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.”
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.”
Think Pieces on . . . Everything
Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss.”
Jelani Cobb, “Georgia, Trump’s Insurrectionists, and Lost Causes.”
Mike Davis, “Riot on the Hill” and “Hopes for 2021?”
Blair McClendon, “Lost Lost Causes.”
Adam Kotsko, “An Apocalypse about Nothing.”
Yoni Appelbaum, “How America Ends.”
Gabriel R, “Trump the Despot.”
Franklin Foer, “The Triumph of Kleptocracy.”
William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, “Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol.”
Masha Gessen, “The Trial of Donald Trump Must Tell the Full Story of the Capitol Insurrection.”
Leah Donnella, “How The Storming of the Capitol Was — And Wasn’t — About Police.”
Eric Fretwell, “From Lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the Violence of Revelry.”
I didn’t get a lot of writing done this year, but some of the little I did is out today near its close. I am thrilled and honored to have the first of my pandemic sonnets—“2020.01,” “2020.02,” “2020.03,” “2020.04,” “2020.05,” and “2020.06”—in the online arm of Always Crashing. I also had important poems from the sonnet project, including the “long sonnet” “2016.36: Preface,” out in issue three of Always Crashing earlier this year. Thanks so much to the editors’ ongoing support of my work and this project.
Coronavirus
Sarah Zhang, “The End of the Pandemic Is Now in Sight.”
Katie Thomas, “New Pfizer Results: Coronavirus Vaccine Is Safe and 95% Effective.”
Meredith Wadman, “Fever, Aches from Pfizer, Moderna Jabs Aren’t Dangerous but May Be Intense for Some.”
Zeynep Tufekci, “The Pandemic Heroes Who Gave Us the Gift of Time and Gift of Information.”
Abby Goodnough, “Long-Term-Care Residents and Health Workers Should Get Vaccine First, C.D.C. Panel Says.”
Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, and Noah Weiland, “Trump Administration Officials Passed when Pfizer Offered Months Ago to Sell the US More Vaccine Doses.”
Thomas R. Frieden, “We Know How to Beat COVID-19. We Just Don’t Do It.”
Bruce Robbins, “Return of the Plague.”
“Dead Horse Bay” and “Archives of Winter,” poems from my current ongoing project, Postrock, have been reprinted in Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary, edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan and published by Spuyten Duyvil.
The anthology was originally published online as a special issue of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: “Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.” Other contributors include Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jane Hirshfield, Cynthia Hogue, Angela Hume, Michael McClure, John Shoptaw, Stephanie Strickland, Harriet Tarlo, Edwin Torres, and many, many others.
Coronavirus
Georgina Hayes, “Face Masks Could Be Giving People Covid-19 Immunity, Researchers Suggest.”
Devon Price, “Do You Have ‘Zoom Fatigue’ or Is It Existentially Crushing to Pretend Life Is Normal as the World Burns?”
Eva Hagberg, “The Pandemic Has Remade Friendship.”
And “Cruise Ships Dismantled for Scrap after Pandemic Sinks Industry.”
Black Lives Matter
Inae Oh, “Wisconsin Police Shot Jacob Blake in ‘Broad Daylight.'”
Peter Beaumont, “Kenosha: Teen Charged with Murder after Two Black Lives Matter Protesters Killed.”
Adam Serwer, “The New Reconstruction.”
Jasmyn Wimbish and Jack Maloney, “NBA Protest, Live Updates: Schedule Announced for Resumption of Playoffs on Saturday, Sunday.”
Shams Charania, “Sources: LeBron James Sought Out Barack Obama for Advice to Players.”
Melissa Gira Grant, “Far-Right Militias Are Learning Impunity From the Cops.”
Hallie Golden, Mike Baker, and Adam Goldman, “Suspect in Fatal Portland Shooting Is Killed by Officers During Arrest.”
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.”
Black Lives Matter
Gina Cherelus, “How We Juneteenth.”
Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”
R. H. Lossin, “In Defense of Destroying Property.”
Coronavirus
b2o Review, “COVID-19 Dossier.”
Hortense J. Spillers, “Apocalypse Now and Then.”
Charles Bernstein, “Herd Immunity.”
Nathan L. Grant, “Horseman No. 5.”
The A-Line Editorial Staff, “Convergence 5: Apocalypse Now and Then.”
Adrian Parr, “Pandemic Urbanism.”
Neil Vallelly, “The Coronavirus Decade: Post-capitalist Nightmare or Socialist Awakening?”
Umair Haque, “If Life Feels Bleak, It’s Because Our Civilization Is Beginning to Collapse.”
Hamilton Nolan, “There Is No Plan (For You).”
