Richard Schiffman reported in The Atlantic today that “time is running out to put the brakes on the planet’s warming, says arguably the most exhaustively researched scientific paper in history,” in “What Leading Scientists Say You Should Know About Today’s Frightening Climate Report.” Thanks to my sister-in-law for drawing my attention to this. And also to my brother for being instrumental building the satellite that brings us this image.
In a publication that my home receives regularly (but I tend not to really glance at, being the non-culinary member of my household), Bon Appétit has an article on food in Thomas Pynchon’s novels written by Nicole Villeneuve: “All the Food in Thomas Pynchon’s Books (And What It Means, Sorta).” (That said, this article is mighty short, and I cannot imagine that this is all the food in Pynchon’s novels and stories. . . . I bet the Pynchon Wiki would be of help here. Indeed, even just a quick search of “food” in Mason & Dixon [1997] returns over five-hundred hits. I also wonder if anyone has seriously ever tried to make Pirate Prentice’s famous banana breakfast?)
I have refrained from posting about Syria and the US sabre-rattling in response to chemical weapons attacks both because it would probably be hard to miss in the news and because the situation seems a bit too complex to treat in either a short post or by posting a number of links. But it looks like the US, Russia, and Syria have reached a diplomatic solution, at least according to the BBC. I am a bit surprised and considerably relieved to hear this. Having come of age during the 2000s, I thought such middle-of-the-road compromises, whether between the US and other nations, or within the US gov’t itself, were patently impossible. Obviously this is more complicated than being a simple “solution,” but man, it doesn’t sound like the US will be dropping bombs after announcing that it would/might in this instance, and that is certainly something new in my adult life.
Eric Schlosser’s new book about the many near misses with nuclear explosions that occurred throughout the Cold War, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, has received an interesting review in The New York Times. Walter Russell Mead treats it at length in “Atomic Gaffes.”
This month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine has a lengthy and interesting review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge by Joshua Cohen (article link requires subscription), and an interesting take on the crisis in the humanities (something this blog has posted frequently on this last summer) in Thomas Frank’s monthly column, “Easy Chair,” titled, “Course Corrections.” Frank nicely summarizes many of the issues facing humanists and the humanities today, and ends with a fairly bold call: “The world doesn’t need another self-hypnotizing report on why universities exist. What it needs is for universities to stop ruining the lives of their students [financially]. Don’t propagandize for your institutions, professors: Change them. Grab the levers of power and pull.” (On a semi-related note I’m happy to report that my own current department looks like it is doing just that.)
My friend Carolyn Kellogg has a review of Bleeding Edge in the Los Angeles Times, “Thomas Pynchon Meets 9/11 in Bleeding Edge.”
John Williams for The New York Times has reported on a promotional video released by Penguin Press for Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming Bleeding Edge (2013).
Here is a link to Michiko Kakutani’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013) from The New York Times. Bleeding Edge comes out next Tuesday. (Here’s to hoping Amazon gets me my pre-ordered copy a day or two early.)
boundary 2 has made the entirety of Patrick Jagoda‘s recently published essay, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” freely available online. This is an excellent article, and I was actually already planning on providing it to the students of my current Narrative and Technology class. For anyone interested in video games, and the emerging scholarship and conversation about them, this should be mandatory reading.
Lois Weiner has a very interesting piece in Jacobin, “This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher,” on how teacher’s unions are revitalizing the labor movement.
And there may be a bigger surveillance system then PRISM, as reported on in The New York Times by Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan in “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing the N.S.A.’s.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 