Spring 2023 Links

Nuclear and Environmental

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960).

Raymond Zhnog, “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.”

Nicholas Kristof, “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.”

Rebecca Solnit, “What If Climate Change Meant Not Doom–But Abundance?”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “It’s Earth Day—and the News Isn’t Good.”

David Wallace-Wells, “Greta Thunberg: ‘The World Is Getting More Grim by the Day.'”

Mark O’Connell, “Our Way of Life Is Poisoning Us.”

Simon Schama, “Simon Schama on the Broken Relationship between Humans and Nature: ‘The Joke’s on Us. Things Are Amiss.'”

Continue reading

2013–2017: Sonnets Will Be Published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024

Fest, Bradley J--Cover for 2013-2017--600 resolution--coverI am absolutely thrilled to announce that 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume of my ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. I’ll update this page with more information when I have it, but for now, here’s a description of the book:

2013–2017: Sonnets is the first volume in Bradley J. Fest’s ongoing sequence of American sonnets, a project concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Continuing the program of poetic assemblage explored in his first two books, these poems were composed consecutively as emergent temporal snapshots documenting certain experiences of what it was like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017. Over the past decade, this ongoing experimental sonnet sequence has become: a complex encounter with time and its twenty-first-century rhythms; a document of artistic maturation; a personal archive of occasions, moments, days; a continually refreshed confrontation with the global computational hyperarchive; a discography of popular music; an extended reflection on contemporary literature, art, and culture; an increasingly multiplex meditation on the sonnet; an historical record of the troubling national situation in the United States; and a work of mourning for a world disappearing into climate emergency. The second volume, currently in progress, begins in 2018.

Also, thanks much to my very good friend Taylor Baldwin for the amazing cover image: The Interpreter (2010).

Fall 2022 Links

12.-JROME-7P9A8927-copy-1024x683

Nuclear and Environmental

Max Bearak, Raymond Zhong, and Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud, “Deadly Floods Devastate an Already Fragile Pakistan.”

Katie Rogers and David E. Sanger, “Biden Calls the ‘Prospect of Armageddon’ the Highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

David Wallace-Wells, “The World Took a Bold, Toothless Step Forward on Climate Justice” and “Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming into View.”

Somini Sengupta, “‘A Reason to Act Faster’: World Leaders Meet on Climate Amid Other Crises.”

Max Bearak, “Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality.”

Brad Plumer, Max Bearak, Lisa Friedman, and Jenny Gross, “UN Climate Talks End with a Deal to Pay Poor Nations for Damage.”

Catrin Einhorn, “Researchers Report a Staggering Decline in Wildlife. Here’s How to Understand It.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 28: June 16–July 15, 2022

main_image_star-forming_region_carina_nircam_final-1280
Nuclear and Environmental

Eric Schlosser, “What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?”

Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Strips Federal Government of Crucial Tool to Control Pollution.”

Zach St. George, “Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?”

Neelan Bohra, “Arizona Wildfire Destroys Observatory Buildings.”

Christopher Flavelle and Julie Tate, “How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions.”


Politics

Max Fisher, “Is the World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?”

Carl Hulse, “Mitch McConnell’s Court Delivers.”

Charlie Savage, “Decades Ago, Alito Laid Out Methodical Strategy to Eventually Overrule Roe.”

Ezra Klein, “Dobbs Is Not the Only Reason to Question the Legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”

Katherine Stewart, “Christian Nationalists Are Excited about What Comes Next.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 27: May 16–June 15, 2022

Nuclear and Environmental

Mitt Romney, “We Must Prepare for Putin’s Worst Weapons.”

United Nations Environment Programme, “In South Asia, Record Heat Threatens Future of Farming.”

Margaret Renkl, “One Way to Do More for the Environment: Do Less With Your Yard.”

Christopher Flavelle, “As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces an ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb.’”

Jonathon Catlin, “Why We Love Disaster Films.”


Coronavirus

Noah Weiland, “White House Outlines Coronavirus Vaccine Plan for Children under Five.”

Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland, “FDA Panel Recommends Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines for Youngest Children.”


Ukraine

Anton Troianovski, “‘They Basically Got Everything Wrong’: A Russian Diplomat Speaks Out on the War.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 26: April 16–May 15, 2022

Politics and Economics

Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, “Supreme Court has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows.”

Roxane Gay, “It’s Time to Rage.”

Matt Gertz, “With Attack on Twitter, the Right Shows It Has Institutionalized Trump’s Corrupt Use of Government Power.”

Anthony Cuthbertson, “NFT Sales Plummet 92% as Market ‘Collapses.'”

David Yaffe-Bellany, Erin Griffith, and Ephrat Livni, “Cryptocurrencies Melt Down in a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Fear and Panic.”

Eric Budish, “The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and Blockchain.”

Nuclear and Environmental

Chris Cameron, “Climate Activist Dies after Setting Himself on Fire at Supreme Court.”

Abrahm Lustgartn, “The Great Climate Migration.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 25: March 16–April 15, 2022

Nuclear and Environmental

Max Fisher, “As Russia Digs In, What’s the Risk of Nuclear War? ‘It’s Not Zero.’”

William J. Broad, “How America Watches for a Nuclear Strike.”

Rod Buntzen, “This Is What It’s Like to Witness a Nuclear Explosion.”

Cara Buckley, “‘OK Doomer’ and the Climate Advocates Who Say It’s Not Too Late.”

Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong, “Stopping Climate Change Is Doable, but Time Is Short, UN Panel Warns.”

John Vidal, “Energy Efficiency Guru Amory Lovins: ‘It’s the Largest, Cheapest, Safest, Cleanest Way to Address the Crisis.'”

Henry Fountain, “In a First, an Ice Shelf Collapses in East Antarctica.”


Ukraine

Jane Burbank, “The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War.”

Malachy Browne, David Botti, and Haley Willis, “Satellite Images Show Bodies Lay in Bucha for Weeks, Despite Russian Claims.”

“‘At Night I Dream of Mariupol’: Nine Accounts of Surviving a Russian Siege.” Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 22: December 16, 2021–January 15, 2022

January 15, 2022

Nuclear and Environmental

Elizabeth Weil, “California’s Forever Fire.”

Bill McKibben, “The Year in Climate.”

Jeff Goodell, “‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All.”

John Levi Barnard, Stephanie Foote, Jessica Hurley, and Jeffrey Insko, eds. “Infrastructures of Emergency,” special issue, part 2, Resilience 8, no. 3 (Fall 2021).

Rebecca Evans, “Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock.”

Jack Healy and Mike Baker, “As Miners Chase Clean-Energy Minerals, Tribes Fear a Repeat of the Past.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 21: November 16–December 15, 2021

Kentucky Tornado 2021

Nuclear and Environmental

The New York Times, “Postcards from a World on Fire.”

Keith Collins, Josh Williams, Denise Lu, “Before and after the Tornado: Devastation in a Historic Neighborhood.”

David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “As China Speeds Up Nuclear Arms Race, the US Wants to Talk.”

Graham Readfearn, “Ocean Scientists Call for Global Tracking of Oxygen Loss That Causes Dead Zones.”

April Anson, “American Apocalyptic: A Conversation with Jessica Hurley.”

Douglas Dowland, review of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: Literature and the Nuclear Complex, by Jessica Hurley.

Matt Williams, “A Sun-Like Star Just Blasted Out a Flare That Would Be Devastating If It Happened Here.”

And Ben Smith, “A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 18: August 16–September 15, 2021

This past fall semester I was teaching three classes and, it seems that whenever I do that, I don’t have time for other things, so the links have fallen away. I will post the backlog over the next few days and hope to be back and current by the fifteenth of December.

Nuclear and Environmental

Jessica Hurley and Jeffrey Insko, “Introduction: The Infrastructure of Emergency” and ed. “The Infrastructure of Emergency,” special issue, American Literature.

Heather Murphy, “Will These Places Survive a Collapse? Don’t Bet on It, Skeptics Say.”

Christian Wessels, “The Garbage of Our Time.”

Dorothy Wickenden, “Kim Stanley Robinson on ‘Utopian’ Science Fiction.”


Coronavirus

New York Times, “COVID Updates: Biden Receives Preliminary Report on Virus Origin.”

Juliette Kayyem, “Vaccine Refusers Don’t Get to Dictate Terms Anymore.”

Continue reading