Environment
Bill McKibben, “Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?”
Paul Krugman, “The Big Green Test: Conservatives and Climate Change.”
Science
What I’ve been speculating about for years now: physicists are saying consciousness is a state of matter.
The Hubble has seen a star eat another star.
Economics
Benjamin Kunkel’s long review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence (feeling like a broken record). David Willman, “$40-Billion Missile Defense System Proves Unreliable.”
The inverted nuke in the garden (seriously, a broken record) . . . : Dylan Matthews, “A New Report Shows Nuclear Weapons Almost Detonated in North Carolina in 1961.”
Alex Wellerstein found this, wow, simply amazing document: assessing post-apocalyptic land values.
Iraq
Robin Wright, “A Third Iraq War?”
Lawrence Wright, “ISIS’s Savage Strategy in Iraq.”
Elliot Ackerman, “Watching ISIS Flourish Where We Once Fought.”
Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin, “Massacre Claim Shakes Iraq.”
Rod Nordland and Suadad Al-Salhay, “Extremists Attack Iraq’s Biggest Oil Refinery.”
David Frum, “Iraq Isn’t Ours to Save.”
J. M. Berger, “How ISIS Games Twitter.”
Moíses Naím, “The Rise of Militarized NGOs.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The New Map of the Middle East.”
And Greg Shupak at Jacobin, “No More Imperial Crusades.”
Nuclear and National Security State
Mark Strauss, “Failed Nuclear Weapons Recycling Program Could Put Us All in Danger.”
Lauren Gambino, “New York Review of Books Slams CIA with Twitter Attack.”
Climate Change
It’s sad that we even see articles like this one. Allison Kopicki, “Is Global Warming Real? Most Americans Say Yes.” Argh.
Lori Montgomery, “In Norfolk, Evidence of Climate Change Is in the Streets at High Tide.”
Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence: Lily Hay Newman, “Air Force Security Failed a Takeover Drill at a Nuclear Silo.”
Climate Change, Catastrophe, and the Anthropocene
We’re doomed. “A Galaxy Far, Far Away . . . Will Hit Ours.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: The Collapse of Greenland’s Ice Sheet Could Be a Bigger Disaster Than We Thought.”
Ari Phillips, “In Landmark Class Action, Farmers Insurance Sues Local Government for Ignoring Climate Change.” Is that what we need? For the insurance companies to get involved?
Yes. McKenzie Funk, “Insuring the Apocalypse.”
Paul Krugman, “Cutting Back on Carbon.”
On the flooding in the Balkans.
Everything is the worst: Ryan Koronowski, “House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon’s Hands on Climate Change.”
Climate Change
The New York Times on the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Paul Krugman, “Points of No Return.”
Eyder Peralta, “New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having Broad Impact.”
Gerry Canavan on “Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and the End of the World.”
Peter Frase, “Adjusting to the Apocalypse.”
A very interesting piece at Jacobin reflecting on an analogy between abolitionists and environmentalists: Matt Karp, “A Second Civil War.”
Roger Peet, “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis.”
Martin Lukacs, “New, Privatized African City Heralds Climate Apartheid.”
Julie Beck on John Oliver’s “Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate.”
Saskia Sassen, “Countdown to Oblivion: The Real Reason We Can’t Stop Global Warming.”
Mike Wall, “To Combat Climate Change, Humanity Must Act Now, NASA Chief Says.”
Brad Plumer, “Five Horrifying Maps of America’s Massive Drought.”
And “Picture This: U.S. Cities Under 12 Feet of Sea Level Rise.” An example:
The Back Bay in Boston under 12 Feet of Sea Level Rise
But don’t fret, “This Couple is Making Roads Out of Solar Panels, and They Actually Work.”
And Michelle Nijhuis, “How to Laugh at Climate Change.”
Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2014 American Literature Association Conference, taking place May 22-25. I will be presenting this paper on a panel organized by the William Carlos Williams society, titled, “William Carlos Williams: The Poet-Doctor as Environmentalist.” The panel will be taking place 11:10-12:30 on May 23.
Apocalypse on Repeat: William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and the Nuclear Imagination
Long out of print after their initial publication in 1923, the prose sections of Spring and All offer remarkable critical avenues for discussing William Carlos Williams’s environmentalism. Serving as both a frame for some of his more well-known poetry and a theoretical engagement with the volume’s central concern—the imagination—the prose of Spring and All cannot help but strike a contemporary reader with its anticipation of the post-apocalyptic and eco-disaster narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To begin the aesthetic work of poetic composition, Spring and All enacts total destruction followed by material repetition in order to allow Williams to formulate an imagination distinct from a romantic apocalyptic, a formulation essential for the development of his ecopoetics. The imagination in Spring and All is a material force. It is vibrant, organic, and radioactive. It is scientific and geological, and it is concerned with atomic physics well before the atom was split. This paper will argue that Spring and All articulates what I have called elsewhere a nuclear imagination. Drawing upon current reconsiderations of modernism’s relationship to atomic technology and my own conversations with J. Hillis Miller about Williams’s poetry and romanticism, I will suggest that Williams, through embracing this destructive, recursive, ironic, nuclear imagination, abandons an eschatology that could in any way be positive, even as something to be gone “beyond.” In this way, reconsidering Spring and All opens up a space for the contemporary environmental imagination that is neither apocalyptic nor post-apocalyptic, but rather thoroughly material and ecological.
It’s been a busy end of the semester and I haven’t been able to post anything for a bit. So, now that I have a bit of time before the semester wraps up, here’s a bunch of stuff that has been happening the last few weeks. My apologies if I’m a bit late on some of these things.
Nuclear and Disaster
Laura Miller reviews Craig Nelson’s The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and the Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Age.
John Metcalfe, “What Famous Old Paintings Can Tell Us About Climate Change.”
Only .02% of published research rejects global warming.
Adam Weinstein, “Arrest Climate Change Deniers.”
The Concourse has a great map of the ways that Hollywood films have depicted the destruction of various locales in the US.
Science
The first evidence for cosmic inflation–i.e., the Big Bang–was discovered this week.
Megan Garber at The Atlantic, “What It’s Like to be Right About the Big Bang?”
The search for Flight MH370 is revealing one thing: the ocean is filled with garbage.
Kim Stanley Robinson alert: Paul Rosenfeld, “Would You Take a One-Way Ticket to Mars?”
And as part of his forthcoming 3 million page novel, Breeze Avenue (2015), Richard Grossman has buried a crystal ball deep inside of Princeton Mountain in Colorado. The ball, “made of synthetic sapphire, which is almost as indestructible as diamond,” has the Ten Commandments inscribed on it in Hebrew, and in “20 million years, as a result of natural forces carefully calculated by the geologists, the Torah Ball will emerge from its eroded resting place and bear the Ten Commandments down the mountain.” Hyperarchivalists of the deep future rejoice!
Richard Grossman, The Torah Ball (Synthetic Sapphire, Princeton Mountain, 20 Million Years of Erosion, 2011).
With the incursion of Russia into the Ukraine, a lot of stuff is going on.
Peter Baker in The New York Times, “Pressure Rising as Obama Works to Rein in Russia.”
“Ukraine, Putin, and the West” at n+1.
Peter Beinart for The Atlantic: “The Ukraine: Is This How the War on Terror Ends?”
Dominic Tierney for The Atlantic: “Putin’s Improv Act.”
David Rhode for The Atlantic: “Crimea: The Greatest Challenge to Geopolitics Since the Cold War.”
“Kerry Condemns Russia’s ‘Incredible Act of Aggression’ in the Ukraine.”
And a critique of The New York Times‘ coverage of Kerry.
Nuclear
“Aim Points in the US Nuclear Arsenal.”
Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project, has authored an article for the Federation of American Scientists, “Obama and the Nuclear War Plan.”
Other
Noam Chomsky, “America’s Apocalyptic Imperial Strategy.”
Noam Chomsky, “The Death of American Universities.”
boundary 2‘s latest entry into its Great American Author Series, “A Political Companion to Walt Whitman” by Kerry Larson.
Ezra Klein, “The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 