* There’s nothing he can’t ruin.
* How to put Trump on Mount Rushmore, something he’s never even thought about.
* #Actually Stubbs’s tenure as mayor was deeply problematic.
* John McCain Just Proved He Is the Senate’s Biggest Fraud (Again). Your enemies are human too.
The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.
* Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.
* Understanding skinny repeal.
* Don’t forget: they win because the system is rigged in their favor. Not that they don’t get a lot of help.
* And yet! Sometimes they don’t. Good for Collins, Murkowski, McCain, and literally every Democrat in Congress, and remember that Trumpcare isn’t truly dead (no matter how many bullets you put in it) until Democrats get a veto point back…
