Quick Hits

• An excellent round of up Abagail Nussbaum's posts on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, my favourite and, in my opinion, the best of the Treks, and one of the most thoughtful treatments of religion on a sci-fi show that I've seen (eat your heart out, Battlestar Galactica).
• The .DOC File of Alfred J Prufock, by copperbadge. One of the many examples of why the internet is one of my favourite things. Be sure to check the comments for the William Carlos Wilson version of a thank you comment.
• Courtesy of a friend in the department who knows me quite well, The Anthropology of Hackers in The Atlantic. Love the syllabus-as-article format, and I think the use of both Martha Nussbaum and the concept of spectacle in a class on hackers is fantastic. I wish more classes on trendy-techy subjects would reach back for help from their intellectual predecessors.
• An excellent collection of links commenting on the most recent iteration of RaceFail/Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM. If you don't know RaceFail, the two previous links give you more information than you could get through in a month, but suffice to say it was the moment fandom confronted race head on and changed the discussion in a challenging, often infuriating and heartbreaking way. Suffice to say that this iteration starts in the same place, and that middle-to-big name professional sci-fi and fantasy writers should take a long hard look at themselves before they decide to pontificate on entire groups of people.
• Re-imagine Music is releasing a tribute album to Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home on October 5th. It has Julie Doiron, Ane Brun, The Morning Benders, Sea Wolf, and Laura Veirs. I'm practically oozing anticipation.
• Immanuel Kant attack ad (I know enough about Kant to know that it's funny. Which is very little indeed):