In a little over a week I start teaching three classes at the University of Pittsburgh that I am greatly looking forward to: two sections of Narrative and Technology (ENGLIT 0399; class blog here), and a brand new upper-division course that I designed for English Majors that fulfills an historical period requirement: Postmodern Literature (ENGLIT 1350). I am quite excited about both classes.
Archival Pedagogy
On the Death of Robin Williams and Other Links
Nuclear and Environment
Sarah Stillman, “Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma.”
McKenzie Wark, “Critical Theory After the Anthropocene.”
International
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, “Ebola and the Fiction of Quarantine.”
Leigh Phillips, “The Political Economy of Ebola.” “Ebola won’t be solved, because it isn’t profitable to do so.”
The Salaita Affair and Other Links (and New Involvement in Iraq)
There have been many responses by notable people to the Steven G. Salaita issue. Corey Robin has a ton of links on the issue, including a tweet by Glenn Greenwald, and a piece by Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Former president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has written an open letter to Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Phyllis Wise. Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors, has written a piece defending Wise’s decision. Some background on Nelson. John K. Wilson has criticized UIUC in “Fighting the Twitter Police.” Sarah T. Roberts, “Steven Salaita: The University of Illinois is not an Island.” And here’s a recent piece by Salaita himself on academic freedom, “The Definition of Academic Freedom, for Many, Does Not Accommodate Dissent.”
In other news:
Dwight Garner seems to think that David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot may be the book of the summer in “Maybe There’s a Whole Other Internet.”
In hyperarchival news, Monte Reel reports on “The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records.”
And I’m starting to get the itch for the new semester:
Joshua Rothman, “What College Can’t Do.”
“Rogeting: Why ‘Sinister Buttocks’ Are Creeping into Students’ Essays.”
And, just breaking, President Obama has announced that he has authorized airstrikes and humanitarian aid in Iraq. The Washington Post has a transcript of the announcement.
“Literally” Two-Thousand Fourteen Links
Nuclear and Environment
US War Department’s Archival Footage of the Bombing of Hiroshima.
H. Bruce Franklin, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, American Militarism,” a review of Paul Ham‘s Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath.
Mark Strauss, “Federal Employee Gets Fired After Writing an Article Criticizing Nukes.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: Warming Responsible for Siberia’s Mysterious Hole.”
August Links
Its been a couple weeks since I’ve posted any links, so there’s a bunch of stuff here.
Disaster, Nuclear, Environment, and Deep Futures
John Oliver on America’s Insecure Nuclear Arsenal.
Willie Osterweil, “The End of the World as We Know It.” On the reactionary politics in ancient apocalypse films.
Josh Marshall, “Disaster Porn, For Once for Real.”
Ross Andersen, “When We Peer Into the Fog of the Deep Future What Do We See–Human Extinction or a Future Among the Stars?”
Radical eco-nihilism. Wen Stephenson, “‘I Withdraw’: A Talk with Climate Defeatist Paul Kingsnorth.”
Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.”
Mark Strauss, “Space Junk Is Becoming a Serious Security Threat.”
Robert T. Gonzalez, “Bad News: Scientists Have Measured 16-Foot Waves in the Arctic Ocean.”
Nadia Prupis, “‘There Will Be No Water’ by 2040? Researchers Urge Global Energy Paradigm Shift.”
Slow Learning and Other Links
Environment and Disaster
George Dvorsky, “A Dramatic 260 Foot Crater Has Mysteriously Appeared in Siberia.”
National Security State
Sue Halpern, “NSA Surveillance: What the Government Can’t See.”
Tom Engelhardt, “The New American Exceptionalism: An Imperial State Unable to Impose Its Will.” (This only shares a title with Donald E. Pease‘s excellent book of the same name, The New American Exceptionalism.)
H. Bruce Franklin, “America’s Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War.”
Jeffrey Frank, “Obama’s Unwritten History.”
Xeni Jardin, “NSA Sees Your Nude Pix ‘as Fringe Benefits of Surveillance Positions,’ Says Snowden.”
July Links
(It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted links, so some of this is already pretty dated, but heck . . it’s also been a jam-packed couple of weeks in the news.)
Nuclear
Nina Strochlic, “Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City.”
Forthcoming book: Fabienne Colignon’s Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination.
Environment
Lindsay Abrams, “The Ocean Is Covered in a Lot Less Plastic Than We Thought–and That’s a Bad Thing.”
James West, “What You Need to Know About the Coming Jellyfish Apocalypse.”
Brad Plumer, “Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic Linked to Wastewater Disposal.”
Atomurbia and Other Links
Environment
Bill McKibben, “Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?”
Paul Krugman, “The Big Green Test: Conservatives and Climate Change.”
Science
What I’ve been speculating about for years now: physicists are saying consciousness is a state of matter.
The Hubble has seen a star eat another star.
Economics
Benjamin Kunkel’s long review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Quantum Data Teleportation and Other Science Fictions (Links)
Hyperarchival
Adrienne LaFrance, “The US Army Says It Can Teleport Quantum Data Now, Too.”
Joe Veix, “Top Tweets from the CIA.”
Adrienne LaFrance, “The Promise of a New Internet” and “Facebook is Expanding the Way It Tracks You and Your Data.”
Robinson Meyer, “Google Owns a Satellite Now.”
According to Tim Parks, in “Reading: The Struggle,” it is really hard to read today. I wish someone would talk to me before making such claims. . . .
Andrew Leonard, “Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Vision of the Future is Terrifying.”
And some good news in hyperarchivalism: the entire Jade Tree catalog just became available for streaming. Avail, Cap’n Jazz, Denali, Jets to Brazil, Lifetime, Milemarker, Pedro the Lion, The Promise Ring, These Arms Are Snakes, The Turing Machine, et cetera. My youth in miniature.
Notes from the Anthropocene: Insuring the Apocalypse and Other Links
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.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 