Ferguson and Other Links

Ferguson

The running blog from Fergusons latest: Ben Mathis-Lilley and Elliot Hannon, “Officer Who Stopped Michael Brown Did Not Know He Was a Robbery Suspect.”

Photos from Ferguson.

Robert Stephens II, “In Defense of the Ferguson Riots.”

An open letter from David Simon.

Rembert Browne, “The Front Lines of Ferguson.”

“This Time, For Once, What It Is, It Is.”

Daniel Politti, “After a Day of Calm, Ferguson Reignites: Looting, Clashes with Police and Tear Gas.”

Jack Mirkinson, “Police Threaten to Shoot, Mace Reporters in Ferguson.”

Dylan Scott, “Mayor Defends Police: I Can’t Second-Guess These Officers.”

Jamelle Bouie, “The Militarization of the Police.”

The militarization of US Police.

Sahil Kapur, “House Democrat Unveils Bill to Demilitarize Local Police.”

Rand Paul, “We Must Demilitarize the Police.”

“There’s a Police Coup Going on Right Now in Ferguson, MO.”

Matthew Yglesias, “Enough is Enough in Ferguson.”

Mychal Denzel Smith, “The Death of Michael Brown and the Search for Justice in Black America.”

LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, “Policing the Police.”

Joe Coscorelli, “Obama Treads Lightly, Again, on Ferguson: ‘Listen and Heal,’ Don’t ‘Holler and Shout.'”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race.”

And a must see: John Oliver on Ferguson.

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Slavoj Žižek Plagiarizes and Other Links

Environment and Disaster

Robin McKie, “Miami, the Great World City, Is Drowning While the Powers That Be Look Away.”

Miami Beach tidal flood

More on Miami: Jeff Goodell, “Goodbye, Miami.” (And there’s definitely a joke to be made about LeBron leaving Miami here. . . .)

And when it rains, it also might pour lava from the sky: Scott Kaufman, “Parts of Yellowstone National Park Close After Massive Supervolcano Beneath It Melts Roads.”

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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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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse and Other Portents of Doom

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

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.”

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Science Fiction, Science Fact, and Other Links

Science Fiction, Science Fact

Claire Cain Miller and Chi Birmingham, “A Vision of the Future From Those Likely to Invent It” and Risa Marisa, “All the Time Science Fiction Became Science Fact in One Chart.”

Deobrah K. Fitzgerald, “At MIT, the Humanities Are Just as Important as STEM.”

Early Octavia Butler stories coming out soon.

Samuel R. Delany reviews Star Wars (1977).

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End of the Semester Links Spring 2014

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.”

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Big News in Science and Other Links

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).

Richard Grossman, The Torah Ball (Synthetic Sapphire, Princeton Mountain, 20 Million Years of Erosion, 2011).

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Elaine Scarry Has a New Book on Nukes, and Other Links

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a discussion of Elaine Scarry‘s new book, Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2014). Nathan Schneider has written an extensive review of Thermonuclear Monarchy, “A Literary Scholar’s Voice in the Wilderness: Elaine Scarry Fights American Complacency About Nuclear Arms.” Scarry is also the author of the monumentally important, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987).

“Melting Ice Makes the Arctic A Much Worse Heat-Magnet than Scientists Feared.”

January was actually one of the warmest months on record.

And more disastrous weather to come.

Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels writing for Jacobin on the University Illinois-Chicago faculty strike.

Davis and Michaels explaining why they’re striking at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Noam Chomsky: Zombies are the New Indians and Slave in White America’s Collective Nightmare.”

“David Foster Wallace, Mathematician.”

Samuel Cohen on Wallace, “Future Tense.”

My friend David Letzler reviews Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013).

On Dead Poets Society (1989) and the humanities.

“Feminism, Depravity, and Power in House of Cards.” I just finished watching the fairly incredible second season last night.