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.”

Continue reading

More June 2015 Links

Environmental, Nuclear, and Disaster

Stephanie Kirchgaessner and John Hooper, “Pope Francis Warns of Destruction of Earth’s Ecosystem in Leaked Encyclical.”

Andrew Hoberek, “The Post-Apocalyptic Present.”

Matt Langione, “Will Art Save Our Descendants from Nuclear Waste?”

Tim McDonnell, “Here’s Why Obama Is Cracking Down on Airplane Pollution.”

“Atomic Explosion Tourism.”

Eric Markowitz, “Poison Prison: Is Toxic Dust Sickening Inmates Locked Up in Coal Country?”

Christopher Daley, “On Nuclear Criticism.”

Margaret DeMarco, “Details of Malmstrom Missile Officer’s Court-Martial.”

Continue reading

Slow Learning and Other Links

Environment and Disaster

George Dvorsky, “A Dramatic 260 Foot Crater Has Mysteriously Appeared in Siberia.”

giant siberian crater


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.”

Continue reading

Apocalypse Forever

I just received (from R. for xmas) and am looking forward to reading Craig Child’s Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth, which I imagine will fit nicely w/ this Wikipedia entry on the far future. The number of catastrophic things that have happened and will happen to the earth really dwarfs most anthropic notions of time, disaster, and crisis.

And on the other side of this spectrum, check out The Long Now Foundation.

Irony, Archives, and (Dubious) Posthumanism

I’m currently discussing DFW’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”[1] with my freshman English class, and so of course it was quite appropriate that Christy Wampole just wrote an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times, “How to Live Without Irony.”

In hyperarchival news:

To address this issue, the Wikimedia Foundation is collaborating with JSTOR, a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, to provide 100 of the most active Wikipedia editors with free access to the complete archive collections on JSTOR, including more than 1,600 academic journals, primary source documents and other works. The authors who will receive accounts have collectively written more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles to date. Access to JSTOR, which is one of the most popular sources on English Wikipedia, will allow these editors to further fill in the gaps in the sum of all human knowledge.

And The New Yorker has a piece by Gary Marcus on “Ray Kurzweil’s Dubious New Theory of Mind.”


[1] There are two things to note about this link: 1) it links to a .pdf of the original Review of Contemporary Fiction piece from 1993, so is (perhaps) slightly different than its final appearance in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and 2) it is dedicated to “M.M. Karr” (Mary Karr), which takes on all sorts of different significances in the wake of Max’s biography of DFW.

I’m in the Archive!

So, in commemoration of today’s 100th post on this blog (i.e. the last post), I’d like to provide a LINK to my name now officially being on Wikipedia. This is for an award I received in Poland this last weekend at the 2011 SFRA Conference that I sadly could not attend. It was a Student Paper Award given for my paper, “Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier,” which I delivered at the 2010 SFRA Conference.