I am sad to say that Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014), one of my most important teachers, has passed away. I have written a short remembrance of him that either will appear here or in some other form.
Tomaž Šalamun
Christopher Merrill, “Remembering Tomaž Šalamun.”
Andrew Epstein, “Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) and the New York School.”
Dalkey Archive Press on Šalamun.
And though I can’t read Slovenian, there is much here, including video of a television report.
I have been understandably busy with the end of a fun and challenging semester. So there are quite a few links that have built up.
Nuclear and Environment
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “US Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.”
Robert Burns, “Air Force: Hagel Departure Won’t Slow Nuke Reforms.”
Mark Memmot, “Nun Who Broke Into Nuclear Complex Gets 35-Month Jail Term.”
Barbara Starr, “Navy Investigation Under Way after Female Officers Filmed.”
Eric Holthaus, “Seventy–Seven Zero–Inches of Snow for Buffalo as Winter Overpowers America.”
“Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” was just published in boundary 2. (An abstract is here.) I am thrilled and very proud to see this in print, and thank J. Hillis Miller for talking with me at such delightful length.
Environment and Disaster
George Dvorsky, “A Dramatic 260 Foot Crater Has Mysteriously Appeared in Siberia.”
National Security State
Sue Halpern, “NSA Surveillance: What the Government Can’t See.”
Tom Engelhardt, “The New American Exceptionalism: An Imperial State Unable to Impose Its Will.” (This only shares a title with Donald E. Pease‘s excellent book of the same name, The New American Exceptionalism.)
H. Bruce Franklin, “America’s Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War.”
Jeffrey Frank, “Obama’s Unwritten History.”
Xeni Jardin, “NSA Sees Your Nude Pix ‘as Fringe Benefits of Surveillance Positions,’ Says Snowden.”
(It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted links, so some of this is already pretty dated, but heck . . it’s also been a jam-packed couple of weeks in the news.)
Nuclear
Nina Strochlic, “Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City.”
Forthcoming book: Fabienne Colignon’s Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination.
Environment
Lindsay Abrams, “The Ocean Is Covered in a Lot Less Plastic Than We Thought–and That’s a Bad Thing.”
James West, “What You Need to Know About the Coming Jellyfish Apocalypse.”
Brad Plumer, “Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic Linked to Wastewater Disposal.”
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
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.”
Climate Change and Disaster
Henry Fountain, “At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature’s Adaptation.”
New advances in solar technology.
Climate change already impacting US and “New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having a Broad Impact.”
Katie Valentine, “The Southeast Has Had More Billion-Dollar Disasters than the Rest of the Country Combined.”
Archives
A whole new kind of archive fever: the cassette tape that can hold 64 million songs. Where was this technology when I was making mixtapes in high school?
Digital Culture
Conor Friedersdorf, “The Strangest Interview Yet With the Outgoing Head of the NSA.”
And here’s John Oliver’s interview with General Keith Alexander, outgoing head of the NSA.
Adam Kirsch, “Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities.”
Nilay Patel, “The Internet is Fucked.”
Mark Sample on torture in videogames, “Sites of Pain and Telling.”
An interview with Brian Tomasik, who thinks killing videogame characters is immoral.
On work in videogames: Steven Poole, “Working for the Man.”
Rey Junco, “Beyond ‘Screen Time’: What Minecraft Teaches Kids.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 