* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.
* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.
* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?
* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.
* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.
* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.
* The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…
* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.
* Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.
* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!
* Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.
* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?
* How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.
* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.
* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.
* The Making of the American Gulag.
* 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.
* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.
* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.
* Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.
* Beware the climate pragmatists.
Capitalism collapses every 10 or 15 years and has essentially summoned a climate meteor to wipe out all life on earth, and people are literally staring at the abyss of human extinction like "its the only system that works."
— Jeremiah Red
(@_Floodlight) October 10, 2019
(@_Floodlight) * Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.
* A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.
* Understanding the professional-managerial class.
* Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.
* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.
* Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.
* Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.
* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.
Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.
• lied in wait in the Earth's crust for literally millions of years
• made from the dead bodies of creatures nobody in recorded history has ever seen alive
• almost immediately granted us advanced technology—
Peryton's Shadow
(@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019
Peryton's Shadow 
(@YseultCeirw) • naturally occurring, yet has a scent incomparable to any other natural substance
• pitch black liquid
• kills anything it touches
• using it to make anything kills everything it DOESN'T touch, but very slowly
• inexplicably addictive to the money-poisoned—
Peryton's Shadow
(@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019
• Is the cause of the mass extinction event we're currently experiencing, and that 95% of people are completely unaware of or outright deny.
—
Peryton's Shadow
(@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019
* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.
* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.