Nuclear

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2000) and the recent Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013, a book that is on my shortlist of things to read right now), has a couple of interesting things in The New Yorker on Dr. Strangelove: “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,”  “Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove,” and Kubrick’s alternative titles to the film.

In other hard-to-believe nuclear news, Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones that a “Nun Faces up to 30 Years for Breaking Into Weapons Complex, Embarrassing Feds.”

Torpedoes and the military industrial complex.

 

NSA

“Angry Birds and ‘Leaky’ Phone Apps Targeted by NSA and GCHQ for User Data.”

The Blackphone. “A Phone for the Age of Snowden.”[1]

And an older op-ed piece from The New York Times on “Edward Snowden, Whistleblower.”

 

Environment and Disaster

Another disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Atlanta snow “storm,” and the devastating effects of two inches of snow when coupled with suburban sprawl:

More than any event I’ve witnessed in two decades of living in and writing about this city, this snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it. It tells us something not just about what’s wrong with one city in America today but what can happen when disaster strikes many places across the country. As with famines in foreign lands, it’s important to understand: It’s not an act of nature or God—this fiasco is manmade from start to finish. But to truly get what’s wrong with Atlanta today, you have to look at these four factors, decades in the making.

“Climate Change is Already Causing Mass Human Migration.”

And an interview with Fredric Jameson on capitalism, the infernal machine.

And a journey to the end of a world that may have no end.

 

Humanities and Higher Ed

“What STEM Shortage? Electrical Engineering Lost 35,000 Jobs Last Year.”