It’s been a busy month, and a there’s a bunch of stuff to catch up on, so links:
Disaster and Environment
David Roberts, “The Awful Truth about Climate Change No One Wants to Admit.”
Sarah Resnick, “A Note on the Long Tomorrow.”
Phil Plait, “Jovian Armageddon +20.”
Jamie Lauren Keiles, “Millennial Revenge Fantasy.”
“Texas Governor Signs Law to Prohibit Local Fracking Bans.”
Maureen McHugh, David Rieff, Benjamin Kunkel, Joseph McElroy, Srikanth Reddy, and Ted Nelson: “Speculations Archive: Overextending Ourselves.”
Politics
“Media Blackout over Massive Police Brutality Protests in Baltimore.”
Jon Swaine, Paul Lewis, and Oliver Laughland, “Troops Roll into Baltimore as Obama Urges US to Start ‘Soul Searching.'”
Alexis C. Madrigal, “These Are the Most Striking Pictures of the Freddie Gray Protests in Baltimore.”
Radical Faggot, “In Support of Baltimore: or; Why Smashing Police Cars Is a Logical Political Strategy.”
David Simon, “Baltimore.”
Pablo Iglesias, “The Left Can Win.”
President Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
National Security State
Seymour M. Hersh, “The Killing of Osama bin Laden.”
Elias Isquith, “The Vindication of Edward Snowden: How a New Court Decision Cements the Whistle-Blower’s Legacy.”
Seth Stevenson, “Grim Carnival: The Baffling Reasoning of the Jury That Just Sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Death.”
Zach Blas, Face Cages (2013-15).
Hyperarchival
Ashleigh Kane, “Cybernetics and the Post-Surveillance Age.”
Daniel Peterson, “One Hundred Thousand Landscapes.”
Joe Fassler, “Writing Should Be a Continued Exploration,” an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski about, among other things, his twenty-seven volume novel, The Familiar (2015- ).
Literature and Culture
William Pierce, “Reality Hunger: The Six Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Part III.”
Seth Colter Walls, “What Philip Glass Learned from Samuel Beckett.”
Matthew Schniper, “Fight Club 2: The Return of Tyler Durden.”
Kimberly Joki, “Jane Austen’s Fight Club: No Corsets. No Hat Pins. And No Crying”:
Veronica Fitzpatrick, “Meditations in an Emergency: The Final Episodes of Mad Men.”
Emily Nussbaum, “The Original, Resonant, Existentially Brilliant Mad Men Finale.”
Lili Loufbourow and Phillip Maciak, “Mad Men: Season 7: ‘Time and Life.'”
“Mad Men and the Coke Jingle Theory.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, “Mad Men Finale: I’m Okay, You’re Okay.”
Jon Teti, “Mad Men: ‘Person to Person.'”
Marc Campbell, “The Mind-Meltingly Brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road Gives Cinema a Shock to the System.”
Sean Nelson, “Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Greatest Film of Its Kind Ever Made.”
David Perry, “Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For.”
Armond White, “All Sound and Fury Road, Signifying Nothing.” (Perhaps the only negative review of Mad Max: Fury Road, and is it any surprise it’s coming from the conservative National Review?)
Sadie Doyle, “Age of Robots: How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie.”
Raffi Khatchadourian, “World without End: Creating a Full-Size Digital Cosmos,” on No Man’s Sky (forthcoming).
Melissa Locker, “David Lynch Is Headed to Twin Peaks (Again).”
“Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Is a Columbia Student and Teacher.”
K. Silem Mohammad with Jeff Dolven, “Psychoanalytic Night at Hooters.”
Christopher Bollen, “A Very British Crime Scene: At Home with Agatha Christie.”
Thomas Frick, “An [Old] Interview with J. G. Ballard.”
Alexandra Levit, “Make Way for Generation Z.”
Chris Miller, “Why the Kremlin Reads Žižek.”
Slavoj Žižek on West Side Story.
Jack Hamilton, “How Bill Simmons Changed Sports Writing.”
Albert Burneko, “Bill Simmons Is a Shitty Writer.”
Steven Craig Hickman, Dark Ecologies: The Carnival Edge of Post-Humanism.
The first page of Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming Purity.
Paul Blest, “How Bernie Sanders Shaped the Northeast Punk Scene.”
Martin Woessner, “Brave NewWorlds,” review of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema, by Daniel Yacavone.
Eli Blasko, “Taylor Baldwin, Eutopia.”
Kevin Frances and Taylor Baldwin, “A Conversation between Kevin Frances and Taylor Baldwin.”
Rachel Wetzler, “The Reality TV Novel: Goldin and Senneby’s Headless also Lacks a Soul, but That’s Probably the Point.”
Reagan Arthur, Bonnie Nadell, Ethan Nosowsky, and Carolyn Kellogg, “Panel Discussion on Publishing.”
Nina Sabak, “A Lively, Hospitable Place for Poetry,” review of Rattle, no. 47 (Spring 2015).
Lee Konstantinou, “A Theory of Here.”
“National Poetry Month and Robin Clarke.”
And I directed an incredible independent study this spring: Sarah Lane‘s Chick Fight: The Battle Against Oppression and Inequality (2015), a feminist board game. Check it out. Support it. Buy it here. Play it. It’s amazing.
Geoffrey Glover and Bradley J. Fest playing Sarah Lane’s Chick Fight (18 April 2015).
Humanities and Higher Education
Todd Gitlin, “You Are Here to Be Disturbed: A Plague of Hypersensitivity“: “The unwritten contract of university education: I am here to be disturbed.”
Matt Stromberg, “Entire First-Year MFA Class Drops Out in Protest at the University of Southern California.”
Mark Bauerlein, “What’s the Point of a Professor?”
Scott Eric Kaufman, “‘Academia Is the Titanic’: Mark Bauerlein on Teaching in the Morally-bankrupt Grind of the New American University.”
The Tattooed Professor, “I Will Not Be Lectured To. I’m Too Busy Teaching.”
2015-2016 has been declared the “Year of the Humanities” at the University of Pittsburgh.
Andrew Hartman, “How Austerity Killed the Humanities.”
Jedediah Purdy, “Ayn Rand Comes to University of North Carolina.”
Deborah M. Todd, “Carnegie Mellon University Summit Encourages Creativity for the Common Good.”
Christy Wampole, “The Conference Manifesto.”
Vimal Patel, “The PhD Pay Gap.”
David Wescott, “Survival of the Fittest in the English Department.”
David J. McCowin, “An Adjunct’s Farewell.”
Hamilton Nolan, “Professor Failed the Whole Class.”
Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen, The Elements of F*cking Style: A Helpful Parody.
“Professor Deeply Hurt by Student’s Evaluation.”
Pittsburgh
Nicole Davis, “Could the Next Brooklyn Be Pittsburgh?”
Jon Schmitz, “Better Fiscal Health Leads Port Authority to Add Service.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 