I’m looking forward to a lot of exciting projects this summer, including some reviews, an interview, essays, and finishing the book. Like years past, I’ll be spending most of my days in front of the computer, I imagine, so you can expect many more links in the months to come. To start off:
Nuclear
Who knew there was such a thing?: The National Atomic Testing Museum.
Hyperarchival
“How the KGB Archives Will Be Opened and Information Declassified.”
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.”
Surveillance, consent, networks, numbers, the hyperarchival condition of the contemporary: Natasha Lennard writes “Of Being Numerous” for The New Inquiry.
This doesn’t seem like reading at all: the new “speed reading app.”
Rebecca Stoner in The Daily Sophist: “What’s Love Got to Do with Anything? DFW Biographer D.T. Max Speaks on Campus.”
“A Game is Being Beaten” by Leigh Alexander at The New Inquiry: “The trend in video game design is to comment on violence by asking players to perform violence. But could there be pleasure in performing consent?”
“How Benjamin Kunkel Went from Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual” by David Wallace-Wells at Vulture.
“Between Two Ferns: The Selling of the President, 2014.”
A very interesting forthcoming issue of Critical Inquiry.
A(nother) soundtrack for the apocalypse. Track 1 seems especially doomy. (Thanks Michael.)
My good friend Ryan Pierson on The Lego Movie: “On the Nonessential Beauty of Legos.”
And because I saw it yesterday and enjoyed it (though I am a bit confounded by this fact), another: Andrew O’hehir for Salon: “The Lego Movie: Plastic Blocks Fight for Freedom!”
German philosophers play Monopoly. (I wonder what would happen if they got a game of Risk [The Game of Ruining Friendships] going.)
And sad news in hyperarchival realism. Google is redoing its Street View for many places in Pittsburgh, and thus Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett’s wonderful Street With a View is going away. (Right now it goes from a marching band in the rain to a deserted, sunny street. Uncanny.) Ah, the transitory internet–perhaps it isn’t an archive at all, for really, how do we archive the present in the present. . . .
A short film on Street With a View:
The Hyperarchival Parallax 