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?”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 