July 2015 Links

In addition to the release of The Rocking Chair by Blue Sketch Press on 1 August 2015, and “Poetics of Control,” my recent review of Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect (2012), I’ve completed a number of exciting projects over the last three months, so be on the lookout for a couple essays, another review, an interview, and more poems in 2015 and 2016. For now, however, some links have been piling up over this historic month.

 

US Politics

Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide.”

David M. Perry, “A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.”

Transcript: Obama delivers eulogy for Charleston pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

Claudia Rankine, “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.'”

Emma Green, “Black Churches Are Burning Again in America.”

The Editorial Board of The New York Times, “Take Down the Confederate Flag, Symbol of Hatred.”

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Atomurbia and Other Links

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.

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Leaking or Spying?

R. drew my attention to this vexing article in yesterday’s New York Times: Adam Liptak‘s “Court Rulings Blur the Line Between a Spy and a Leaker.” An excerpt:

The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.

These developments are rapidly revising the conventional view of the role of the First Amendment in national security cases. The scale of disclosures made possible by digital media, the government’s vast surveillance apparatus and the rise of unorthodox publishers like WikiLeaks have unsettled time-honored understandings of the role of mass media in American democracy.

Is it just me, or is contemporaneity becoming Orwellian far faster than I can keep up with?