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).”
Coronavirus Think Pieces
Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations.”
Jodi Dean, “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”
Ibram X. Kendi, “We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic.”
David Harvey, “We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus.”
Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation, COVID Masks, Revolutionary Collectivity.”
Charles Stross, “It’ll All Be Over by Christmas.”
Laurie Penny, “Productivity Is Not Working.”
Corey Robin, “Comrades.”
Masha Gessen on the present.
I originally intended in late May 2020, when the spring semester was finally over and I had some time to finish “Spring 2020 Links (Pre-COVID-19),” to post one big link dump for coronavirus-related things. But the hyperarchival barrage of news over the past three months, including everything that has happened in the United States the past three weeks (combined with how little time I still have . . .), has made it clear that it would be better to divide posts into smaller, more manageable bits. So here is everything I came across from March 11-April 15, 2020. More to come soon.
Sheri Fink and Mike Baker, “‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the US Coronavirus Response.”
The New York Times, “Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak,” “Coronavirus in the US: Latest Map and Case Count” and “Coronavirus Tips, Advice and Answers to Your New Questions.”
IHME, “COVID-19 Projections.”
Katie Zezima, Joel Achenbach, Tim Craig, and Lena H. Sun, “Coronavirus Is Shutting Down American Life as States Try to Battle Outbreak.”
Coronavirus Think Pieces (General)
Laurie Penny, “This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For.”
Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Capitalism–and How to Beat It.”
Frank Pasquale, “Two Timelines of COVID Crisis.”
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal.”
Anne Applebaum, “The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff.”
Dan Kois, “America Is a Sham.”
A lot of stuff was going on for me this year, both personally and professionally, so I haven’t really had a chance to post links since . . . last summer (!), nine months before the global pandemic was declared. So, to catch up: here’s links from late summer 2019–March 11, 2020 that are, by the very nature of posting them now, rather outdated/anachronistic, a window onto a world that is gone yet still all too present (and excessive), a world that most certainly wasn’t going in the direction of human flourishing and that any nostalgia for may be misplaced. . . . I hope to have “Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 1” up sometime soon(er than nine months from now . . .).
Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say” (February 20, 2020).
Nuclear and Environmental
Mary Hudetz, “US Official: Research Finds Uranium in Navajo Women, Babies.”
David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer, “US Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed Seven Russians.”
Kristin George Bagdanov, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’S ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious.”
Alyssa Battistoni, “Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.”
Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change.”
At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago (January 3-6, 2019), I will be speaking on a round table discussing the New Nuclear Criticism. I have included the information on the panel and a tentative abstract for the paper I will be presenting below. More information about the panel is available at kristingeorgebagdanov.com.
For previous essays of mine on nuclear criticism, see:
““Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive”;
246. New Nuclear Criticism
Friday, January 4, 2019, 10:15 AM–11:30 AM, Hyatt Regency – Randolph 3
The panel is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
Presider: Frances Ferguson, U of Chicago
Presenters: Jada Ach, U of South Carolina, Columbia, Bradley J. Fest, Hartwick C, Jessica Hurley, U of Chicago, Kristin George Bagdanov, U of California, Davis, Kyoko Matsunaga, Kobe City U of Foreign Studies, Inna Sukhenko, U of Helsinki
Session Description: The year 2019 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1984 colloquium at Cornell University on nuclear criticism and the publication of a special issue of Diacritics collecting the Cornell papers. Do we need a new nuclear criticism? Panelists explore what a new nuclear criticism in the context of ecological crisis might look like by drawing on archives, methods, and approaches not previously included in nuclear criticism’s original manifestation.
Jacques Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” at Thirty-Five
Abstract: 2019 will mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1984 colloquium at Cornell University on nuclear criticism and the publication of a special issue of Diacritics collecting its papers. The conference occurred at a historical moment of heightened tension between the United States and the Soviet Union unseen since the chilling days of October 1962. But in the intervening years, which have seen the end of the cold war, a reduction of the US and Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a nuclear treaty with Iran, and waning cultural depictions of global nuclear war, the project of nuclear criticism has seemed less vital and, indeed, at times rather anachronistic. Though significant contributions in the ongoing discussion regarding literature of the first and second nuclear ages have been made by a new generation of scholars such as Paul K. Saint-Amour, John Canady, Daniel Cordle, Daniel Grausam, Jessica Hurley, and others (e.g., the 2013 collection, The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World), and nuclear criticism, for others, has been subsumed under a broader concept of risk criticism inspired by the thinking of Ulrich Beck (e.g., the work of Ursula K. Heise and Paul Crosthwaite’s collection, Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative [2011]), most would agree that literary and critical engagements with the threat of nuclear war have taken a back seat to more pressing global concerns, particularly the realities of climate change and the emergence of the Anthropocene as an important cross-disciplinary concept for understanding the present.
It seems apparent, however, that in the dark days since November 2016, literary and cultural theorists must once again confront the issue(s) of global (and limited) nuclear war and the cultural, political, economic, and social conditions that allow the persistence of what Elaine Scarry has called a “thermonuclear monarchy” in the US, particularly as this power now rests in such unpredictable hands. So the time is ripe to not only revisit the concept of nuclear criticism, as this panel proposes to do, but one of its most important, founding documents: Jacques Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives” (1984).
This paper will reconsider Derrida’s seminal text in light of two major transformations. First, I will track and assess what Derrida calls the “nuclear referent,” particularly as it has found its way into twenty-first-century depictions of ecological disaster, representations I will suggest have now reinscribed themselves in the contemporary cultural imagination of nuclear war. Second, I will again take seriously “No Apocalypse, Not Now”’s emphasis on the fabulous textuality of nuclear war and its threat to the archive, particularly in light of the dissemination and proliferation of new exceptionalist national fantasies via the internet visible in “fake news” and the resurgence of US nationalism. This paper will argue that Derrida’s essay–and nuclear criticism more broadly–considered at the intersection of these two cultural transformation, might provide us with reinvigorated tools for confronting the new nuclear realities of contemporaneity.
Nuclear and Environmental
Fourth National Climate Assessment.
Deconstructed, “Will the US Ever Give Up Its Nukes?”
“Trump Says US Will Withdraw from Nuclear Deal with Russia.”
Wilfred Wan, “The Nuclear Threat Is Rising: Europe Cannot Just Stand and Watch.”
Will Steffen, et al, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”
Kate Aronoff, “‘Hothouse Earth’ Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics” and “With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, “To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need to Take On Capitalism.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Joshua Miller, “Ed Markey’s Career-Long Fight against Nuclear Weapons.”
Donald J. Trump’s letter to Kim Jong-un.
Avery Anapol, “Lindsey Graham: War with North Korea Would Be ‘Worth It’ in the Long Run.”
Anton Troianovski, “Putin Claims Russia Is Developing Nuclear Arms Capable of Avoiding Missile Defenses.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, “Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans. It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet.”
Ursula K. Heise, “Climate Stories” and Kate Marshall, “The Readers of the Future Have Become Shitty Literary Critics,” reviews of The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh.
Kate Aronoff, “Denial by a Different Name.”
