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.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 19: September 16–October 15, 2021

Nuclear and Environmental

Min Hyoung Song, Climate Lyricism.


Coronavirus

Cary Funk and John Gramlich, “Ten Facts about Americans and Coronavirus Vaccines.”

Apoorva Mandavilli, “If You’ve Had COVID, Do You Need the Vaccine?”

Zeynep Tufekci, “The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think.”


Politics and Economics

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, “Pandora Papers.”

David Pegg and Dominic Rushe, “Pandora Papers Reveal South Dakota’s Role as $367bn Tax Haven.”

Raychel Gadson, “‘There’s No There There’: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left.”

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

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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

Nuclear and Environmental

Coral Davenport, “The Keystone XL Pipeline Project Has Been Terminated.”

Nadja Popovich, “How Severe Is the Western Drought? See For Yourself.”

Dan Sinykin, “The End of the World as We Know It.”

Clifford Krauss and Peter Eavis, “Climate Activists Defeat Exxon in Push for Clean Energy.”

Stanley Reed and Claire Moses, “A Dutch Court Rules That Shell Must Step Up Its Climate Change Efforts.”

Lisa Friedman, “Biden Administration Defends Huge Alaska Oil Drilling Project.”

Paquito Bernard, “It’s Time to Tackle Climate Change in all University Disciplines.”


Coronavirus

Morgan Meis, “Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic.”

The Editorial Board of the New York Times, “America Is Failing Its Moral Test on Vaccines.”

Michael D. Shear, Julian E. Barnes, Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller, “Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry into Origins of Virus.”

Zeynep Tufekci, “Checking Facts Even If One Can’t.”

Apoorva Mandavilli, “Immunity to the Coronavirus May Persist for Years, Scientists Find.”

And Alexa Lardieri, “Florida, Alabama No Longer Reporting Daily Coronavirus Data.”

Continue reading

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 14: April 16–May 15, 2021

Politics and Economics

Declan Walsh, “Israel Ground Forces Shell Gaza as Fighting Intensifies.”

Committee to Protect Journalists, “Israeli Air Strikes Destroy Buildings Housing More than a Dozen Media Outlets in Gaza.”

Democracy Now!, “Gaza Journalist: Israel Is Deliberately Targeting the Media by Bombing AP and Al Jazeera Offices.”

Patrick Kingsley and Vivian Yee, “Conflict Spirals across Israel and the Palestinian Territories.”

Posted byMari Cohen, Joshua Leifer, and Alex Kane, “A Guide to the Current Crisis in Israel/Palestine.”

Samera Esmeir, “The Palestinians and the Struggle of the Dispossessed.”

Mariam Barghout, “Why Are Palestinians Protesting? Because We Want to Live.”

John Eligon, Tim Arango, Shaila Dewan, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Derek Chauvin Verdict Brings a Rare Rebuke of Police Misconduct.”

Tobi Haslett, “Magic Actions.”

Lili Hu, “Race, Policing, and the Limits of Social Science.”

Audra D. S. Burch, Amy Harmon, Sabrina Tavernise, and Emily Badger, “The Death of George Floyd Reignited a Movement. What Happens Now?”

Continue reading

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.”

Continue reading

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.”

Continue reading

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.”

Continue reading