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.
Author: Bradley J. Fest
NY Times Reviews Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control
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.”
More Bleeding Edge Reviews and The Crisis in the Humanities
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.)
Carolyn Kellogg Reviews Bleeding Edge for the LA Times
My friend Carolyn Kellogg has a review of Bleeding Edge in the Los Angeles Times, “Thomas Pynchon Meets 9/11 in Bleeding Edge.”
Really Quite Weird Bleeding Edge Promotional Video
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).
The New York Times Reviews Bleeding Edge
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.)
Patrick Jagoda’s “Gamification and Other Forms of Play”
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.
Labor Day Links
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.”
Post-Apocalyptic Archive
Forthcoming Interview with J. Hillis Miller
I’m pleased to say that over the summer I had the wonderful opportunity to interview esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller, and that the interview will be published soon in boundary 2.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 