Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence: Lily Hay Newman, “Air Force Security Failed a Takeover Drill at a Nuclear Silo.”
Climate Change, Catastrophe, and the Anthropocene
We’re doomed. “A Galaxy Far, Far Away . . . Will Hit Ours.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: The Collapse of Greenland’s Ice Sheet Could Be a Bigger Disaster Than We Thought.”
Ari Phillips, “In Landmark Class Action, Farmers Insurance Sues Local Government for Ignoring Climate Change.” Is that what we need? For the insurance companies to get involved?
Yes. McKenzie Funk, “Insuring the Apocalypse.”
Paul Krugman, “Cutting Back on Carbon.”
On the flooding in the Balkans.
Everything is the worst: Ryan Koronowski, “House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon’s Hands on Climate Change.”
National Security State
Stephen Luntz, “The Pentagon Has a Zombie Apocalypse Emergency Plan.”
Where the US military is in Africa.
And the LAPD is going to use drones.
Hyperarchivalism and the NSA
Glen Greenwald is going to publish a list of everyone the NSA has been spying on.
James Risen and Laura Poitras, “NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images.”
Kate Crawford at The New Inquiry, “The Anxieties of Big Data.”
Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Faking Cultural Literacy.” (I didn’t actually read the whole thing. . . .)
Peter C. Baker, “Reading in an Emergency.”
Why not? Let’s download the brains of the mentally ill.
And some amazing photos of the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Learning.
US Literature and Culture
Something more to add to the class on the 1990s that I want to teach one day. The most ’90s thing ever: Windows 95 and members of the cast of Friends (1994-2004).
More 19990s. Patrick Wensink, “Photos from the Kurt Cobain Crime Scene that Could Be High Art.”
Jennifer Medina, “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm.”
Sarah Shoker, “Economics in Fantasy Literature, or, Why Nerds Really Like Stuff.”
Eudora Welty’s job application to The New Yorker.
The fantastic Priscilla Wald, Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University: “Man vs. Nature is Godzilla‘s Message, Then and Now.”
David Ehrlich, “Godzilla: The First Post-Human Blockbuster.”
Jordan Alexander Stein, “Unfeeling Godzilla.”
Netflix is glitching, creating films that sound fascinating: “Decades after the adventures of the Enterprise crew, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard leads the new Enterprise on missions of trash-talking and deceit.”
(Behind the times.) Just saw a bit of this fascinating game by Jason Rohrer, Sleep is Death (2010). (Thanks Dave.)
And Kevin Durant’s amazing MVP acceptance speech.
Humanities and Higher Education
For all the graduating seniors: David Wong, “6 Ways You’re About to Get Screwed by the Job Market.”
Jacqui Shine, “Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.”
The pedagogy of Slavoj Žižek: “Professor of the Year: ‘If You Don’t Give Me Any of Your Shitty Papers You Get an A.”
Rebbecca Schuman on President Obama’s college ratings plan, on PhD student debt, and her scathing critique of the MLA Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. You can read the original report here.
Miscellaneous
For boundary 2, Alice E. M. Underwood reviews Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen (who also wrote a fabulous and chilling biography of Vladimir Putin).
Local: Pittsburgh
Congratulations to Pamela VanHaitsma (recent University of Pittsburgh PhD in Composition) and Jess Garrity as the first same-sex couple to get married in Allegheny County.
And my old friend Emmy Wildwood just released the first single, “Mean Love,” from the EP of the same name on Tiger Blanket Records. Enjoy.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 
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