Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 10: December 16, 2020–January 15, 2021

Think Pieces on . . . Everything

Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss.”

Jelani Cobb, “Georgia, Trump’s Insurrectionists, and Lost Causes.”

Mike Davis, “Riot on the Hill” and “Hopes for 2021?”

Blair McClendon, “Lost Lost Causes.”

Adam Kotsko, “An Apocalypse about Nothing.”

Yoni Appelbaum, “How America Ends.”

Gabriel R, “Trump the Despot.”

Franklin Foer, “The Triumph of Kleptocracy.”

William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, “Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol.”

Masha Gessen, “The Trial of Donald Trump Must Tell the Full Story of the Capitol Insurrection.”

Leah Donnella, “How The Storming of the Capitol Was — And Wasn’t — About Police.”

Eric Fretwell, “From Lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the Violence of Revelry.”

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Spring 2020 Links (Pre-COVID-19)

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to catch up: here’s links from late summer 2019–March 11, 2020 that are, by the very nature of posting them now, rather outdated/anachronistic, a window onto a world that is gone yet still all too present (and excessive), a world that most certainly wasn’t going in the direction of human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.”

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End of the Semester Links, Spring 2017

It’s been a long year, long for many reasons, but here’s a backlog of some links. (Some very good news is imminent. . . .)

 

Nuclear and Environmental

New York Times Editorial Board, “The Finger on the Nuclear Button.”

Rebecca Savranksy, “US May Launch Strike if North Korea Moves to Test Nuclear Weapon.”

Kaveh Waddell, “What Happens if a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan.”

Radiolab, “Nukes.”

Laurel Wamsley, “Digitization Unearths New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films.”

Michael Biesecker and John Flesher, “President Trump Institutes Media Blackout at EPA.”

Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information.”

Zoë Schlanger, “Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated.”

Cass R. Sunstein, “Making Sense of Trump’s Order on Climate Change.”

Laurie Penny, “The Slow Confiscation of Everything.”

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Mid-Summer Links 2016

Nuclear and Environment

Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.”

Aamna Mohdin, “Fearing a Nuclear Terror Attack, Belgium Is Giving Iodine Pills to Its Entire Population.”

Annabell Shark, “MoMA, The Bomb and the Abstract Expressionists.”

Alex Wellerstein, “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin.”

Lake Chad disappearing over the past fifty years.

Continent 5.2.

And RDS-37 Soviet hydrogen bomb test (1955).

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Beginning of the Semester Links

Now that the semester is starting, I will have less time to read things on the internet. So here’s one last link dump for the summer.

 

Nuclear and Environment

Maria Temming, “Geoengineering Won’t Save Us: Why It Can’t Halt the Effects of Climage Change by Itself.”

Claire L. Evans, “Climate Change Is so Dire We Need a New Kind of Science Fiction to Change It.”

Alan Taylor, “A World without People.”

Bill McKibben, “The Pope and the Planet.”

Mark Soderstrom, “Unequal Universes.”

And Kenneth Chang, “World Will not End Next Month, NASA Says.”

Brandon Shimoda, ed., The Volta, no. 56, and April Naoko Heck, “Dispatch from Hiroshima.”

Sam Stein, “July Was The Hottest Month Ever; Cable News Barely Noticed.”

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News From Iraq, Nuclear Weirdness, and Shutting Down a 9 Year Old Boy’s Library

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.”

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Quantum Data Teleportation and Other Science Fictions (Links)

Hyperarchival

Adrienne LaFrance, “The US Army Says It Can Teleport Quantum Data Now, Too.”

Joe Veix, “Top Tweets from the CIA.”

Adrienne LaFrance, “The Promise of a New Internet” and “Facebook is Expanding the Way It Tracks You and Your Data.”

Robinson Meyer, “Google Owns a Satellite Now.”

According to Tim Parks, in “Reading: The Struggle,” it is really hard to read today. I wish someone would talk to me before making such claims. . . .

Andrew Leonard, “Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Vision of the Future is Terrifying.”

And some good news in hyperarchivalism: the entire Jade Tree catalog just became available for streaming. Avail, Cap’n Jazz, Denali, Jets to Brazil, Lifetime, Milemarker, Pedro the Lion, The Promise Ring, These Arms Are Snakes, The Turing Machine, et cetera. My youth in miniature.

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It’s Ideology, Stupid! Climate Change Denial and Other Links

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.”

Paul Krugman: it’s not big business lobbying against environmental protections, it’s ideology, stupid!

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