Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 29: July 16–August 15, 2022

This is the last volume in my “Links in the Time of Coronavirus” series. This is for a few reasons. First and foremost, a new academic year is about to start, and I know I’m going to be busy (especially this coming semester), will again fall behind with posting regularly, and would like to return to putting up just four(ish) link posts per year (one each season: e.g., “Fall 2022 Links”). This will also allow me to be more selective and less encyclopedic in my links and to worry less about capturing the full “fabric” of events as I perceive them (from my obviously limited and privileged subject position). Second, as the CDC has just (quite controversially) considerably reduced COVID-19 guidelines—with the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Greta Massetti saying: “‘This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,'” adding later that: ‘”We know that COVID 19 is here to stay,'”—it seems as good a point as ever, considering these links began on the occasion of an official body (the World Health Organization) declaring a global pandemic, to stop this series.

For no matter how much we may disagree with the CDC’s decision, Massetti’s latter point seems pretty clearly the case at this point, that COVID-19 is here to stay, and it is this point in particular that has made me to decide to cease grouping my links as part of the “time of coronavirus” series. It appears that there will never now not be a time of coronavirus; from here on out any links I post will always be “in the time of coronavirus.” (When I imagine keeping this series going until we might say it is “not” the time of coronavirus—such a prospect is dauntingly disheartening.) Let me be clear, however: my decision to discontinue this series has nothing to do with thinking that the pandemic is “over,” only that it appears to have made a shift to something that—woefully, unfortunately, perhaps criminally—is just part of the fabric of being human in the twenty-first century; it has become a fact of our lives no matter how much we wish it had all gone differently, wish that we lived in a world/country with a functioning healthcare system and a greater agreement about scientific facts, with a greater capacity to care for each other, to wear masks, to get vaccinated, etc. But we didn’t, we don’t. The current point the pandemic has reached, this point of ubiquity, of defeatism, of “normalization,” of the fact that COVID-19 rarely dominates headlines in this time of search warrants and climate bills, means that it is now time, at least for my practice of putting up links, to move them to another position, another standpoint. See you in “Fall 2022 Links.”


Nuclear and Environmental

Emily Cochrane, “Senate Passes Climate, Health and Tax Bill, with All Republicans Opposed.”

Jack Ewing and Ivan Penn, “Climate Bill ‘Transformative’ for Auto and Energy Industries.”

Kate Aronoff, “Congress Is about to Pass a Historic Climate Bill. So Why Are Oil Companies Pleased?”

Paul Krugman, “Did Democrats Just Save Civilization?”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 23: January 16–February 15, 2022

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Nuclear and Environmental

Henry Fountain, “An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten.”

Jacob Blumenfeld, “Climate Barbarism: Adapting to a Wrong World.”

Joshua Rothman, “Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?”


Ukraine

The New York Times, “Moscow Is Pessimistic about Reaching Accord with US on Ukraine, but Talk Continues.”

Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, “US Battles Putin by Disclosing His Next Possible Moves.”

And Max Fisher, “On Ukraine, US, and Russia Wage Signaling War to Avert Actual War.”


Coronavirus

Apoorva Mandavilli, “Yes, Omicron Is Loosening Its Hold. But the Pandemic Has Not Ended.”

Steven Kurutz, “Too Young to Feel So Old.”

Alexander Provan, “The Great Equalizer” (from June 2020).

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 20: October 16–November 15, 2021

Nuclear and Environmental (and Apocalyptic)

Alex Traub, “Sunao Tsuboi, 96, Dies; Hiroshima Victim Who Lived to Tell His Story.”

Abigail Curtis, “Every Year, They Hike to Remember the Day the Rapture Didn’t Happen.”


Coronavirus

Shane O’Neill, “Is It Just Us or Does Everyone Have a Cold Right Now?”


Politics and National Security State

Jim Tankersley, “Biden Signs Infrastructure Bill, Promoting Benefits for Americans.”

Carol Rosenberg, “US Military Jury Condemns Terrorist’s Torture and Urges Clemency.”

Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt, “How the US Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria.”

Katie Benner, “Steve Bannon Turns Himself in on Contempt of Congress Charges.”


Hyperarchival

Ian Bogost, “The Metaverse Is Bad.”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 17: July 16–August 15, 2021

(A little late on this one, but August has been quite busy, both personally and professionally.)


Nuclear and Environmental

Brad Plumer and Henry Fountain, “A Hotter Future Is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us.”

Naomi Klein, “Stuck in the Smoke as Billionaires Blast Off.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “June 2021 Was the Hottest June on Record for the US.”

Oliver Milman, “US Set for Punishing Temperatures as Huge ‘Heat Dome’ to Settle over Country.”

Ezra Klein, “It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn.”

Liza Featherstone, “How to Live in a Burning World without Losing Your Mind.”

Kat Aronoff, “Playing Nice With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Climate Denial.”

Katy Lederer and Julian Brave Noisecat, “Infrastructure, Infrastructure! An Interview with Julia Brave NoiseCat.”

Deanna K. Kreisel, “A Deadly Fart That Will Kill Us All: On Climate Grief.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, “Remembering Climate Change . . . a Message from the Year 2071.”

Zach St. George, “He Wrote a Gardening Column. He Ended Up Documenting Climate Change.”

Jonathan Foley, “Seven Reasons Why Artificial Carbon Removal Is Overhyped.”

And Call for Applications: Fellowships at Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) 2022-23.

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 16: June 16–July 15, 2021

Heat Dome over Pacific Northwest, Summer 2021

Nuclear and Environmental

Kai Heron, “Extinction Isn’t the Worst That Can Happen.”

Christopher Flavelle and Kalen Goodluck, “Dispossessed, Again: Climate Change Hits Native Americans Especially Hard.”

Sarah Miller, “All the Right Words on Climate Have Already Been Said.”

Brad Plumer, Jack Healy, Winston Choi-Schagrin, and Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Batters the West before Summer Even Begins.”

Jeffrey Insko, “Line 5: Dismantling as World-Building” and “How to Dream beyond Oil.”

Jon Hay, review of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, by Jessica Hurley.

James Temple, “The Lurking Threat to Solar Power’s Growth.” Hmm.

Dan Egan, “The Climate Crisis Haunts Chicago’s Future: A Battle between a Great City and a Great Lake.”

Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology.

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 13: March 16–April 15, 2021

Map-of-Ships-Going-around-Cape-of-Good-Hope (1)

Nuclear and Environmental

Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin, “On the Ethics of Impossibility.”

Steven Watts, review of Infrastructures of Apocalypse, by Jessica Hurley.

Rebecca S. Oh, “Apocalyptic Realism: ‘A New Category of the Event.'”

Amy Brady, “Telling Tales of Climate Collapse: Novelists Weigh In.”

Patrick Kingsley, David E. Sanger, and Farnaz Fassihi, “After Nuclear Site Blackout, Thunder from Iran, and Silence from US.”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 12: February 16–March 15, 2021

This is the twelfth entry in my Links in the Time of Coronavirus series (?), marking a year since the beginning of the pandemic. And whether it was because the semester started again and I’m teaching three classes (and so I have had less time to “surf the internet” [i.e., despairingly look at my phone because there’s nothing else to do]) or because the first full month of the Biden administration was just, um, less filled with news, or whether we’ve reached a holding pattern with regard to the pandemic—just waiting for the number of vaccinated people to increase—there are fewer links here than at probably any point in the last twelve months. As such, I thought I’d start with a section that is usually down the page a bit. Less timely, perhaps, but there were lots of interesting things published over the past month:

Theory and Criticism

Kelly Horan, “More Heart, Less Darkness,” review of Love’s Shadow, by Paul A. Bové.

boundary 2 Editorial Collective, “Does Attention to Language Matter Anymore? Philology, Translation, Criticism.”

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “On Cosmopolitanism and the Love of Literature: Revisiting Harold Bloom through His Final Books.”

Gerry Canavan, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”

Mark McGurl, “Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle.”

Jane Hu, “Said by Said.”

David Kurnick, “Queer Theory and Literary Criticism’s Melodramas.”

Martin Hägglund, “Marx, Hegel, and the Critique of Religion: A Response.”

Étienne Balibar, “Politics and Science: One Vocation or Two?”

Len Gutkin, “We’re Off to the Method Wars.”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 11: January 16–February 15, 2021

General Think Pieces and Poems

Lawrence Wright, “The Plague Year.”

Naomi Klein, “The Meaning of The Mittens: Five Possibilities” and “How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation.”

Irene Butter, “I Witnessed the Rise of Nazism Firsthand. We Must Act Now to Protect American Democracy.”

Charles Yu, Mike Jaccarino, A. S. Hamrah, Eileen Myles, Judith Martin, Olivia Laing, Yinka Elujoba, Lauren Oyler, Jane Hu, Liane Carlson, David Owen, Christian Lorentzen, and Christopher Beha, “Life after Trump.”

Micah Uetricht, “Amid the Wildfires: Mike Davis’s Forecast for the Left.”

Eric Reinhart, “Pandemicity without Pandemic: Political Responsibility in the Exponential Present.”

Jericho Brown, “Inaugural.”

Dan Rather, “A Moment of Reckoning.”

Kyle Chayka, “How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted.”

Adam Serwer, “An Incompetent Authoritarian Is Still a Catastrophe.”

Susan B. Glasser, “Obituary for a Failed Presidency.”

Tim Naftali, “The Worst President in History.”

Christian Lorentzen, “I Need Money,” review of Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden, by Branko Marcetic.

Paul Musgrave, “America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents.”

Matt Johnson, “Will the US Ever Recover from Trump?”

David Roth, “The March of American Kooks.”

Molly Crabapple, “Molly Crabapple on New York City Before—and One Day, After—COVID-19.”

Paul Rosenberg, “‘A Moment of Moral and Political Nihilism’: Theologian Adam Kotsko on Our Current Crisis.”

Michael Hardt, “War by Other Means.”

Lauren Russell, “Poetry for the Moment.”

Julia Barajas, “How a Twenty-Two-Year-Old LA Native Became Biden’s Inauguration Poet.”

Alexandra Alter, “Amanda Gorman Captures the Moment, in Verse.”

Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin, “The Poetry of the Future.”

The Editors of n + 1, “The Politics Trump Made: A Reading List.”

George T. Conway III, “Donald Trump’s New Reality.”

And (re-upping) David Roth, “The President of Blank Sucking Nullity.”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 5: July 16–August 15, 2020

Black Lives Matter

Ishmael Reed, “America’s Criminal Justice System and Me.”

Anthony Bogues, “Black Lives Matter and the Moment of the Now.”

Colin Dayan, “Police Power and Can’t Breathe.”

Dwight Garner, “Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ about Our Abiding Sin.”

Jane Hu, “The Second Act of Social-Media Activism.”

Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab Protesters off Portland Streets.”

Shane Harris, “DHS Compiled ‘Intelligence Reports’ on Journalists Who Published Leaked Documents.”

Ken Klippenstein, “The Border Patrol Was Responsible for an Arrest in Portland.”

Katie Shepherd and Mark Berman, “‘It Was Like Being Preyed upon’: Portland Protesters Say Federal Officers in Unmarked Vans Are Detaining Them.”

Charlie Warzel, “50 Nights of Unrest in Portland.”

Conrad Wilson, Dirk Vanderhart, and Suzanne Nuyen, “Oregon Sues Federal Agencies for Grabbing up Protesters off the Streets.”

Gillian Flaccus, “Judge Blocks US Agents from Arresting Observers in Portland.”

Richard Read, “Out of Portland Tear Gas, an Apparition Emerges, Capturing the Imagination of Protesters.”

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