Nuclear and National Security State

Mark Strauss, “Failed Nuclear Weapons Recycling Program Could Put Us All in Danger.”

Lauren Gambino, “New York Review of Books Slams CIA with Twitter Attack.”

 

Climate Change

It’s sad that we even see articles like this one. Allison Kopicki, “Is Global Warming Real? Most Americans Say Yes.” Argh.

Lori Montgomery, “In Norfolk, Evidence of Climate Change Is in the Streets at High Tide.”

Paul Krugman: it’s not big business lobbying against environmental protections, it’s ideology, stupid!

International Politics

My friend John Wagner Givens on “The 25th Anniversary of Tiananmen and the Chinese Dream.”

Sam Gindin, “Unmaking Global Capitalism” at Jacobin.

 

Hyperarchival

I’m sad I didn’t know about this: Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani on the Radical Archives Conference at New York University.

Unpacking the library. Wow, I somehow forgot that Walter Benjamin did radio broadcasts, but Verso is set to release a new volume transcribing those broadcasts in October.

Bookstores will not, cannot die! Sarah Butler, “Foyles Pins Hopes on Old-Fashioned Books with New Literary Temple.”

John Oliver on net neutrality.

Gerry Canavan on unpacking Octavia Butler’s archive at the Los Angeles Review of Books (he’s the first scholar to see some of this material!). A two parter: “Knowing No One’s Listening: Octavia Butler’s Unexpected Stories” and “‘There’s Nothing New / Under the Sun, / But There Are New Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables.”

Welcome our new AI overlords! Pranav Dixit, “A Computer Program Has Passed the Turing Test for the First Time.” Wait a minute. . . . Well, even glancing through the article, it’s clear that, well, saying this computer “passed the Turing Test” is stretching it. Mike Masnick heartily agrees in “No, a ‘Supercomputer’ Did NOT Pass the Turing Test for the First Time and Everyone Should Know Better.”

Jillian Steinhauer, “Study Finds We Prefer Art Made by Individuals Over Collectives.”

 

US Literature and Culture

N. Katherine Hayles and others appeared on NPR last week to talk about videogames.

My friend Ryan Pierson, “Orange Is the New Black Is the New ‘Brute Force’: Prison Melodrama and Network Aesthetics.”

April Bernard on Orange Is the New Black, “Caged Laughter.”

This should be very interesting: Darren Aronofsky is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy as an HBO series. Look out Game of Thrones. . . .

Critical Inquiry just started a new book review section. There are already some interesting reviews up, like Patrick Jagoda reviewing José van Dijck’s The Culture of Connectivity, and Ursula K. Heise’s review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. (That said, I was much more impressed by Hyperobjects than was Heise, and think it was one of the more important recent books I’ve read recently.)

More from the 1990s (sorta): Sarah Gray, “Watch: These Teens Are Horrified by ’90s Internet.” Indeed, ’90s internet was horrifying.

 

Humanities and Higher Education

Benjamin Winterhalter, “The Morbid Fascination With the Death of the Humanities.”

Thomas Frank, “Colleges Are Full of It: Behind the Three-Decade Scheme to Raise Tuition, Bankrupt Generations, and Hypnotize the Media.”

David Francis Mihalyfy, “Higher Ed’s For Profit Future” at Jacobin.

And Rebecca Schuman is not happy with Slavoj Žižek’s pedagogy: “Please Stop Worshipping the Super Star Professor Who Calls Students ‘Boring Idiots.'” For all Schuman’s incisive and important writing recently, I feel she has missed the point here.