* The “Buffy at 20″ special issue of Slayage is out, with an introduction by me and James South, interviews on the future of Whedon Studies with Rhonda Wilcox and Sherryl Vint, and seven terrific articles by conference attendees on “Restless,” “Normal Again,” Fuffy, Spike, mental health, anger, and the soul. Check it out! I think the interview with Sherryl is especially interesting if I do say so myself, and raises some intriguing questions about the status of Whedon Studies as a discipline going forward: “Whedon Studies after Whedon.”
* CFP: 21st Century Climate Fiction.
* Students Want to Write Well; We Don’t Let Them. We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know.
* Frankie Muniz doesn’t remember the show that made him famous.
* Becoming Anne Frank: Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?
* Here Are the Outrageous Incentives That Losing Cities Offered Amazon for HQ2. How to Stop the Amazon Extortion From Happening Again. Break up Amazon. More and more and more. And of course.
* It still doesn’t even approach the scale of the Foxconn con. Time to check in on the old job creators.
* Indigenous women kept from seeing their newborn babies until agreeing to sterilization, says lawyer. In 2017.
* With illness in shelters and hotels at capacity, wildfire evacuees desperately seek refuge. Made homeless by flames, evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation. California Wildfires Are A Bigger Public Health Nightmare Than Anyone Imagined. Dozens dead, thousands missing.
* Air pollution levels ‘forcing families to move out of cities.’ The Ecological Is Political. What were Ocasio-Cortez and 150 young activists doing in Nancy Pelosi’s office? The Green New Deal. And, you know, for kids: the Civ 6 climate change expansion.
* For First Act in Power, Democrats Consider Making Their Own Agenda Impossible to Pass.
* Silicon Valley’s boosters say it’s an innovative, meritocratic wonderland that rewards brilliant visionaries and just might save the world. That’s nonsense.
* Presenting your attorney general. This is going to be wild. It’s only been like a week.
* “I see this morning we are down to 26 ICE detainees,” Lt. Dan Lindhorst wrote in an email. “Could you please see if you can get these numbers up.”
* Trump spent $200,000,000 on the election stunt of sending 6,000 troops to the border, then withdrew them before the caravan arrived. A steal at twice the price!
* Authorities find a rocket launcher and pipe bombs during massive Florida white supremacist sting. The Great Race Panic. Scary Clowns. Brookings running cover for Bolsonaro, already.
* Essentially every right wing media operation in the country is run at a huge loss while screeching about markets, markets, markets. It’s a truly amazing grift.
* On doctors and guns: staying in your lane.
* Girl, 13, Who Wrote Essay on Gun Violence Is Killed by Stray Bullet.
* Cop not charged, not disciplined, cleared of any wrongdoing and back on the job.
* Is any bit of this legal? The new “Cabinet order” was signed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not President Donald Trump. It allows “Department of Defense military personnel” to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention. and cursory search.”
* When your medicine spies on you. It’s becoming a habit.
* Northern Michigan U. Compensates 4 Who Were Threatened With Punishment for Speaking of Suicide. Bombshell Lawsuit Against Dartmouth. This gay college athlete was disowned by her parents and left with nothing. Just 96 of 30,000 people who applied for public service loan forgiveness actually got it. Stevens Points doomed to repeat it.
* The Gospel According to Mark Fisher.
* Of course Wes Anderson’s curated museum exhibit is full of weird oddities.
* The Reckoning. Children of the apocalypse.
* Facebook Is a Normal Sleazy Company Now. Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Delany, Deny, and Deflect.
* Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’ I don’t know, I think we can beat it.
* The encounter between sovereignty and the natural life of the turkey is thus a failed one, and therein lies the turkey pardon’s messianic promise. The ultimate sovereign prerogative of the presidential pardon falls idle in its application to a subject who is incapable of guilt or innocence. As against the “zone of indistinction” that opens up between law and life in the sovereign exception, here we have a separation of the two orders without any overlap — a law that is inapplicable, and a life that is simply lived, in blissful ignorance of the legal order. In the messianic kingdom, we will all, in a sense, be the pardoned turkey that is left to live out its life in peace.
* brb working on like six different screenplays
* Sports always turns out to be more interesting than I thought.
* I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.
* Hey, Listen! Ocarina of Time, like me, is old. Even more at MetaFilter.
* No other work of art has so beautifully captured the feeling of the Trump years. It was actually a very good night for tweets.
